Recruiting

Recruiting (including hiring) is among the most universal, consistently important, enduring, and outright strange activities leaders engage in.

Universal

Every leader recruits. In fact, every leader must recruit. From the high-level executive to the product manager to the tech lead, each is responsible for recruiting for their team, project, and to some extent for the company as a whole. This is the case across the breadth of functions and the depth of the management hierarchy. It's true within all industries and it extends outside of business as well, into any human organization or association, and really any effort involving multiple people. The guy who knows you have a truck and asks you to help him move, he's a leader and you've been recruited (perhaps grudingly).

Managers at all levels, from the CEO on down, clearly recruit and must do so as a core responsibility of their role and really as a way of life. Unlike individual contributors who can "just do it themselves", it's manifestly apparent that managers depend on recruiting others who can do the work, have the expertise and skills, and will recursively recruit teams of others. Managers are both entirely reliant on and deeply empowered and strengthened by the teams they lead.

Non-manager leaders must recruit as well. Recruiting supports growth in the scope and capabilities of the team. In shirking their role in recruiting, any leader diminishes their ability to expand, delegate, and achieve leverage, thereby dramatically reducing the impact and potential of both the team and themselves. Happily, non-manager leaders are often in unique and uniquely valuable positions from which to recruit, as a result of their individual network, their relatable role outside of management, and their technical or product expertise and skill.

Individual contributors should recruit as well. Just as the team's work is distributed across the team's members, successful and sustainable recruiting is distributed as well, in order to share the burden and take advantage of the idiosynchratic abilities and contributions of each team member. Excluding anyone from recruiting, or allowing them to avoid it, unnaceptably deprives them of the opportunity to influence the growth and composition of the team. Here, we see that not only do leaders recruit, but in fact everyone recruits. Recruiting affects everyone in the team, so everyone should take an interest and be involved. Thankfully, recruiting takes many forms, so there should be something for everyone.

As expected, many recruiting activities are related to hiring, including reviewing resumes, conducting interviews, providing referrals and references for former classmates and colleagues, and encouraging skilled contacts already within the company who are looking for something new to interview with the team. Perhaps less obvious are the elements of recruiting that are not at all related to hiring. Persuading higher levels of management to assign a certain number and even specific group of existing employees to a team or project is a form of recruiting. Soliciting advice and consultation from contacts inside and outside the organization is a form of recruiting. I would even argue that retaining is recruiting. Retaining an existing, skilled employee eliminates the need to recruit their replacement. Therefore, the manager doing their job well, the tech lead who helps the team develop technically-competent and successful projects, and the individual contributor who keeps things fun and interesting (yes, the "personality hire") are all engaging in a form of recruiting via retention.

There's a subtle, less-discussed, but deeply important way in which all leaders recruit. Recruiting isn't just about getting butts in seats or growing the ranks, although it is necessary to bring people on board. It's not just about getting the right people and finding the right "fit", although that is important. It's also crucially about getting the willing participation, and ideally the enthusiasm and genuine engagement, of the people being recruited. Unlike conducting interviews or providing referrals, attaining this is not something the leader can "do" directly. What they can do, and must do to be successful, is create an environment that's sufficiently attractive - with credible leadership, compelling incentives and motivation, meaningful purpose and potential, appropriate levels of support and cooperation, etc - that people are eager to join the team and work on the projects, or at the very least are willing to go along and lend their efforts and expertise. The leader can try to persuade the candidate, they can promote their team, they can inform and encourage, but they can never consent for the new team member, can never make them feel excited, can never instill a sense of belonging, and so on.

Recruiting is a bilateral activity; the candidate has to accept you, your team, and the broader organization as much as you have to accept them. It can be easy to forget this when considering a pool of candidates from which it seems you get to pick and choose. The number of applicants, that the job is yours to offer, and really the whole structure of hiring obscures the fact that there are generally only a small number of actually-suitable candates and an even smaller number of exceptional candidates. Yes, you can probably hire somebody, you can very likely fill the req, but you don't just want "somebody", you want to get someone highly appropriate for the role. Whether or not you can get that person depends on whether or not you see them in the first place (pipeline) and then on whether or not you can attract them. How could you hope to attract them if the job and the context in which it exists aren't attractive? If you want great people, shouldn't you be great and offering a great job as part of something great?

