Hiring managers lessons learned

Author: davidfischer

img/2019-job-seeker-timeline.png

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+.. post:: February 1, 2019
+   :tags: advertising, sustainability, hiring
+   :author: David
+   :location: SAN
+
+
+Lessons From and For Hiring Managers
+====================================
+
+Over the last four weeks, Eric Holscher and I did dozens of customer development interviews with engineering hiring managers.
+We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies
+with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers.
+We talked to people looking for talent at five person companies all the way up to the biggest names in tech.
+In this post, I am going to cover some of the common things we heard from hiring managers
+and **share some ways for hiring managers to improve their company's process**.
+In a week or two, I will write the second part to this blog with actionable tips
+for job seekers based on the same interviews.
+
+
+Why is Read the Docs tackling hiring? Hasn't that been done?
+------------------------------------------------------------
+
+While we didn't initially think about Read the Docs ads for recruiting,
+based on some :doc:`unexpected past successes <hiring-developers-with-readthedocs>`,
+we decided to position promoted jobs as one of our main verticals within our advertising.
+Rather than dash forward and create a product, however, we started by just talking to hiring managers
+to understand the hiring process better so we can best meet their needs with something we create.
+
+One of the questions we asked in our interviews was how long it took to hire their most recent developer?
+Specifically, we asked hiring managers to consider how much time they and their team spent sourcing candidates,
+filtering resumes, preparing for and doing phone and onsite interviews, and anything else.
+Internal recruiters' time is valuable too, but we figured the hiring manager
+would probably underestimate how much time the recruiter spent since they didn't directly observe it.
+While answers were all over the place, the range with the most overlap was **50-100 hours of engineering time to make a hire**.
+No huge revelation here, but companies make a massive investment in hiring.
+
+From my days being an interviewer at Qualcomm and Amazon as well as a smaller startup,
+I'd say fifty hours is on the low side for big company but about right for a smaller company.
+When something costs 50+ engineering hours to do,
+any improvement is worth a lot of time and money
+and at Read the Docs we believe we can help significantly here.
+
+
+Top hiring channels
+-------------------
+
+It was no big surprise to hear that **referrals were the top hiring channel**.
+The second best channel was a bit of a surprise with local meetups and local communities being very high in multiple interviews
+although this was less true among the largest companies we talked to.
+Companies also had some success with recruiting at conferences, using various job sites, and proactive outreach.
+I'll address recruiters in a separate section.
+
+Hiring managers shared strategies with us that they used to increase the number of referral and community candidates they got.
+Two different companies we talked to hosted multiple local meetups at their offices and one of those hiring managers said
+"being plugged into the community" was their main channel for hiring.
+
+Another hiring manager who focused a lot on developers with security experience talked about having "LinkedIn parties"
+where either a hiring manager or internal recruiter sat with engineers on their team one-on-one to go through their LinkedIn network.
+Even when he heard a person "is great, but they'll never change jobs", that was a good candidate to target.
+Security is such a high demand field, he said, that very few great people are actively looking for a job.
+
+
+.. figure:: img/2019-job-seeker-timeline.png
+   :alt: Job seeker timeline
+   :width: 100%
+
+
+Reaching people who aren't looking is critical
+----------------------------------------------
+
+One of our biggest takeaways at Read the Docs was that companies wanted to reach candidates before they started actively looking.
+Most of the hiring managers we talked to stressed the importance of getting in front of passive candidates.
+Certainly fewer people are actively looking for developer jobs than those who are just open to a change.
+A few different reasons were given but I actually think `Joel Spolsky had it right`_ when he said
+top developers "barely ever apply for jobs at all. That's because they already have jobs."
+
+This quote isn't necessarily a slight against people who apply actively to jobs.
+Virtually everyone I know in tech started their career applying to a job.
+Rather, the implication here is that as a developer becomes a mid-level developer
+and then becomes a senior developer, they are more likely to rely on their network
+to somewhat passively job seek rather than going through the front door
+and simply applying on a company website.
+
+Reaching people who aren't actively looking is one area where Read the Docs can really help.
+Companies want to reach them when they are just thinking about a new job or perhaps passively seeking.
+Developers who come to our site are actively building software, not job-seeking.
+Many of them are content at their current position.
