Tips on hiring engineers for managers

As I sat down to write my performance review as an engineering manager for the first time, I blanked out. What should I add in there?

After understanding input and output metrics it took me some time to figure out that ability to hire is one of the important metrics to add in my performance review.

At that time, I was working at a big company, and we had a big recruitment team to help us out with multiple steps of recruitment. I thought hiring was all about doing interviews and making hiring decisions.

I was wrong.

When I joined a startup as the head of engineering, I had to form a team of 40 people within a short amount of time. I had one part-time recruiter to help me with this. All I could ask from that person was to co-ordinate interviews for candidates. This left a big void on sourcing for new candidates, doing interviews, closing, and other areas of recruitment. I had no option but to figure out things on my own.

During times when I was not involved in hiring, I was helping out Marketing team set up various outbound and inbound campaigns. One advantage of a startup is that you get to work with various departments and understand how they work. Luckily for me, working with the marketing team and understanding how they generate interest helped me apply some of those techniques to solve my hiring problem.

The marketing funnel describes a customer journey with the company. Here is a high-level funnel used by the marketing team

It was interesting to see how most of this applies to the candidate journey as well. The first step in this journey is creating awareness.

Marketing teams create awareness of a product via various means. Like ads, blog posts, webinars, direct mails, searches, etc. The main goal of this is to create product awareness with potential customers.

As an engineering manager, you should be able to create awareness of various open positions in your team and get the best engineers to apply for them.

If you want to be a better engineering manager, you should demonstrate the ability to get awesome engineers to apply for positions in your team.

You can create awareness about your team, your company, open positions both passively and actively.

Passive/Inbound

A passive or inbound way of creating awareness is to let future candidates know about your company, team, and technology. There are some passive activities you (and your team) would do periodically and there are some you would do on an ad hoc basis. Generating passive awareness is horizontal and covers breadth.

Technical Blogs

Technical blogs tell future candidates what type of problems your team solves, how they solve them, and what it means for your company. I am particularly a big fan of Pinterest engineering blog

Note the footer towards the end of each blog post. They have a link back to their careers page. You should make sure you add this link to all your blog posts.

Get people in your team to contribute to blog articles periodically. This is a good way to showcase the team’s talents to the external world.

Negative Nancy says — My company does not have a blog like Pinterest, so I cannot use this.

Me — These days, platforms like Medium make it easy for anyone to start a blog. You may need to get approval from your company but that is completely in your realm

LinkedIn

Use the power of your team to advertise your open positions. Get every team member to publish a post on LinkedIn. Each of these posts should be unique, and personal to better resonate with their connections. It should contain

1. What problems your team solves
2. Personal reasons to join your company
3. What is unique about your company
4. Link to Job Description

Post them around important events in your team/company. When a new member joins your team, when a new position is created within your team, or when your company hits a major milestone.

Video Job Description

I have been guilty of copy-pasting job descriptions. Don’t do that. Job descriptions help future candidates understand job requirements, your team, and your company. I have learned to add videos to my job descriptions. After I started doing that, I have seen a jump in the interest of candidates. You can use platforms like Loom to create these videos.

Here is a video I created when I was reaching out to hire https://bit.ly/3KBVORP

Active/Outbound

An active or outbound way of creating awareness is to directly reach out to candidates who will fit the role. Active reach-outs cover vertical and cover depth

LinkedIn reach-outs

If your company has LinkedIn recruiter access then you can search for candidates that fit your team and send a personal note to them. Make sure the note is simple, personal, and informative. In other words, don’t copy-paste the same note to many people. Quality is more important than quantity.

Example

Hi {name} how are you? I noticed {write_something_personal_about_the_candidate}. Currently, I work for {company name}. One of the main reasons I joined is because {give your reason}. We have a unique role in our team which would fit your experience because {write a reason why you think they will be a good fit}. Here is a description of the role and team {Add video job description link}

Other reach-outs

Don’t limit yourself to just LinkedIn. There are many other great sources where you will find great candidates

1. Public git repos
2. Slack communities for various engineers
3. Developer blogs
4. Coding boot camps

Referrals

Referral is a great source for getting candidates. Use the power of your team to seek out referrals. There are some great tools for helping with this like Candidate. If you are like me, old school, then all you need is a Google/Notion Sheet. Create a sheet and share it with your team. Have them enter each person they are reaching out to and have them update the sheet when they hear back from them.

Tip 💡

Whether you are creating awareness passively or actively, always add unique links to your job postings with the specific source, medium, and campaign. If you are not familiar with link attribution, you can read about it here.

If you are lazy like me, then just use a platform like bitly to create and manage links

Notes

Back to my original question. What goes into my performance review as an engineering manager? To demonstrate your expertise in hiring you can share some of the following metrics

1. How many blog posts your team created
2. How many LinkedIn posts your team created
3. How many people did you/your team reach out to

In each of those cases, you need to measure (like a funnel) how many of those created interest (link clicks) and did they eventually turn into an offer acceptance. Like below

Remember creating awareness about open positions in your team is only the first step in the recruitment journey. We will talk about other stages in the recruitment journey in future posts.

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