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Recruitment and Hiring

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As the hiring manager for your team, you're ultimately responsible for everything related to hiring — from screening and interviewing potential candidates to working with upper management and recruiters to align on headcount targets. You'll help drive the hiring process and, in many cases, make the final hire/no-hire decision on candidates. Crucially, you'll also be the one to 'close the deal' with potential new hires and help them become successful members of your team!

What to expect

As the saying goes, "With great power comes great responsibility." Since your role as a manager will be vital to this hiring process and shape what the process looks like over time — it's critical that you understand and demonstrate experience with different steps of the hiring funnel. You might be asked a broad question, like "How do you recruit great engineers?" Questions like this are just a starting point for a discussion — use them as a springboard for discussing how you approach sourcing leads, interviewing candidates, and selling potential hires — all with the goal of building a successful, impactful team.

What they're looking for

As always, you should bring your answers to life with your own experiences, anecdotes, and personal style. It's helpful to ground your stories in common wisdom and best practices — but interviewers are actually looking for hard evidence that you've put these ideas into practice successfully in the past.

Note: Hiring processes differ by industry, team size, and company stage. For example, a public software company approaches recruiting very differently from a hardware startup. Be aware your experiences at one company may not translate directly to another — and don't assume that your interviewer will understand these differences or explain them to you! Make sure to explain your experiences in context and then discuss how they could apply in a new company.

Now, let's explore a few of these topics in more depth.

Sourcing

Sourcing is the beginning of the hiring funnel — the stage where you find potential hires and bring them into the recruiting process. As a manager, your involvement in this step can vary dramatically depending on the maturity and hiring needs of the company, so think about the company you're interviewing with: How large is the team? Do they have a dedicated recruiting department already? How fast are they hiring?

At smaller companies, you may be expected to be directly involved in the sourcing process, so it's important to demonstrate you can do the following:

  • Identifying and reaching out to potential candidates online.
  • Leveraging your personal network and your team's network to refer candidates.
  • Using hiring platforms and/or working with external recruiting firms.
  • Knowing how to balance recruiting with other responsibilities.

Tip: Getting team buy-in is important when adding headcount. A great way to get the team involved and enthusiastic about a new hire is to ask your employees for quality referrals from their personal networks. You'll likely get some great candidates.

At larger companies with dedicated recruiting teams, generally speaking, your role in the sourcing process could be more indirect, but you'll still need to consider the following:

  • Explain how you justify headcount and hiring targets to meet business goals.
  • Explain how you would screen inbound applicants based on their resume.
  • Explain how you work with dedicated recruiters to make sure you're targeting the right candidates.

Interviewing

As the hiring manager, you'll be interviewing candidates for the company, helping shape the interview process, and weighing the input of your employees' interview feedback to arrive at hiring decisions. It's important to think about the following:

  • What questions do you like to ask engineering candidates?
  • What qualities or signals do you look for in an engineer in general?
  • How do you make hiring decisions? What do you do if the team's feedback is mixed?
  • What problems have you discovered in your interview process? How did you fix them?

Selling

Part of the manager's job is also about sales and persuasion. In the context of hiring, this means that even while you're evaluating candidates, you should also be getting them excited about the prospect of working at your company and keeping them motivated to move forward in the interview process. After a hiring decision is made, you'll often be the one to congratulate the candidate, answer their questions, and convince them to join your team.

Try this: How would you pitch your team to a potential new hire? Now think about how your approach would change depending on the type of candidate — e.g. a junior engineer vs. a senior engineer. Can you effectively communicate why this is the right team and company for them to work?

As an aside, some companies like Facebook and Google have a separate team-matching process that happens after the hiring decision. In this case, you may need to think about how you would convince new hires to join your team over other equally exciting opportunities within the company.

Practice real interview questions

Before you move on, here are a few more example questions and exercises to try out that have been asked in recent EM interviews. Take a moment to answer these on your own, or record yourself giving example answers:

  • How do you recruit great engineers?
  • How would you build up a pipeline of world-class candidates?
  • What frameworks and processes have you set up on your teams to hit hiring goals?
  • What do you look for when you screen resumes?
  • What questions do you ask candidates who want to join your team?

After you've tried these out yourself, continue to the next lesson to see some example answers and our recommended approach for questions like these.