If you randomly ask three people at your organization how a new role is created and how a candidate is hired into the role, you're most likely going to hear three different variations. This is how most organizations operate. It reveals just how little emphasis we place on hiring despite all of us harping on how critical hiring means to us. What an irony.
“Do you have a job description for a Sr Software Engineer?”, I’d ask. Then, I’d just send it over to recruiting to post on LinkedIn. And I'd end up with a boring, run-of-the-mill job description just like everyone else. And I’ll get run-of-the-mill candidates just like everyone else.
The reason we copy others’ job description is we’re too busy and too lazy to come up with something more refreshing. I mean how many different ways can you describe the role of a senior engineer?
Turns out there is an infinite number of definitions of the same role. Because every role is unique to your team. A senior engineer on your team may require an entirely different set of abilities and competencies to achieve your desired outcomes.
Craft a role that’s tailored to your needs. If your team already has a strong technical lead and you’re looking for a manager, you may not need a manager who’s highly technical. Instead, due to your team make-up you may prefer a manager who is exceptional in transforming a team into a high performing team. Particular to this team, the team members are seasoned engineers. But they just can’t seem to row in the same direction no matter what the technical lead tried.
If you simply copied a generic engineering manager role, you may end up with a good candidate. But not one who can turn this team around. By the time you realize your mistake, you’d have wasted months interviewing and onboarding the new hire. Worse, the mismatch between what the new manager can do and what the team needs caused the team performance to plummet. Because the manager, instead of building trust, implemented heavy processes which completely backfired. Eventually, some of the team members got so frustrated and left.
When crafting a role, there are two documents to describe the role. The job description is used to describe the responsibilities and skillsets to the candidate. The scorecard, on the other hand, is used to describe what we look for in a successful candidate in the role.
The Job Description
If you think about what a job description is used for, it's really first and foremost an advertisement. When a candidate browses through hundreds of job listings, every job listing is vying for her attention. How do we get her to click on our job listing first? And if she did, how do we hold her attention long enough for her to decide to click "Apply"? When you start thinking about it like this, you quickly begin to realize the job description is a candidate conversion funnel.
So, you can see how a lousy job description will lead to lousy candidates. Because lousy candidates would skip reading the 78th mundane job description and skip right to applying.
Unfortunately, most of us think of a job description as a candidate filtering tool. To some extent, this is true. The list of requirements will cause most under-qualified candidates to self-select out of applying. But by losing sight of the job description's purpose as an advertisement, our job description ends up sounding lame and uninspiring. So, not only did we filter out under-qualified candidates, we also discouraged the best candidates from reading the job description.
Take a look at the excerpt below from an actual job description.
Responsible for delivering senior level innovative, compelling, coherent software solutions for our consumer, internal operations and value chain constituents across a wide variety of enterprise applications through the creation of discrete business services and their supporting components... This position ensures the performance of all duties in accordance with the company’s policies and procedures, all U.S. state and federal laws and regulations, wherein the company operates.
It's hard to feel excited about something you can't grok. Compare to the excerpt below.
As a Growth Engineer, you will be iterating on our core product to help drive activation, conversion, retention, and expansion. You will work on a cross-functional team that owns the full stack, tackle projects related to scaling acquisition of new customers to boost conversion rates in the mobile app and work with the Growth team on experimentation. This role is exciting for engineers who are able to apply an entrepreneurial mindset to their day-to-day, enjoy working cross-functionally to master the ins and outs of the business, and then use that knowledge to guide their work leading growth initiatives through strategic engineering.
This I can get excited about. I know what I'll be doing. Maybe some of the things on there I haven't done before. But being able to drive conversion and impact growth sound like an opportunity to learn how I can apply my engineering skills differently.
Candidates get excited about the autonomy and responsibilities they'll have in the role offered. So, when creating a role, give the role ample room to exercise judgement and impactful responsibilities. This sends a few signals to the candidate:
- By deferring important decisions to this role, you're signaling trust. The best candidates yearn for autonomy. It's an opportunity to say, "You know the iMessage passcode autofill feature... That was me."
- By assigning impactful responsibilities, you’re signaling your appetite for founder mindset. You’ll attract calculated risk takers who embrace failures.
- By setting high expectations, you’re signaling growth opportunity that the candidate may not find else where. You’ll draw candidates who are tenacious and eager to learn.
According to Triplebyte’s survey, if you want to hire the best employees, offer growth. Growth doesn’t necessarily mean career advancement. Growth means advancement in knowledge. That is, the opportunity to learn something new.
The Scorecard
A scorecard is a blueprint that defines what a successful hire in this role looks like. The term came from Who - The A Method of Hiring, which is, in my opinion, the authoritative guide to hiring the best candidates.
In reality, most companies have scorecards in some shape or form. The utility of the scorecards, however, is less understood. One reason for this is a lack of preparation and education. The hiring manager doesn’t spend enough time preparing the interviewers to understand the purpose of a scorecard. Or not enough time was spent defining the values to look for. Ill-prepared interviews feel repetitive and aimless. Everyone asks the same questions and no new insight is gained. When it comes time to decide to hire or not, interviewers simply respond with an insubstantial, “Yeah, he’s good.”