Important

We've discussed recruiting as universal in terms of being common to all leaders, but there's another sense in which it's universal as well: its ubiquity and universal importance within a specific organization. Every business unit, every function, every group, and every team recruits, and it's crucially important to all of them and the leaders of each.

For each individual leader, their team is their world (professionally) and the character, dynamics, environment, and fate of that world depends on its inhabitants. The ICs hired by a front-line manager are not less important to that manager than the C-suite is to the CEO. We can talk about the company as a whole and say that hiring a front-line team of underperforming engineers is recoverable, while hiring a team of underperforming executives is not. However, that outside, holistic perspective doesn't really matter in the day-to-day lives of leaders. The front-line manager can only hire members into his team, he depends on them for his and the team's success, so he better make good hires. The CEO will primarily hire her direct reports, she depends on them for her and the company's success, so she better make good hires. They're operating at different levels with different scope and impact, but they're both recruiting and depend on the success of that recruiting.

In aggregate, the people within a company - all of whom were recruited at some point and in some way - determine not just the trajectory of the company, but in fact the range of potential trajectories. As new people join through recruiting (and others leave for various reasons), the range of possibilities expands or contracts proportionally to their true but as-yet-unproven capabilities and the scope of their impact. We can see this clearly with executives, who have the opportunity to influence the direction of the company for better or worse. In doing so, they can change the entire landscape of available trajectories and outcomes in a way that either makes full use of or wastes the abilities of the rest of the company. Similarly, a skilled engineer will not just do good work, but may also have the potential to help recruit many other good engineers or invent new technologies or products, thereby expanding the upper bound of available trajectories the team or company as a whole may follow.

Enduring

Strange

Recruiting is a strange activity that occupies a weird space in the psyche and work of individuals, teams, and organizations. We could imagine an organized system that algorithmically determines the best candidate for each available role, optimizing for maximum compatibility in each match as well as maximum aggregate utility and thereby finding the best use for each person. Recruiting isn't like that. Instead, it's a turbulent, messy, and very human system, rooted in arbitrary timing, idiosynchratic approaches, luck and randomness, and imprecise evaluations. It's not completely flawed or unworkable, it doesn't even produce particularly bad results, but it also certainly isn't the pinacle of thoughtful organization and structured resource allocation.

A Players and B Player

Steve Jobs famously said "A players hire A players, but B players hire C players". Guy Kawasaki offered a fuller version: “Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players. But B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to F players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.”

As with most statements of this sort, it's been variously quoted, interpreted, paraphrased, and applied (and misquoted, misinterpreted, and misapplied) in ways that suit the purposes of the person doing the quoting. Is the message to only hire the best? To keep up your standards? Is it that top players are secure enough and interested enough in their craft that they are eager to work with top players while the slightly-less-skilled and much-less-skilled are insecure and therefore only want to hire people who are not as capable as them? I personally find the idea of a "bozo explosion" a bit mean, but also funny and relatable, having worked in a couple of rapidly-expanding startups as they grew into big companies.

Listening to Jobs actually speak on the topic, he suggests that A players want to work with A players, actively avoid working with B and C players, and will "self police" in a way that attracts more A players and keeps out Bs and Cs. Rather than regarding this as some sacred aphorism to be memorized and internalized, or as some old-school boomer perspective to be torn down, let's see what we can take from it. It's a compliment to the original Mac team, which Jobs said was populated with "A players" and provided as an example of his claim. It's a reminder that a small team of skilled people can do great things. It alludes to the classic Mac, which was an amazing product that played an important role in the early years of both my life and personal computers more broadly. It's fun to be nostalgic about the better parts of our past that built the present, as Jobs was doing and as we can do now. There's certainly an undertone of arrogance within these statements (and many made by Jobs), but also the sense that they are motivated by aspiration, aversion to the mundane, and high expectations.

