Leads and Principals may be asked to act as hiring managers when your team is recruiting a new member. This chapter details what's expected of you throughout that process. Keep in mind we may decide to change our strategy before or during the round depending on the needs of the team and the candidate pool; what follows is typically how we've done open hiring calls in the past.
The decision to hire is not made lightly. We hire when it hurts. If not a backfill, the decision to hire is usually a consensus of the members of the hiring team after feeling the pain of lack of momentum for a sustained period of time. Loop in your People Ops team once the decision has been made and approved by senior leadership.
People Ops will work with you to draft a job post. Past art can be found in the Resources chapter of this handbook, but those are for inspiration only and not simple copy paste. Our job ads are updated each time we hire to capture examples of current work, maintain quality standards, and to ensure the process described is accurate. People Ops post the job ad once everyone's satisfied with it. Where People Ops posts the job depends on what the role is, e.g. Designer to Dribbble, Programmer to Ruby on Rails Job Board, and so on. People Ops sends job notification emails to people who subscribed to our alerts and posts to company socials. Jason and David post to their personal socials as well, all to ensure we're reaching everyone who wants to be reached.
Around this time, you'll meet with People Ops to discuss screening criteria. People Ops will confirm with you the hard skills, expertise level, and past work experience you're expecting to see from the applicants. You'll also discuss any preferences you have for how the applicants design their applications and how they present their work in their cover letter and other materials. Give the fullest, most ideal picture of a candidate you can to People Ops so they can most efficiently screen the thousands of applicants that typically come across their desks.
Once the job has been posted and People Ops knows your hiring criteria, your job is done for about a month. During that time People Ops will divide the candidate pool into 3 categories: (1) Disqualified are people who we don’t want to see more work from because they meet no or little screening criteria; (2) Set Aside are candidates we want to look at again because they meet screening criteria and have submitted quality applications; (3) Closer Review are people who we definitely want to put in front of the hiring manager for their review. People Ops is responsible for communicating with candidates throughout the process.
After the job application window closes and People Ops has completed screening, they will ask for your input on the Closer Review pool. You will be asked to review no more than 50 candidates, and you'll use a star rating system with an optional comment field to rank those applicants. You have no quota for putting Closer Review candidates through to the interview round; pass or fail based purely on merit. Full instructions for how to navigate the BambooHR Applicant Tracking System can be found in the Resources section of this handbook.
Next, you'll provide input on which candidates will be asked to proceed to the first interview with People Ops. Usually after culling the Closer Review category, somewhere between 5 and 15 people move to the People Ops Screening stage.
People Ops will draft an interview template and scoring rubric for their phone screen and you'll be asked to approve it. They will post interview notes as they conduct the screens. Phone screens are meant to introduce the candidate to the company and our process, humanize the process, and suss out any blockers to hire such as visa issues, application inconsistencies, or personality problems. Read the interview notes carefully as they're posted, and feel free to add feedback or call out green or red flags not noted by People Ops commentary.
Phone screens should reduce the candidate pool by about half. We'll ask the remaining candidates to complete their at-home technical exercise. Sometimes this step will come earlier in the process; we've had great success, for example, assigning programmer candidates their exercise as part of the initial application. Hiring managers are responsible for designing the technical exercise. You should develop a project that (1) is similar to something we'd ask an employee to work on during a typical cycle, (2) requires the candidates to showcase technical skills that are crucial to their success at the job we're hiring, e.g. HTML/CSS for designers, (3) gives the candidate plenty of room to explore and ideate, as you will be evaluating not just their technical work but also how they approach the problem to be solved and how they communicate their ideas.
When developing your technical exercise, consider using AI to help you pressure test the clarity of the brief, whether the scope is appropriate for the seniority level you're hiring, and whether the skills you're hoping to see in your candidate are actually being assessed by the exercise. Feed an old exercise into AI or ask for its help generating a new one. Then test it. Ask it to find ambiguities that might trip up candidates, or even ask it to complete the exercise as a candidate might complete it, to gauge for yourself where you can improve what you're asking.
The candidates will have a couple of weeks to work on their project, and it's up to them how much time they devote to it. You should include a deadline and instructions for submitting their prototype in your exercise brief sent to candidates. You will have ample time to evaluate candidate projects and assign a pass/fail grade to each. You will then be asked to interview the passing candidates, usually along with 1 other teammate. Those interviews primarily involve discussing the candidate's project work, reviewing their technical choices, and digging into how they approached the assignment.
After hiring team interviews, you'll be faced with some choices: (1) decide on a clear winner and inform People Ops that you'd like to make a candidate an offer, (2) find that you have more questions and schedule follow-up interviews, or (3) accept that none of the candidates meet the bar to hire. As disappointing as it can be to not hire anyone, making that call during the hiring process is far preferable to hiring with uncertainty, hiring someone that only adds drag to you and your team, or, worst case, needing to fire a colleague shortly after hiring them. Your People Ops team will support any final decision made by you and your hiring team.
Offers will be sent from the People Ops team to your new hire. People Ops will retain the application materials of any candidates who you might want to revisit for a future hire. Once the offer has been accepted and start date decided, you'll work with People Ops on the plan for onboarding your new teammate!