The goal of a scorecard is to explicitly describe who you are looking for and leave no room for misinterpretation. Interviewers should assess and score candidates based on the scorecard. The scorecards filled out by each interviewer will help you decide on hiring or not.
There are three sections in a scorecard.
Mission
The scorecard begins with a mission describing why this role exists. The mission plainly sets out what this role aims to achieve.
The problem with writing mission statements is we tend to get overly broad and vague such that no one knows what the hell we’re talking about.
To improve performance of the engineering organization by employing best practices and a standard of excellence.
That's like saying the sky is blue. Compare this to something that’s more matter-of-fact.
To transform the engineering organization into an elite performing engineering organization by shipping faster and more frequently while maintaining a high quality of service.
The mission should be so clear there’s no room for misinterpretation.
Outcomes
With a mission written, we can now define the outcomes that need to be true for the mission to be realized. In other words, these are the objectives that must be met for the mission to be considered successful.
Here are some examples:
Improve shipping cadence to production from once a month to at least once a day by end of H1.
- Deployment of the monolith can be performed during the day without impact to live traffic.
- Deployment is fully automated and can be accomplished by a single engineer.
Reduce cycle time (commit-to-production time) from 3 days to 1 hour or less by Q4 2020.
Reduce failure rate per deployment from 34% to under 10% by Q1 2021.
With clearly defined mission objectives, you can link them to company objectives. This ensures alignment of the role’s objectives with the company’s.
What I find distinctive about this approach in defining a role is it‘s outcome driven and says nothing about how to achieve the outcomes. Instead, it shifts the focus to the results and leaves the journey up to the A player we will hire. Think about how liberating that is. Implicitly, we’re telling the candidate we trust you entirely to know how to get us there. Context, not control.
Competencies
What the mission and outcomes don’t describe are the behaviors that your organization values. This is one of the main reasons why each job description is unique. Every organization has a unique set of values. And for each role, some values are more important than others.
By explicitly listing the values that are important for a role, you ensure the candidates are assessed on each of these values in their interviews. Underestimating the criticality of defining these values for the role ahead of interviews is one reason most interviews are repetitive, aimless, and more of a formality than an assessment.
Some examples of competencies you may look for in a senior engineer are:
Accountability - Holds self responsible for success and failure for all assigned tasks and projects. Makes no excuses for failure, irrespective of personal cost.
Grit - Consistently delivers on commitments. Incredibly resourceful. Nothing ever seems to faze you. Just when others give up, you press on because this is where greatness begins.
Urgency - Allergic to inaction. Decisive and confident despite imperfect information. Ships first, then iterate because perfection is the enemy of good.
Justifying a Role
Every hire is an investment. Measure it as such. What is the expected return on this investment?
The bulk of the cost of a fledgling startup is salaries. Investors are willing to invest because they believe the spend on salaries will result in substantial value creation in a short amount of time.
This should be no different when you decide to hire a person. You’re effectively choosing to invest in a new hire in lieu of marketing or customer acquisition. So you better make a strong case for why you believe the long term outcome will be dramatically better than other opportunities.
Some roles have outcomes that are easier to quantify and attribute to the role. An example is a sales role. Some roles are harder such as an engineering role. But just because it’s harder doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Measure the outcomes and set goals that if achieved will demonstrate marked improvement that ultimately benefits the business. A manager who can improve a team performance by shipping 10x faster will have a palpable impact on the organization. Sales can win more deals because of you can deliver a feature sooner than the competition.
I'm dead serious about how shipping faster can have a palpable impact. Story time...
Tock is a restaurant reservation system primarily serving high-demand, celebrity-chef restaurants. Due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, reservations plunged 85% between late February and March 15 and would drop to nothing. But CEO Nick Kokonas saw an opportunity and had the team build and launch Tock to Go within days! Two weeks later, he reported pick-ups took them back to March 15 reservation levels. Speed is a competitive advantage. Nay. A survival skill.
Putting on my @Tock hat here for a few posts.
— nick kokonas (@nickkokonas) March 28, 2020
Expand the chart to see the drop off in reservations from end of Feb. to March 15, when almost 85% down.
Our team quickly built Tock to Go and launched in a few days to help restaurants and communities. (cont..) /1 pic.twitter.com/MQjgXm5uua
But hiring is also the most costly option. It should be the last resort only after you have taken into consideration all other alternatives. If you need a message queuing system, is it cheaper to hire an engineer to run it in-house or use a managed service? Of course, there may be other constraints that render the other option unviable. Nonetheless, you should first consider all options before consider hiring. Once you have considered other options, it’s easier for you to justify the role by listing the alternate outcomes should you not hire. Alternate outcomes could be delayed delivery, which could in turn lead to loss of sales.
There’s a good rule of thumb for when not to hire: never hire if it will result in a reduced throughput-to-headcount ratio. In other words, don’t hire unless the new hire can produce a proportionate increase in throughput. If an 8-person team was able to deliver 12 tasks in a week, adding a 9th member should increase throughput by 1.5 tasks. Notably, this rule is just as applicable to a replacement hire. If you lost a person on the same team, had the person been a performing team member you should observe a reduction in throughput to 10.5 tasks. But if you observe no loss in throughput despite losing the team member, then there’s no need to hire a replacement.
