The IT market is overheated. It is difficult to hunt developers with the right competencies, but to do it quickly is even more difficult. I’m telling you how we managed to assemble a team in 3 weeks, quickly set up processes and keep our spirits up remotely.
Over the past year, the market for digital enterprise services has changed a lot – just like the B2C segment. This became a driver for the growth of the B2B direction in our service: we improved the corporate office, launched certificates, made many other product changes and increased our client base.
In February of this year, we in the B2B department faced a severe shortage of people. One team could no longer cope – it was necessary to expand the staff. We realized that:
- It’s time to build something better on the foundation we already have.
- And at the same time maintain and increase the growth rate of the company.
Only cool product developers can handle such tasks. In our case, with a rare expertise in Ruby. We had to search and onboard newcomers very quickly, while not losing the quality of the hire.
As a result, our team has grown 4 times in less than a month. All developers have passed the probationary period and are already bringing value to the business. I’ll tell you how it happened – and for those who are too lazy to read, there is a “in short” block at the end of the article. 🙂
How to quickly hire a lot of cool people
Step 0. Define the product structure
At the start, this is 80% of the work to successfully assemble a team. The step seems obvious and not very difficult, but it has many pitfalls.
The product team is part of such a structure. You won’t be able to create it until you gather several teams with a huge number of competencies and different interests and understand in practice what areas of responsibility in the product they can cover.
If you need to expand quickly, it is enough to divide product teams into business blocks: a client product, an internal support product, and so on.
By the way, we are recommended to use services like Remotal.io to find IT stuff in a few steps. You can get remote developers in a few clicks. This is easier than searching for such a person manually.
Step 1: Write Unique Job Descriptions
At this stage, we “breathed life” into the descriptions of our vacancies and added more specifics – tasks, goals, expectations. When looking for a person in a product development team, details about the product are indispensable: he must understand exactly what he will implement.
Here it is important to be careful in the descriptions so as not to accidentally reveal the company’s product plans. Try to give a specific description of the work, without naming the product. In some cases, even the name of the company is revealed to the candidate only after the response.
Step 2. Collect recommendations from experts within the company
We were lucky that the team did not have to be assembled from scratch. It already consisted of 8 strong developers with extensive experience in other companies. Colleagues advised us specialists of the same level with whom we had worked before and who would be interested in trying their hand.
As a result, internal recommendations at the initial stage have definitely become the best and biggest source of new people in our team.
Step 3. Focus on Hiring All Team Members
Not only HR, but also the product, team leader and others – our entire team focused on interviews and sometimes even on cold search.
Hiring should be the first priority. As a team, we set up a two-week sprint consisting entirely of tasks related to hiring: writing vacancies, searching for references, finding cold contacts, interviewing. Yes, in the moment you will fall behind in the current product tasks, but in the long run you will find exactly the specialists that you need – and catch up with them.
Step 4. Tell everyone around about the search
If you work for a large company, share your hiring problem with all your co-workers—even those who work in a different department.
For example, we conduct hiring in the Huntflow HR system. There you can find cards of all candidates. In some of them, our colleagues left notes: “the candidate is good, very suitable for the B2B direction”. That’s how hard we buzzed their ears.
Absolutely every hiring manager in the company should know what profile of people you are looking for and what tasks they will perform. This will make it possible to receive even more interesting candidates who might not be suitable for other positions opened in your company.
Step 5. Synchronize with the team and discuss the results
Everything is like in a standard sprint – adjusting goals, inspecting results. Only the tasks are not grocery, but recruiting.
Every day we had “dailies”, short calls for 15 minutes. Share problems and overcome them together. This helped us hire 5 people a week and expand the team 3 times in one month. At the same time, we have kept the concentration of talent in the team at the same high level as before. We hired not “people-functions”, but independent proactive pros.
Hiring is only half of the goal we set for ourselves. With multiple growth, there are new problems associated with immersing newcomers into the team and work processes.
How Not to Lose Everyone So Quickly
Okay, you managed to assemble a team in a month. How to keep talented professionals for a long time?
- Quality onboarding
When the staff expands three times, you need to automate as many things as possible.
Imagine that you are hiring 15 people at the same time – and they all unanimously begin to ask what and how it works. This will lead to a complete defocusing of the team for several weeks. Systematize the onboarding process so that the “oldies” are distracted by the newcomers as little as possible.
What we did:
- We gave the first orientation meeting into the hands of HR.
- We made a big page in Confluence with all the descriptions, roles, team structures and an action plan on where to start: where to get access, who to write to, how to set up a laptop and other basic FAQs.
- Processes
The second thing that helps a beginner to join faster is well-established processes within the team.
They are formal and informal. Formal is a working framework. We have SCRUM. Each team member has a clear understanding of the goal for the next two weeks: what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and how it affects
With new team members, we have already had several offline events: from field trips or karting to face-to-face meetings to discuss big strategic issues.
- Quickly introduce people to the goals and vision of the product
I conduct the final stage of the interview with each developer personally, so even before the offer, the person understands where he is going. Then, regularly at work and at monthly meetings, when we do a product retrospective, I talk about what our goals are and how we are moving towards them.
The earlier and the more you talk about the product, the faster people get immersed in the workflow.
- High team independence
There are now four development teams in the B2B department. Two are involved in customer product development. A client product is everything that our users come into contact with: a website, an application, payment methods.
The third team is responsible for B2B Tools. These are tools for B2B users: personal account, purchase calendar. The fourth team makes an internal product for our sales people. All of them are completely independent. Two people are responsible for the results of each team: a product manager and a team leader. The product manager is for the development of the product, the team leader is for the development of the technology.
A high level of independence is given in exchange for a high level of responsibility. Leaders are solely responsible for team results and OKRs. If people do not want to take responsibility, this is normal, but then there is less independence.
The autonomy and format of a small team within a large company helps us retain new specialists. They clearly understand who works side by side with them, and see that the leaders are maximally involved in everything they do.
In short
- Define the structure of the product.
- Prepare unique job descriptions: high-level professionals need interesting “hooks”.
- Set aside current product tasks and focus on hiring.
- Tell everyone in the company what kind of talent you are looking for. If hiring is slow, go through the status with the team, sort out possible mistakes, as in a product sprint.
- Establish the process of onboarding to the team: it should happen as quickly as possible and with minimal involvement of team leads.
- Keep track of the processes within the team: the clearer the tasks, the faster the new specialist will join the work.
- Tell the team regularly about the goals of the product and how you are moving towards them.
- Formulate specific and achievable OKR metrics.
- Maintain feedback within the team.
- The more independent the team, the higher its level of responsibility: do not be afraid to leave people a large piece of work.
