#136 - Draft table of contents for hiring ebook

The topic I get the most questions about these days is hiring. This is actually a great time to hire, with many private-sector firms freezing their hiring while economic conditions are uncertain.

This newsletter has covered a lot of hiring topics over the past (almost) three years, and I’ve gotten a lot of useful feedback - thank you!

I’d like to distill that material down to a single document that could be as useful to as many people as possible. I’ve started putting everything together into one PDF: so far the table of contents is below.

If you’d be interested in this material, or would send it to someone who would need it, could you go through the table of contents and tell me what you think? Is this what you’d want to read? Are there things missing, or (more likely) things you don’t care about that can be skipped? Would you be willing to leave comments on a first version of the material? I’d appreciate any feedback - just hit “reply” or email me at [email protected].

Background

Avoid Common Meta-Mistakes

• Hiring Is Always Strategic

• The Goal is To Build a Team That Succeeds Together

• Aim To Get To “No” Quickly

• Hiring is Onboarding

The Process

Step 1: Begin with the End in Mind

• Create Your “Hiring Advisory Committee”

• Get Agreement on What the Job Is For

• Define A Successful Hire Together

• Develop An Initial Path To Success

Step 2: Define the Onboarding Process

• Take an Inventory of Onboarding Resources

• Get Feedback On The Lists

• Put Together An Initial Plan

Step 3: Define the Evaluation Criteria

• What must haves does someone have to onboard successfully?

• Technical skills are easier to learn than team skills

Step 4: Define the to Evaluation Process

• You’re looking to disprove the hypothesis

• Only ask questions that have disqualifying answers

• If you can’t evaluate against a criterion, the criterion needs to change

• Define interview process

  • Work samples

  • Technical interviews

  • Team skills questions

  • Behavioural questions are your friends

Step 4: Write Up the Candidate Packet

• First version of job advertisement

  • Description of the team

  • Why this job matters

  • Support you’ll get

  • Success plan

• First version of interview process

Step 5: Figure Out Where To Find Candidates

• Understand the personae you’re trying to reach

• How can you reach your candidates?

• Who do you have in your networks who are relevant to the search?

• First direct contacts - “do you know anyone who would be interested…”

• Incorporate Feedback

Step 6: Write The Official Job Posting

• Fill out the horrible HR form

• Post your ad on your team webpage

• Polish the Candidate Packet

Step 7: Actively Recruit

• Mass emails don’t work: directly contact individuals

• Find new candidates via LinkedIn, etc.

• Solicit help from others

• Find out about institutional resources

Step 8: Running The Hiring Process

• Draft rejection emails

• “Phone” screens

• Get specific feedback and recommendations after each stage

• You owe the candidates prompt and useful responses

• Save the interview notes for the successful candidate

Step 9: Running The Onboarding Process

• Create the full, personalized onboarding plan

• Onboarding continues through to success

• Offboarding unsuccessful new hires

• Continuing with one-on-ones

• Collect feedback on the hiring and onboarding process

• Review interview notes; what signals should you amplify/dampen for next time?

Making Things Easier The Next Time

Build on What You’ve Done

• Run a retrospective: what worked, what didn’t

• Save your Worksheets and Documentation

• Keep everyone involved

• At performance review time, sketch out job definitions for other team members

Develop a Bench: Grow Your Team’s Professional Network

• Have a shared list of potential colleagues of interest

• Use conferences, etc to find people of interest

• Always Be Recruiting

Consider An Internship Program

• Hiring more often = Hiring better

• Make the internship as valuable as possible

• Alumni are part of your team’s professional network now

Build your team’s external visibility

• Conference talks

• Blog posts

• Short Videos

Appendices

• Job definition worksheet

• Onboarding template

And now, on to the roundup!

Managing Teams

Split Your Overwhelmed Teams - Thomas A. Limoncelli, Operations and Life, ACM Queue

I’ve mentioned before that in other fields, people learn a lot about people systems from case studies. We don’t generally get opportunities for that, so I like to include anything like a case study wherever possible.

Here, we have something of a case study. A service reliability (SRE) team — cross-cutting technical software/operations experts charged with keeping a service up and running both preventatively and in the case of outages — had high attrition and the people were unhappy.

