Time to Market

A Recruitment Case Study

A Fortune 500 was developing a revolutionary product that solves a fundamental problem with today's big data needs.

Their initial POC was successful and needed to hire over 50 engineers within an extremely short period of time to capitalize on this innovation.

To complicate matters, the group adhered to a very strict Test-Driven Development (TDD) standard and required all hires to have mastery of it.

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Methodology

Campaign Management

Covers:

Scoping
Workforce Planning
Resource Allocation
Goals/KPIs
Stakeholder Mgmt.

Guiding

Principles

Covers:

Repeatability
Measurable
Holistic Vision
Methodical Approach
Documentation

Master Sourcing Strategy

Covers:

Social Networks
Org Mappings
Event, Referrals
GitHub/Stackshare
Diversity

I run every staffing project thru a framework to make sure nothing get's missed. It's broken down to capture both the recruiting and sourcing aspect of the project. This ritual gets summoned so the basics are covered, creates a structure anyone can follow/take over and allows for team collaboration/buy-in. (click on the arrows below for more info)

Implementation

Utilizing the 3 concepts above, we developed a comprehensive strategy for our campaign. Below is a summary:

[ 1 ] Scenario: The client just green lighted a POC and wants to build out an entire office to capitalize on this first mover advantage. The initial team only comprised of four individuals (the architect, 2 SWE and 1 SDET). Immediate needs are to grow the SWE and SDETs, with some Solution Architects and Product Owners sprinkled in.

[ 2 ] Workforce Planning

I broke the hunt down to four pipelines: SWEs, SDETs, Solutions Architects and Product Owners. Goal is have all boots on deck within 6 months.

[ 3 ] Resource Allocation: Utilizing the formulas in the campaign mgmt section above, we figured it best to borrow an additional resource from another team to augment my team.

[ 4 ] Establish Goals and Metrics

Due to the small size of the initial team, we couldn't waste any precious cycles on bad interviews (needed the team to do what they do best, which is to develop). We created some solutions to help with this (will talk about this later). To track our effectiveness, we pushed hard on our submission to interview ratios, and interview to offer ratios. All our other metrics were still in play (e.g. reach outs, response rate, hires, etc.), but the big focus was on quality.

[ 5 ] Develop Search Strategy

We went thru every one of the techniques in the master sourcing strategy above.

[ 6 ] Execute Strategy

We discussed our progress in a daily standup in order to be agile and tweak our strategy if necessary.

[ 7 ] Stakeholder Management

We have two stakeholders here - one was the actual hiring manager (who is really the architect of the project), and the other is the VP of Engineering. For the manager we provided weekly reports and went deep into the numbers to review our effectiveness and provide him with assurance the pipeline is generating at an appropriate pace. Because this project had high visibility, we also provided the VP with a weekly report, but kept it brief.

What was our Secret Formula?

Proper Screening Questions
Effective Coding Challenge
Training on Tech Concepts

[ 1 ] Screening Questions

Below are screening questions developed and approved by the Hiring Manager. These are to be asked in a live conversation (so you can tell if the candidates are Googling answers).

What is an Interface and why would you use one?
What is your design philosophy about maintainable code?
What kind of tools do you use for refactoring?
What is the difference between Unit Testing and Test Driven Development?
Have you practiced TDD? If yes then please provide details.
Let's say you're writing an application and the app is going to talk to an ATM machine to withdraw money. How would you write your code and then be able to Unit Test.
Are you familiar with Dependency Injection? If so, where have you utilized this and for what purpose?
Are you familiar with the Factory Method? If they answer yes, then propose this question: Let's say I have an ATM Machine that is from Bank of America and an ATM Machine from Wells Fargo. How would I use a Factory Method to communicate the two without doing much changes on my side?
Are you familiar with Mock Framework or Stubbing for Unit Testing? If so, can you please give me an example of why you would utilize this?

Questions

[ 2 ] Code Submission

I have a love/hate relationship with coding challenges. A simple code submission allows managers the ability to take a quick glimpse into a candidate's coding ability and style. Downfall to this approach? Candidates loathe it, especially the senior and passive ones. We were able to strike a balance on this and had our manager craft up a coding challenge that was effective but only takes 15 minutes to complete.

Scenario

Please write a method in C# and include unit tests for the following: Provide a method that when passed a string will return the count of every alpha character. It is up to you to figure out the return type. The code will be reviewed on maintainability, readability, production quality and performance 0(n). For example, if I pass in "AABACB", I should be able to know afterwards that there was 3 A's, 2 B's and a single C.

[ 3 ] Training

We trained the Sourcers on every aspect of the screening questions so the conversation with the candidate is as smooth as possible. Sourcers were trained to casually speak with the candidates on these questions vs asking them like a robot. They are taught to be able to go back and forth with the candidates on discussions and have the ability to rephrase the questions if the candidates don't understand on the first go.

Topics

Test Driven Development (TDD) concepts
Theory behind maintainable code
Design patterns
What to look for in the sample codes
What is a Mock Framework or Stubbing
What is Dependency Injection and how is it used
Different solutions to the ATM question

VALUE ADD: Customized the sourcing protocol with a two-pronged attack that eliminated unnecessary phone screens by the hiring team. All submittals went straight to the onsite stage and we achieved a 68% sub to hire ratio.

[ 1 ] Coding Challenge

All candidates are required to submit a Unit Test that demonstrated their command of TDD. Sourcers were trained to read the code and only presented candidates that exceeded our client's standards.

[ 2 ] Sourcers Conducting Tech Interviews

Sourcers gained mastery of the TDD concept to effectively interview candidates. Sourcers facilitated phone interviews that covered technical and philosophical topics. Many of the questions were open ended and could have numerous outcomes. The Sourcers needed to have enough knowledge in the subject matter in order to properly screen candidates

We delivered on their aggressive hiring needs. Since then, the team has grown to over 300 employees and grabbing large chunks of market share from competitors that have 10x their workforce strength.