24. Hiring people is a basic skill
Published in
2 min readMay 13, 2020
My team has recently taken over a new product. In 3 months, we had to find, hire and train a whole new team to replace us: a manager, 2 back- and 2 frontend developers, and a QA specialist. Interviewing and hiring staff is a basic skill that every member of the product team should have. Here are some of our tips:
- Write the job descriptions yourself. Use a simple language to portray your product. Do not trust HR to do it unless you want a standard corporate text that sounds pretty boring.
- Invite for an interview only those candidates who have examples of code they’ve written (in case of devs) or a portfolio (designers). If they have nothing to show, ask them to do a test. This will help you rule out candidates with a strong CV, but whose skills are insufficient.
- Specify your candidate requirements to recruiters so that your team doesn’t end up receiving tons of CVs that don’t quite match your job criteria.
- Don’t attend interviews as a whole team at once. Nevertheless, all members of the team should be able to conduct interviews and evaluate both technical and soft skills. If anyone is lacking those abilities, be sure to teach them.
- Know how to sell your product to the candidates — good candidates usually have several job offers on their hands. When selling your product, be honest and don’t exaggerate its value: you want your new colleague to stay in the company for years, not just a couple of months.
Other than that, be patient and stay positive.
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