Throughout my career as a founder, CTO, and VP of Engineering, I’ve hired hundreds of engineers and focused a significant portion of my time and energy on hiring. People always ask me what my success rate is, thinking that it’s supposed to be high -- but in reality, even the best founders and recruiters will be 50/50.
If you think those odds are low, here’s the kicker: The odds don’t increase. You aren’t going to get better over time. You will always be bad at hiring -- that’s just the nature of the beast.
While it’s important to accept that you’re going to make plenty of mistakes during the hiring process, there are still steps you can take to improve the hiring cycle and reduce the impact of a bad hire.
Here are four key things I’ve learned that will help minimize the hiring pain:
1. Don’t get paralyzed by the process
I’ve seen too many companies get paralyzed by the hiring process. It can be hard enough to get a good candidate in the door. Don’t make things worse by bringing too many people into the interview process and taking too long to make a group decision. I thought I had this process down until I met Kayak cofounder/CTO Paul English. Paul introduced me to his Seven Day Rule -- a discipline that recruiters at Kayak used where they offer promising candidates a position within seven days. This was right around the same time that I had lost three talented candidates because I wasn’t quick enough. That should never happen again.
2. Set goals and expectations upfront
Define what success looks like for your new employee before they are even your new employee. What does success look like after the first 30, 60, and 90 days? These things need to be clearly defined during the interview process with the candidate and with your team internally before you even make a decision so you can hit the ground running on day one with your new hire.
3. Make the commitment to onboarding
Treat new employees like new customers and put in the time to nail your onboarding process. Yes, early stage startups need to focus on hiring self-starters (at Driftt we often talk about how our first 50-100 employees should all be able to lead a team on their own), but if you expect to hand a new hire their laptop on day one and set them on their way, then you’re going to get burned. This process doesn’t need be as thorough as “new hire orientation” might be at a big company, but it’s super important to create a repeatable process that will help set your new hire up for success.
4. Rip off the bandaid
As Sam Altman says, a single bad hire left unfixed for long can kill a company. Don’t let this happen to your company. If it’s clear that your new hire is not a great fit, the best thing that you can do is rip the bandaid. Move fast and move on.
The best lesson I’ve learned about hiring is that the odds are going to be stacked against you from the start, but thinking about each of these four things during the process can go a long way to reducing the pain.
Elias Torres is founder and CTO at Driftt. Prior to Driftt, he was VP of Engineering at HubSpot and founder/CTO at Performable (acquired by HUBS in 2011).