April 24th, 2008

Our Hiring rules

As mentioned in our last post, our team is bigger and we are extremely excited with the new members of our team. It’s key for a business as small as ours to get it right when hiring its first employees. We knew that a “bad hire” would affect us tremendously by slowing our effort to serve our customers with quality. Following the same line of thought, a “great hire” would increase our productivity in so many ways that we decided to take the decision to hire slowly.

Although hiring each employee happened naturally, we’ve noticed that, unconsciously, we ended up following the same principles/rules for each one of them.

Rule #1 – Hire the person

In every single case, we hired our employees because they are smart and passionate people who care about their work. By smart, we mean we felt that although they might not possess the skills and experience we would want them to have now, we know they have the capacity to learn fast and be effective if we provide an environment where they can share their ideas and concerns, and learn from their peers. Also, we felt the passion through their comments, ideas, and work was an indicator of good things to follow. Getting a feeling of the person’s attitude eventually tells you more about how they will fit into a team than asking the usual interview questions.

Rule #2 – Say No to the traditional hiring process

We usually ask for resumes/CVs to get a sense of the work and education for potential candidates; however, we ended up hiring the ones for which we haven’t even seen a CV, or have interviewed in the more traditional sense. In all cases, we had previous experience with dealing with each of those individuals, even if out of a professional setting, or for a very short period of time. We felt that we didn’t want to ask the usual interview questions, since we never felt they added value when we were in the “being interviewed” position.

Rule #3 – Find complementary talent

We had the chance to interview some very interesting individuals; however, we settled with a team where we always have more than one individual who can perform a specific task; at the same time, we have professionals that have great experience in areas others are not as strong. It’s a great feeling to know that at least one of us can fill in for another developer/designer if one needs to be absent, without compromising the quality of the work we produce.

Rule #4 – Identify who to not hire

In a lot of cases, we interviewed candidates we wanted to hire because we needed help, and the person seemed “good enough”, but we didn’t settle for “just good” professionals. In most cases, the decision to not hire is made easy by feeling a lack of passion or interest in the industry or work, or just if the person doesn’t fit within the company culture. This rule is influenced by Joel Spolsky’s great Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, which states that you can only have one opinion after an interview, either Hire or No Hire, if in doubt, No Hire is the default answer’.

Our conclusion is that following those principles will definitely yield a strong candidate, and someone that will fit well the requirements for any job position. Of course, we’ll add, change, or even remove some of those rules in the near future, but that’s expected and is part of the learning process we are going through.