It's certainly the case that there are differences in skills, interests, aptitudes, general intelligence, and other characteristics between individuals that make them more or less suitable for certain roles and more or less successful at those roles. It's hard to define in any objective or even definite way what constitutes an "A player" or a "B player", but it is possible to talk in concrete terms about suitability and compatibility between a person and a role, about a person's expertise and ability in specific areas, and about a person's observed performance and realized results. That's what we'll do here in order to think about people and roles in a more consistent, structured, and hopefully general way.

Compatibility

Just as there are differences between people, there are differences between roles, teams, and companies in terms of what they require and what they offer. We can acknowledge this without being arrogant and without making value judgements. Jobs that need to be done are worthwhile and important, while also being very different from each other.

Because of the wide variation in roles, it only makes sense to discuss the compatibility between a particular candidate and a particular role. Although there do exist intelligent, hard-working, highly-skilled, socially-enjoyable people in the world, none are universally "good". That all-around great person you know may be missing specific, key abilities needed to succeed in a particular team or company. They may be great as they are, but not particularly adaptable or keen on learning new things. On the flip side, the role might not be enough for them. They might be too qualified, readily able to find more challenge, more growth, and more compensation elsewhere. This is another kind of incompatibility that's no less problematic (because it means they'll probably leave soon and you'll be back to recruiting).

Jobs change, teams churn, people transfer within an organization, projects and products evolve, and companies mature. Knowing this, it's risky and ill-advised to define a role too specifically. Doing so can make finding compatibility more difficult - or even impossible - because the numerous, precise requirements of the role are too restrictive. Even if you successfully hire someone, they'll be finely-tuned for a job that might change or not even exist in the same form in three months or a year.

At the same time, defining a role too generally is problematic because it reduces the usefulness of the requirements for finding well-suited candidates, for discerning between candidates, and for informing candidates of what's actually needed for the role. It's possible to be over-general by requiring too much, by requiring too little, and by being vague in your requirements or unsure yourself of what you want and need. No one can be good at everything, so if you ask for too many things, you'll either end up with no candidates or only candidates who are good at arbitrary subsets of your requirements that may not correspond to what's actually needed. If you ask for just a few easily-satisifed things, then you'll end up with too many candidates who will, once again, possess some arbitrary set of skills that are not necessarily aligned with the role. Not knowing or not being able to state what you want and need in a role means you have a problem much bigger than just hiring for that single position.

In designing and defining a role, we should act like Goldilocks: not too much, not too little, not too specific, not too vague. Perfection isn't required, but some moderate, reasonable middle-ground is achievable. A poorly-designed role will almost certainly lead to a poor recruiting process and an incompatible or unsatisfactory hire, while a well-designed role can serve as the basis of a successful hiring process.

On the other side, people can adapt, can grow and learn (and are often eager to do so), and can find a way to fit into the team. Not only can the candidate change to fit the role, but they can change and customize the role itself, as long as it still provides complementary value to the other team members and the team's overall purpose. In fact, we expect this; we generally want team members to grow into their role, to take on more responsibility, help the team in general, and perhaps even exceed their role and step into another higher-level role with broader scope. Therefore, typecasting a candidate or being too strict and literal about their current abilities (inferred imprecisely during the recruiting process) is risky as well.

The complexity of the work, the variability in human personalities and skills, and the flexibility of both the role and candidate necessitate a sophisticated notion of compatibility that extends beyond meeting basic requirements, beyond a vibe check, and even beyond most standard interviewing processes.