+For those that aren't, this is a perfect place to showcase great companies
+and help Read the Docs' visitors to find their next job.
+
+.. _Joel Spolsky had it right: https://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html
+
+
+Recruiters can be worth it
+--------------------------
+
+In each interview, we asked whether the company used recruiters or recruiting related services (eg. Hired, Triplebyte).
+Universally, hiring managers brought up how expensive recruiters are,
+but most of the people we talked to who had actually used recruiters in the past had a positive impression overall.
+Hiring takes a ton of time and typically takes it from senior folks at the company.
+At smaller startups, that's frequently the CEO or CTO.
+Even though the price is high, recruiters who help speed that process along are worth it.
+
+I think the quote that really summed it up was from a VP of engineering at a startup that just raised a Series B.
+He's trying to grow his team by 10 developers this year (about a 50% increase).
+His experience hiring his first couple developers through a 2-person boutique recruiting firm was great and
+he would use them for hiring everyone "if hiring 10 people didn't mean $100k+" in fees alone.
+
+Full disclosure: Triplebyte is an advertiser on Read the Docs.
+
+
+Filtering resumes isn't a real problem
+--------------------------------------
+
+Every single hiring manager we talked to complained about the time they spent filtering resumes from applicants.
+Some choice quotes I heard included "95% of applicants weren't a fit" even after only reviewing the resume
+and a hiring manager who posted to a very popular remote-only job board told me he got "literally one thousand applications".
+While I believe this is a legitimate complaint,
+I think `Aline Lerner said it best`_ when she said "Engineering hiring isn't a filtering problem. It's a sourcing problem."
+Filtering is just a time-consuming task that hiring managers directly deal with.
+
+The real problem here is that **the number of applicants to a job post is a vanity metric**.
+What hiring managers are looking for is qualified applicants, which is harder to gauge without some additional work.
+One of the problems here is that a lot of jobs sites make it really easy for candidates to apply to lots of jobs.
+This is understandable from their perspective as more applicants makes it look like their platform is more valuable.
+I'm not trying to talk trash on these platforms as there's no reason for them to erect artificial barriers to the application funnel,
+but hiring managers told us they want candidates who want to work for their company
+not somebody who is applying to every single job out there. More on that in a future post.
+
+Instead of building product here, I think hiring managers just need a few tweaks
+to get more of a signal of candidate quality and intent in their applications.
+A few of the hiring managers we talked to described how they did this.
+Multiple hiring managers mentioned how they required a cover letter that answered specific questions ("why us" was the most popular).
+Another hiring manager described how his hiring system just asked a few short questions of candidates
+-- for example, "what is the software project you're most proud of" -- when they applied.
+When a candidate didn't do a cover letter or didn't answer the questions, they weren't considered.
+I think the latter solution is best as it solves the one-click apply problem without being too much of a barrier.
+
+.. _Aline Lerner said it best: http://blog.alinelerner.com/building-a-product-in-the-technical-recruiting-space-read-this-first/
+
+
+TLDR
+----
+
+Every company we talked to said that hiring talent and especially senior developers was hard, expensive, and time-consuming.
+At the same time, many of the hiring managers we talked to had tactics they used to improve the process and you can use these strategies too.
+
+* **Have a strategy for getting more referrals** whether that is actively asking employees or having an overly generous referral bonus.
+  Referrals are probably your top source of candidates so figuring out how to get more will save you time and money in the end.
+  The same goes for any of your other best recruiting channels.
+* **Reach passive candidates**. There are a lot more passive candidates than active ones so have a plan to reach them.
+  Great developers (especially senior ones) probably aren't actively looking for a new job and it's a job-seekers market.
+  Even if somebody isn't considering a new job at all, the next time they do, you want them to think of your company.
+* **Get more signal in your application process** by adding a step such as a cover letter, quiz,
+  or simply add a couple questions folks have to answer.
+  Making candidates spend even one extra minute on their application can save you hours filtering resumes.
+
+Check back soon for our next post which covers tips for candidates based on the same interviews!
+
+
+.. admonition:: Ready to hire your next developer, fast!
+
+    `Get in front of passive candidates already using your tech`_ by promoting your job openings with Read the Docs.
+
+    .. _Get in front of passive candidates already using your tech: https://readthedocs.org/sustainability/advertising/recruiting/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=readthedocs-blog&utm_campaign=hiring-manager-interviews-i