Hiring for unreasonable impact

You are in a high growth business; you have more work to do than people to do it. Exciting times. You are looking to expand your team so you can get everything done. You start to think about what you need in your next hires.

If you are hiring developers you may start by saying how many tech leads, seniors, mid-levels or juniors do I need to get this work done? Or you may start with a budget and start juggling numbers -> If I hire 1 tech lead that leaves me with £x for 2 seniors and 1 junior. You are viewing the people you hire as commodities or engines of work. They are cogs in your system of work and fungible.

You have hired people in the past that didn’t work out, it’s horrible for everyone involved, you don’t want to have to deal with that again! So you put your efforts into making sure that the person you are hiring will be competent enough to perform their role. Maybe someone with a degree, a track record, or who smashes your tech test. You design your process to eliminate false positives, bad hires.

However, what you never feel the pain of is the false negatives. The brilliant people you never gave a chance or were put off by your exhaustive process. The real kicker here is that impact of team members is massively skewed by some unreasonable performers. Like start-ups, people have a long tail of performance. A great hire is not something you can afford to miss out on.

I need to clarify this last point. You may be thinking I am advocating for 10xers. 10xers get a bad rep in the development community. Being a 10xer is synonymous in many people’s minds with parasitic developers who churn out 10 times the amount of code as everyone else, contribute to 10 times the number of outages (often being held aloft by management as a hero when they fix it), and hoard knowledge to cement their position. This is most definitely not what I am advocating for.

Good software at any reasonable scale is all about people. I am advocating for people who solve issues others never would or that you don’t even realise need to be solved:

• Designing processes to address organisational issues
• Mentoring and creating knowledge sharing opportunities
• Refactoring a complex and fragile service to be simple, well documented, and resilient
• Bridging communication gaps between parts of the organisation
• Building a community around your offerings
• Creating a sense of happiness and well-being within a team

The problem with focusing on titles is that you boil people to a single dimension of skill. Remember you are hiring a complex and fully featured real life person. Value their diversity of thought, experience, and skills.

Maybe a candidate spent a decade running pubs?
They may have learnt a thing or two about conflict resolution.

Maybe they did 2 tours in Iraq?
They can probably help the team keep calm and effective when you have a major outage and everything just keeps going wrong.

Maybe they have just come out of a part time bootcamp and are amazed that they are no longer locked out of the digital economy?
If you treat them well, you may be rewarded with incredible enthusiasm and loyalty.

No one person that you hire is going to have it all. When hiring or managing people, the unique talents people bring can massively outweigh the commoditised skills you are probably initially looking for, maybe you should optimise for the unexpected.

Spot the kernel of potential and nurture it.

But now we understand that we are hiring complex people into our complex organisations, we need to design that organisation so that people can effectively find how their unique set of skills can bring unique value.

Like successful start-ups, phenomenal employees don’t just happen, they require someone to take a risk when a unique opportunity presents itself, learning and iteration, bags of hard work, and a heap of luck.

As a leader, how are you going to work with people can discover their unique value, and how will you help them nurture it? If you have made that investment in them, and taken a chance on them, people will return the favour and you will be rewarded with a superstar.

Be prepared to invest. When you find someone you think might be a phenomenal employee they will probably not be moulded exactly as you need. Spot the kernel of potential and nurture it.

Somebody took a chance on you once and look where you are. Take a chance and pay it forward. Yes it’s a gamble that may not pay off, don’t lose heart keep trying.

Finally, we can only come to a place where we are comfortable taking a risk on a candidate if we come to terms with the fact that sometimes it won’t work out.

Letting someone go is always hard, but we can change the narrative.

We can be open with candidates, communicating continuously and candidly about how they are settling into the role so that everyone is eyes wide open throughout the process. No-one should be shocked when they don’t make it through probation.

If someone worked hard for us, but it just didn’t work out, we can leverage our network to help them find a role where they can thrive. Or help cushion the blow and de-risk by writing into the contract a 1-month salary parachute if the role doesn’t turn out to be a fit.

There should be no stigma about not fitting, brilliant people are brilliant within a context, if Roger Federer were asked to run the 100 meters, he would not be anything special, but maybe you don’t need a tennis player right now. I have known a small number of people who have left a company and gone on to be great advocates, this is a gold standard. It’s a small world and word spreads fast.

When hiring, remember you are hiring a full human, not a job title or a code-sausage machine for you to turn the handle on. Treat people well, give before you expect to receive and optimise for unreasonable performance.

Like start-ups, software development is a highly leveraged world with significant network effects, that means that the best performers can make an unreasonable impact, we need to back many horses, work hard to make them succeed and make sure that when it doesn’t work out, everyone involved still walk away happy to have been part of the process.