Although "compatibility" is perhaps most often discussed in a personal context (for romantic or platonic relationships), it's appropriate to use in a professional context as well because recruiting creates relationships. Bringing a new person into the team initiates human relationships between the new team member and each of the existing members, as well as between the new employee and their manager, tech lead, and anyone else in an oversight role. Further, important and fundamentally asymmetric relationships are formed between the new employee and the team, group, and company which they've joined. While some companies might treat a new hire as "just another", that job is central to the new hire's life, livelihood, sense of self, ambition, and so on. Given the number and weight of these relationships, I think it's valid and valuable to consider them in terms of compatibility in its fullness, in terms of many (but not all) of the aspects we consider in serious human relationships.

Referrals and References

Hiring decisions have to be made based on the information available to you about the candidate, which is often limited in breadth, depth, and verifiability. As a basis, you have only their resume and the feedback from the interviews you conducted with them. Given the importance and weight of the hire / no hire decision, there's a valid and wise desire to know as much about the candidate as possible.

Referrals and references provide an additional source of information about a candidate. Depending on a few factors, the information they provide may be some of the most valuable you have access to, or it may be completely useless. The key factors are:

1. To what extent do you know the reference, their work, their standards, etc?
2. To what extent does the reference know the candidate, their work, their standards, etc?
3. To what extent is the reference able and willing to provide you with high-quality, useful information and opinions about the candidate?

These factors combine to affect how much you can trust and take into account that reference's feedback:

• 1 is used to establish the trustworthiness, abilities, and attitudes of the reference. The less you know them, the less you can say for sure about them. How well does their views of things align with your own? How high are their standards? What skills and experience do they actually have?
• 2 is simply about how much the reference knows about the candidate. The less they know, the less useful information they will be able to provide you.
• 3 is not about what the reference knows (that's covered by #2), but about how they filter, analyze, and present that information. Are they willing and incentivized to tell you everything they know, including giving negative feedback? Are they able to provide you with a fair, accurate, and opinionated assessment of the candidate? Does their disposition and/or relationship with the candidate make it unlikely that they'll provide negative feedback, or distinctive feedback of any kind? Do their goals in providing the reference align with your goals in checking the reference?

You overall goal in consulting a reference is to get some insight from someone who knows the candidate and their work better than you do. In particular, you're looking for distinctive information, either positive or negative, that will help clarify the hiring decision; getting a bunch of generally-positive feedback is worth something, but not much.

Suppose you're hiring for a role and you know someone (the candidate) that you previously worked with who you think would be great for that role. We might imagine this happening at an early-stage startup, where network-based hiring of former colleagues and classmates is particularly important, although it could apply anywhere. In this situation, you know and trust the reference very well (#1), because you're the one providing the referral and acting as the reference. You also know exactly how much the reference knows about the candidate (#2), because, once again, you're the reference! That leaves factor #3. While you're clearly willing to "share" information with yourself, it's still necessary to consider how well you are suited and able to assess the candidate's qualities. Supposing you feel confident in your ability to do so, then it seems like you'll be able to offer a high-quality referral and act as a high-quality reference for the candidate. Of course, they'll still need to go through the hiring and interview process, but your referral will serve as a strong impetus to start talking to them and a strong basis of supporting for hiring them into the company.

Now, let's look at a different scenario. Once again, you're hiring for a role, but not directly out of your network. Instead, you've found a candidate - who you didn't previously know, or didn't know well - through the normal recruiting process and channels. As part of the hiring process, you ask the candidate to provide a reference or two, which they do. The references they provide are people who they hand-picked, but are unknown to you. Already, we have an issue with #1, because you don't know the references. We also likely have a problem with #3 because the references are likely to be positive toward the candidate and disincentivized from providing you with complete, and especially negative, information. Then, when you get on a (short) call with the reference, you not only have to do the usual work of trying to gain information about the candidate (#3) and trying to figure out how much the reference knows about the candidate (#2), but you also have to try to get to know the reference well enough to judge their judgement (#1) and have to try to fight through their disinclination to providing you with complete information (#3). At best, it's an essentially impossible task that will provide no new info, and at worst, you'll come away with some incorrect or unfair impression of the candidate.