3 essential characteristics to making a great hire

You need to hire a person to help you deliver on your goals. How do you make sure that person is the right fit for the job? I have identified three characteristics (that you need) in hiring the right person for the job. By focusing on clarity, patience, and perseverance, you will have success in hiring.

Clarify what you need

Hiring can be one of the most daunting job responsibilities. At first, it can seem insurmountable, you need a person who has specific skills to help me deliver on my company or team’s vision, and you need them right away. As you focus on the immediate need, anxiety mounts, and instead of focusing on the what (skills and behaviors the candidate would bring), you start focusing on the when (you need them right away). The first major obstacle is fuzzy candidate requirements, what role and responsibilities do you need this individual to perform? You need to clearly define these roles and responsibilities. Write everything down that you can think of in terms of responsibilities. At a larger company you may have more well-defined role guidelines that define expected responsibilities. However, beyond the base role guidelines, you need to focus on what is unique. Once you have captured all of these responsibilities, prioritize these responsibilities.

An abbreviated list of responsibilities for an M1 software development manager:

1. Responsible for hiring team and growing team member skills
2. Capable of project management in a large organization (breaks down work into milestones, communicates risks to stakeholders, actively manages risks, understands the software development lifecycle)
3. Understands architectural trade-offs with systems being built and can articulate reasons for decisions
4. Capable of creating three-year vision document that captures personnel needs
5. Has expert knowledge in running a high scale service, actively creating the correct operational metrics for service and mechanisms to monitor them

Let’s consider this abbreviated list, which is for a software development manager (M1) at Amazon. These are all expectations called out in the role guideline for an SDM. However, these expectations will be different from team to team. Consider a senior manager (the hiring manager for this role) who is working on an incubation project. She ranks the responsibility list as follow: 4, 1, 3, 2, 5. She ranks #4 as a priority because she needs an individual who is helping to shape the vision of the product. #1 is the second highest, because this manager will need to hire and grow a team from scratch. #3 is important, but there is a strong senior SDE on the team. #2 is lower because this project is more insulated from the company. #5 is less important because this is a greenfield project which has no customers at the moment.

Patience is a virtue

Great, now you have clarified what skills a successful candidate will possess. As a skilled entrepreneur, manager or individual contributor, you know you need to focus on the long-term goal of what skills this person brings, but the time pressure to hire dominates your mind. In order to give yourself peace during this process you must acknowledge that hiring the right person takes time. The time required is illustrated in the following pipeline.

1 Sourcing -> 2 Phonescreen -> 3 Onsite -> 4 Offer

I show the chart to illustrate the full lifecycle of how big companies hire. Each of these stages take time. There are standard ratios that recruiters know in terms of hiring. There is no shortcut, it is purely a numbers game, and it takes time. Let me illustrate this with some ratios; these aren’t true numbers, as these differ from company to company. For this illustration imagine that for each 10 reach-outs (cold-call), we have 1 interested candidate. For each 10 phonescreens we have 3 candidates who qualify for an onsite loop. For each 10 candidates we have 2 offers, of which one will accept.

Working back from that one candidate, you have the following math:

1 candidate requires 10 onsite loops

10 onsite loops require 30 phonescreens

30 phonescreens require 300 reachouts

Wow! That is a lot of work for a single employee. As a manager, this is where the temptation becomes strong to take short cuts. Don’t do it! Here are some shortcuts, and why you shouldn’t take them:

1. Lower the hiring bar. For any role, you should define expectations of responsibilities. These expectations are sometimes called role guidelines, and should unambiguously define criteria for each level of that job family (a good starting place is defining how much autonomy, scope and business impact is expected). For tech positions we define the hiring bar in terms of demonstration of functional and behavioral competencies. Measuring these competencies against a role guideline for an ideal candidate gives you more objective data to determine whether you should extend an offer and at the level of role you should offer.
   1. Functional competencies are role specific needs for the candidate to be successful. An example for a software development manager at Amazon is demonstrating technical proficiency, i.e. software architecture and (service) operational excellence. We measure functional competencies to ensure that the candidate is able to perform the required job functions. Imagine hiring someone to do accounting that doesn’t understand balance sheets, quarterly reporting or who is bad at math. Hiring an unqualified (or underqualified) individual on the functional competencies will have negative consequences.
   2. Behavioral competencies. Behavioral interviewing is based in the theory that past performance indicates future results. Large companies, like Amazon, have a set of criteria for determining whether a candidate is a good fit in terms of behavioral competencies. Amazon defines the behavioral competencies as leadership principles (LPs for short). Read more here: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. In each Amazon interview we ask behavioral questions for evidence and demonstration of these LPs. Think of these LPs as the codified work culture at Amazon. We look for a cultural fit by looking for strengths and/or concerns in their behavioral examples. These behavioral examples are mapped to a STAR (situation, task, action, result) narrative type format, and we ask follow-up questions to understand the individual’s autonomy, scope, business impact and personal involvement (especially important for hiring leaders). An example, to illustrate the point, when interviewing for Bias For Action LP, I want to understand how comfortable a candidate is with making a decision without all of the information.
2. Introduce bias into the loop to change the outcome (good or bad). As part of running a fair and impartial loop, it is industry standard to avoid cross chatter about candidate performance to other interviewers on the loop. By firewalling the feedback from one interviewer to another, you reduce bias into the loop. We accomplish this at Amazon by having our feedback system (a website) disallow view access to the feedback until the interviewer has entered their feedback. After the feedback has been entered into the system, we hold a meeting, called a debrief, where we discuss the strengths and concerns for the candidate. By keeping bias to a minimum, the candidate has a fair chance of doing well in each interview. Therefore, even if the candidate performs poorly in a single interview, they can perform well in other interviews. To compare the approaches, imagine as the interviewer that I have a concern about a candidate not taking a data driven approach. If firewall rules were broken, after my interview I might mention to the next interviewer in the loop, this candidate doesn’t take a data driven approach, which would result in a biased impression for the next interviewer.  However, if I wait until the debrief, I can voice my concern about a candidate not taking a data driven approach and ask for counter examples where the candidate took a data driven approach.
3. Ignore red (or yellow) flags. Red (or yellow) flags are indicators of poor judgment or anti-culture signals. An example of a red flag is a candidate who makes a comment that is sexist. During one interview debrief, we were discussing a candidate who was strongly technically, when another interviewer in the debrief raised a red flag (strong concern) about the candidate. The concern was around a mentoring example, where the candidate shared a story about a female engineer whom he had mentored. When asked about how he helped her, he made several statements, which the interviewer followed up to clarify, that were derogatory to females being uninterested in diving deep or inferior technically. Our debrief noticed the narrative as being sexist and decided to pass on the candidate. Can you imagine the negative impact of that candidate on a team with female engineers? 

Persevere to the end

You are patiently evaluating candidates and avoiding pitfalls as you pursue a candidate who brings the necessary skills and attitude. This is the point of hiring where you need to dig deep and persevere. Two years ago I took on a multi-disciplinary management role. With this role I needed to hire a product manager. The hiring process took three months. Fortunately, for me, the internal Amazon job board was providing qualified candidates, so the sourcing part was covered. I had “coffee chats”, informal informational-type interviews, with 32 candidates to share as much as I could with the candidates. These informal 30-minute chats resulted in 10 “screens”. For these functional competency screens, I relied upon a senior manager who had a product management background at Amazon. After he vetted the candidates, I had 3 formal loops over this three-month period. This period had many emotional ups and downs, some would disqualify themselves by dropping out after the coffee chat (because of my lack of experience managing PMs), others expressed interest and made it to the screen phase only to be disqualified for lack of technical depth, one candidate, to whom we offered a position, was disqualified for poor performance within his current group. Finally, I found a candidate who was a great fit for the role, he turned out to be one of the best employees that I have managed. The total time investment was around 20 hours. In the midst of the coffee chats, “screens” and formal loops, I started to wonder, “when will this end?”. I have other job responsibilities other than interviewing candidates. However, as a wise mentor once told me, hiring is your most important job. Don’t give up, and be encouraged to persevere.

No candidate is going to be perfect. Even though you won’t find a perfect candidate, by focusing on what you need, making data driven decisions and enduring the highs and lows of the interview process you will find successful candidates. Finding these candidates isn’t an easy job, be patient with yourself and others during this process, and don’t give up.

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