Over the course of my career, I’ve been involved in several high-growth engineering organizations. Having recently helped Vultr more than double its engineering organization (and growing), and with January always being the start of what can be a busy hiring season, I thought I’d start 2024 off right with some tips for how to balance a thoughtful process with speed.

Know What You’re Hiring For

You should be responsible whenever possible in writing the job description for the role in question. When you aren’t, you should work closely with the original author of the JD, and make sure to provide any feedback that might be useful in finding the right candidate. As the hiring manager, you should be ready with a clear sense of what 30, 60, and 90-day goals would look like for the role you’re looking to hire.

Consider looking at the competencies of comparable engineers with the role you’re searching for. If there’s a big delta in skill or background based on what your description calls out, you may want to consider further refining your criteria, or reconsidering how the role is titled or leveled.

Be First Point of Contact

As hiring manager, you should be the first interview post phone screen. Since you’re the person responsible for fostering team culture, you should have the strongest barometer for whether a candidate’s values aligns with your team’s and your company’s.

The candidate deserves to get to know their manager as early into the process as possible to guarantee it would be the right relationship. Since your team’s time comes at a premium, if you or the candidate determine it’s not a good fit after the first round, you’re also preserving the limited bandwidth of your engineers.

If you’re a very soft yes or you’re on the fence without any strong red flags, this is a great time to defer to your team, and still a solid use of their cycles.

Build a Hiring Framework

Work with your HR business partner to introduce a consistent process for hiring. Having these processes spelled out is important for training others to interview (a valuable skill for engineers interested in growth either into a managerial role as well as senior/staff/principal IC), and also setting clear standards for what a successful candidate looks like.

Having these criteria clearly spelled out among a handful of well-rounded interview phases. They should be tailored to understand technical, organizational, and interpersonal competencies. Knowing what you’re evaluating – and how – allows us to evaluate individuals consistently across interviewers. A consistent approach to interviewing helps minimize both conscious and unconscious bias. This goes even more so if you develop these hiring rounds collaboratively.

Don’t just include your peers in engineering. These standards should be established as part of your process for defining any new role, so it’s important to get HR buy-in when building out the components of this process.

Identify a Successful Rejection

In testing, we evaluate the happy path as well as the most common degenerate cases. It should be no different when it comes to interviewing. You should work with your counterparts in HR to make sure you’ve identified the most effective way to give candidates who you don’t intend to move forward with fast feedback – even if it’s just a form email.

The impression any and all interviewees receive when going through your process can impact your company’s reputation whether or not the candidate receives an offer. Because of this, you should work with your hiring team to make sure that all candidates feel listened to and respected. Make sure to express gratitude for every candidate’s time, and for the opportunity get to know them, even if they clearly won’t be a fit for the role. Work as many candidates as you can through the full interview they are scheduled for. Don’t cut an interview short just because you’ve run into a skill mismatch or some other clear deal breaker – use it as an opportunity to get to know the person, and try to understand whether they may be a fit in another role. At the very least, use this as a teaching opportunity so that the candidate leaves the interview having learned something valuable for a future interview.

Early in my career, and even further on, I’ve had some very valuable interviews where – despite not receiving an offer – I learned something important that helped me be more effective in my current role, and ultimately more successful in future interviews.

Roll Out The Welcome Wagon

Anyone in Customer Success can tell you that a deal doesn’t stop when the ink dries. This is just as applicable in hiring. I’ve seen great candidates rescind their offer acceptance because of poor follow-through, or even just room for second thoughts to creep in. Once you have a start date squared away, you should begin a countdown. Around a week out, send an email to the candidate with your team CC’ed, letting them know how excited you are for them to join the team. Encourage your team to reach out sharing their enthusiasm.

Make sure that you have an onboarding buddy assigned who can act as a peer point-of-contact to show this person the ropes, and give them the opportunity to build a positive relationship with this teammate early on.

Build out a consistent 30/60/90-day plan that includes links to onboarding docs, key contacts within engineering and outside of engineering when necessary, and projects of increasing complexity. Having these spelled out will help the candidate establish a foundation and start delivering compounding benefits in their areas of responsibility.

Meet with your new hire frequently in the first 90 days to make sure that they are on track for your 30/60/90 plan. Use that process not only to make sure that they are acclimatizing and acculturating properly, but to receive feedback on your processes, and the state of your team and organization as a whole. I was once told that there is nothing more valuable that “fresh pain” when it comes to working through new processes that everyone on your team may have just adapted to and forgotten about. Make sure to collect that fresh pain, empathize with it, and consider possible solutions.

Rinse and Repeat

You will find that if you follow these approaches that you’ll be able to hire the kind of people who align with your goals and your team’s values. With continued investment in their growth and success, you will have developed an individual who won’t just help you meet your business goals, but will support you further down the line. Onboarded properly, they too will develop techniques that use empathy, preparation, and communication to continue to build an organization of the kind of people who you would be proud to work with.

In other words, imagine every candidate you speak with interviewing a future candidate to join the team you hope to build in six to twelve months. That philosophy will help you succeed in hiring for growth in more ways than one.