There’s two lessons we can take from this article that are very applicable to our teams.

The first is: If you take smart, driven people who want to help, and make them responsible for an infeasible range of work, they will burn themselves out, even if the workload itself isn’t that bad:

The second is that “not enough funding” or “not enough people” is a problem everyone faces. We tend to think of it as a uniquely academia problem. It’s not. There is no team, in any sector, who couldn’t accomplish more and bigger things, worthwhile things, if they had a bigger budget and larger headcount. But they don’t.

Not as much funding as you could make effective use of, not as many staff as could be kept busy, isn’t itself a problem. It may well be part of the cause of other, more specific, problems. Focusing on the specific problems increases the range of solutions available. More money or staff might help; another approach is to scope down, focusing one’s effort where one can have the highest impact, and get very very good at that work.

Ten Simple Rules for Running a Summer Research Program - Joseph C. Ayoob, Juan S. Ramírez-LugoSlack: How Smart Companies Make the Most of Their Internships - Jessica Wachtel, The New Stack

As you know, from the newsletter (and the hiring ToC!), I’m a huge fan of internship programs. They’re an important mechanism for us to train and develop junior folks and so disseminate knowledge. They also help us improve our hiring and onboarding skills by letting us iterate quickly on them. And they help our team develop a larger professional network, with direct connections to people we wouldn’t otherwise necessarily reach.

Ayoob and Ramírez-Lugo look at starting a summer research program from scratch, in the context of an academic department. But their approach makes just as much sense for technical interns:

• Fundamentals (Rules 1, 2, 3): Get a leadership team and funding support together, define the focus, and commit to evaluating the program

• People (Rules 4 & 5): Recruit (and train!) a range of mentors, prioritize diversity of recruitment and selection

• Onboarding (Rules 6 & 7): Build a long pre-program onramp, and have programming for participants once they start

• During (Rules 8 & 9): Be prepared to make changes, and be paying enough attention to the students to kow if that’s neede

• Afterwards (Rule 10): Don’t end the program on the last day

Wachtel interviews Eman Hassan at Slack, who sees the same benefits to internship programs as I do; Hassan focuses more tactically on the individual projects for an intern, and sees success requiring:

• Defining a well-scoped project, with opportunities for creative work with a well-defined outcome

• Defining a clear set of short-term milestones

• Setting up systems of mentorship and communication

Delegation - Azarudeen

Delegation is one of the key practices of our job. Like a lot of things, it’s that delegation is hard to do well, but it’s easy to mess up. The author give the four key steps:

1. Explain why you chose them

2. Give them a chance to say no

3. Explain the job clearly.

4. Explain what and how(quality) the output should be.

And the three most common failure modes:

• Trust issues between you and your team member - This will never work if there is a trust issue between you and your team member.

• You failed to explain clearly.

• You wouldn’t fully let go of the task, and so didn’t get out of the team member’s way

I’ll just add that delegation is much more like to be successful if you have a practice of one-on-ones with your team member. Those will help you build up that trust, learn what directions they want to grow in, and align these delegated tasks with areas they want to grow. It also requires that you are able to give them effective feedback, to keep nudging them onto the right track in a way that maintains trusts and helps them develop skills.

Managing Your Own Career

Reminiscing: the retreat to comforting work - Will Larson

Pairing well with the delegation article above, Larson talks calls out snacking on “comfort work”, retreating from ambiguous and stressful work in our current roles by doing clear and familiar work of the sort we used to do. Maybe ship a little code and close some tickets, or clean up a system image, or “help” with that email to the user community, or analyze some data a few different ways to make just the right figure for that presentation..…

As Larson makes clear with his analogy, a little bit of snacking isn’t necessarily terrible! But it’s a detour from the “nutritious”, real work we’re hired to do. It’s a distraction.

The antidote is to be focussed on what matters:

Random

Our working conditions can be awkward, sure, but - welcome to brr.fyi, the blog of a lone research IT support staffer in Antarctica.

A nice introduction to genomics for software developers.

An embedable graph database that uses datalog as a query language - cozo.

That’s it…

And that’s it for another week. Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share about the newsletter or management. Just email me or reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox.

Have a great weekend, and good luck in the coming week with your team,

Jonathan