This is part six in a series on Engineering team growth.
Having a good place to work
What makes a company good to work at is worthy of another series, but some elements are especially important when hiring. The most obvious example is competitive pay: since many states now require that you post a reasonable pay range in job listings, that’s something many people will see before they’ve even applied.
When it comes to hiring engineers, though, pay is usually just one factor. Most engineers want to work in a place with smart people where they are learning new things and doing work that they are proud of. They prefer to work at a place that has enough process to avoid chaos, but not so much that they feel like they are bogged down with bureaucracy.
Once you’ve got a positive, transparent culture that holds up to its own values, the next step is to make sure candidates find out about your culture.
Share your values explicitly in interviews
Taking some time in your interviews to explicitly share the company (or Department) values can be very helpful. Hopefully they are written down and you should prepare the interview panel to talk about the values with concrete examples. One way to do this is to say something like: “One of the things I love about working here, is that we value teamwork above individual contributions. We work hard, we support each other, and always celebrate our wins together. For example, my team recently built a new feature, and everyone added something, even those who were more focused on other projects.”
Design your interview process around your values
Many companies forget about their values when designing an interview process, but you shouldn’t. Using your values when designing an interview process will help attract people who share those values. For example, if your company claims to embrace agile processes, you should focus the interview around working software rather than abstract problems (principle 7 of Agile is “Working software is the primary measure of progress.”)
If transparency is one of your company values, it can also be helpful to share with candidates a problem the team is working on. Every workplace has problems, but not every workplace is transparent enough to see the problems and try to tackle them, so being honest about things you haven’t fully figured out can be a plus for many engineers. For example, “no one on the team really likes writing tests, so we’ve been exploring ways to have AI write our tests for us.”
If your company values things like “partnership”, “collaboration”, “clear communication”, or “teamwork,” you should design your interview process without surprises. For example, candidates should be given a complete rundown of the entire process early on. I’ve seen some companies outline the process in their job postings on job boards, which I think is outstanding.
Get the word out
Beyond the interview itself, there are plenty of ways your company can share its values. For example, many companies have blogs, and social media presence. While it’s hard to measure the return on investment of blogging specifically for recruiting, there are other benefits as well – a blog can be a great way to celebrate wins and encourage people who are shy about presenting to share what they are doing.
