Hi Sachin, thanks for the question! A lot of our early hiring was done through our networks or networks of people we brought on. We also did a very poor job of assessing people’s skill and fit and things were really inconsistent. Those practices were also terrible for Diversity and Inclusion, which is something that’s really important to us. Here are a few things we’ve done and I’ve learned since then that have helped us a lot. You can do these easily even when you’re a small team, and if I could go back in time, I would do them all:
- Have a hiring manager and everyone knows it’s that person’s decision. Shared responsibility often means no one feels truly responsible.
- A job posting is an advertisement, approach it like writing copy for your homepage.
- Script your interviews. Write questions in advance and what a good answer for each question is. This makes sure you’re asking candidates the same things and it makes for a better candidate experience because you don’t have each person on your team asking them the same set of questions. Also, doing it in advance will likely produce more interesting and thoughtful questions.
- Do behavioral interviewing instead of asking hypotheticals. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
The current situation has changed our thinking about remote. Before being 100% WFH, about 10% of our team was full time remote. We also have really flexible working in general, so many people WFH one or two days a week. We’re still hiring, and many of those roles are now FT remote where they would have been in person. I think it’s likely we’ll end up 30% remote in a year or two.
But we are still plan to continue to be an in-person first team. We do a lot of creative work and much of our company culture comes from being in the same space together. Video chat is great, but I find it’s much harder to achieve limbic resonance (just learned this term last week and love it) than it is in person. I think that resonance is really important for certain type of creative work.