How does a rapidly-growing company keep bringing on the IT talent it needs? By interviewing candidates well before it needs them, says Anjoo Rai-Marchant, CTO of employee engagement solution provider HighGround. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, she explains how she keeps the talent pipeline full.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): Your company is growing very fast which means it's bringing a lot of talent on board quickly. How are you finding that talent, and how do you ensure that these new hires will be a good long-term fit for your company?
Rai-Marchant: We leverage all of the typical recruiting and hiring tactics, but referrals are an especially important channel for us. With a referral program, we're able to better gauge if a candidate would be a cultural fit or not.
The other thing we do is opportunistic hiring – meeting with promising candidates even when there isn't necessarily an immediate role. We are constantly talking with potential candidates to keep our pipeline full in anticipation of growing demand. This means that we have a longer time for us and the candidates to get to know each other and that we can meet hiring demands more just-in-time. Since cultural fit is essential, we spend a lot of time with the candidates to give them a true sense of what it's like to work at HighGround.
Also, one of the ways we manage our ramp up is by hiring experienced team members. People who have interacted with enterprise-level customers or have worked for larger companies help us reduce the learning curve for on-boarding. They understand and are sensitive to the expectations enterprise-level customers have.
TEP: You've had to manage large-scale projects with a small team. How do you do it while avoiding the kind of burnout that can cause top talent to look for opportunities elsewhere?
Rai-Marchant: First and foremost, we keep the customer at the center of our conversations. As a result, our teams see the purpose of their efforts. They are excited about how their work is solving client business problems. We're building technology that's disruptive to how companies develop their talent and performance management programs, and it's something our employees want to be a part of.
On a tactical level, one way we provide execution focus is to build short sprints – chunking out small pieces of work from a larger project and getting the team honed in on that. It is more manageable psychologically, and more achievable.
It's our philosophy that, in general, people don't leave because they're working long hours. They leave because they don't think working long hours serves a greater purpose.
TEP: What advice would you offer CIOs and other tech leaders who have to rapidly scale IT headcount? What are the biggest mistakes they should make sure to avoid?
Rai-Marchant: I'd stress the importance of being especially thoughtful when hiring IT talent. You can take very talented individuals and by placing them in the wrong roles or badly thought out roles, it can result in a very dysfunctional byproduct. It is a lose: lose scenario.
A good assessment of what gap you're really trying to fill is key. For example, if your organization is growing rapidly it may be that what you really need is a project manager who can effectively bring different groups together and bring focus to tasks versus another developer.
You also need to look at what candidates are really excited about, what their strengths are, and how those marry up with their long-term career aspirations. Again, a common example, we take very talented developers and want to give them responsibility for managing a team when in reality they may or may not have any desire to do that. It is a common scenario in tech but it's especially tempting in a rapidly growing company where people have to wear multiple hats.
As an aside, when it comes to rapidly scaling IT headcount, it's essential to recognize that there's a learning curve associated with hiring new staff. For example, when you hire four new engineers, there's going to be a ramp-up period in which other team members will have to step in to bring new employees up to speed.
