Nibletz Staff
*Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a 3 part series on a recent fireside chat with former Twitter head of engineering and current Kleiner Perkins partner Michael Abbott.
Finding and hiring the right people is fundamental to the success of a business. Your employees are the lifeblood of your organization, and their abilities and dispositions are going to shape the way your company lives and grows. The challenge is sifting through the vast sea of talent in order to identify the right person for each position. This can involve a complicated set of value judgments that are not always easy to make.
Riviera Partners recently invited a group of up and coming industry directors to an intimate fireside chat with Michael Abbott about this very subject. Abbott is an expert on rapidly scaling teams for high tech ventures, who was able to take Twitter from just 45 engineers up to 200 in two years’ time. He has a lot of wisdom to share about the hiring process and advice for maintaining a high bar of excellence when forced to deal with rapid growth.
A key takeaway from the talk was that consistency is key. Standardizing the interview process allows you to accurately compare and evaluate the candidate. This might mean having a training program, or guidelines that the people conducting the interviews can follow. A consistent process ensures that the information you are using to evaluate a candidate is scalable, allowing you to make faster and better hiring decisions.
Abbott also discussed how important it is to understand your own career goals when considering a career opportunity. Some people are going to be happier, and more efficient at managing large teams. Others are just better suited to handling smaller, more personal groups. It’s all about finding your niche rather than comparing yourself to others in the field.
It was an enlightening conversation that brought up a lot of questions about the challenges that companies face when dealing with rapid growth and team scaling.
It’s important to get the right people in, but at the same time you have to understand that you will make mistakes along the way. A consistent process undertaken by trained interviewers will help to cut down on these mistakes, and ensure that your company grows the right way.
Alaina Percival is the Head of Developer Outreach for Riviera Partners, a leading technical recruiting firm in Silicon Valley.
