Picking Who to Hire

Commons mistakes while hiring

Before you start hiring, you should know who exactly you want to hire. This might sound like one of the most obvious statements in the world, but there are subtleties to finding the right people to make your team even more effective. Hiring managers fall into some common traps when given the ability to hire anyone for their team:

• They just hire more engineers. No matter what the problem is, just throw more engineers at it, right?

• They just hire the most senior person possible. Surely, the most senior candidate will have seen it all before. Forget about these people with only a few years of experience. Let’s just get the experts in, surely?

• They hire people just like themselves. Culture fit means “one of us,” doesn’t it?

Wrong! There’s much more to putting together a highly functional team than just finding seven carbon copies of yourself. Remember that as a manager, you are trying to find ways to increase your output, where your output is defined as:

The output of your team + The output of others that you influence

Things to look for while hiring

Teams are interdependent by nature. In technology, we work on complex problems that benefit from a diverse range of skill sets, experiences, and viewpoints to produce the best possible work. Today’s ...