Weekly Roundup - Issue #7
“For every open job on your team, you need to spend one hour a day on recruiting-related activities. Cap that investment at 50% of your time. “
- Rands
Every time I see someone cribbing about hiring, this sentence by Rands comes to mind. Most leaders end up delegating their head counts to the recruiters. Recruiters are incentivized to close the positions by hook or crook. They are rarely trained to identify good candidates. In fact, how can you expect a recruiter to know who a good designer or engineer is? So most recruiters ask for a list of companies/colleges that they can approach candidates from. Usually these companies are the ones that /seem/ to have their shit together. Unsurprisingly the ‘same’ companies tend to feature in most recruiter’s lists and that’s how you end up with everyone vying for the same folks and competing on surreal pay packages.
One way to avoid this mess is to spend time designing your recruiting flow.
Here are a couple of posts from Rands that you should read:
But it doesn’t end there. You need to have artifacts and processes in place to keep those designers in your team. This week Intercom wrote about how they approached the redesign of the product design career ladder. Their section on ‘Make the complex clear’ identifies the common issues with most job ladders that I’ve seen and seeks to address them.
That’s it for this week. If you’ve got any topic requests for me to write about, please feel free to DM me on Twitter.