When you are hiring for expanding teams, you often need roles and responsibilities that are beyond the teams' current capabilities. This can make it difficult to evaluate candidates, because the you and the team are in new territory. To help you, this page has hiring tips that you can use and adapt to your own needs.
This page helps you evaluate candidates by using three major perspectives:
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Current skills.
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Past experiences.
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Future goals.
We welcome feedback: what do you like about this information, what do you feel are opportunities for improvement, and how has this information affected your hiring practices?
First and foremost, we recommend that you and your team take time to learn more.
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Can you learn more about the industry, the project, the role, the responsibilities, and so forth? For example, you may want to understand something of the options, scopes, and needs.
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Can you reach out to teammates, peers, and practitioners, to gather advice from people who are doing well in a similar area, and can help point you the right direction? For example, you may want to create an assessment, or rubric, or interview script.
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Can you connect with a professional advisor, such as a recruiter, human resources manager, or job placement person, to get advice and possibly leads as well? For example, you may want to get feedback on a job description, or placement processes, or applicant screening systems.
If you're in a time crunch, such as with an immovable deadline, or mission-critical project, or unchangeable procurement process, then you might not have enough time to connect with people who can advise you.
For this situation, we recommend you consider three technical-oriented tactics that you can pick up right now that may help you with hiring:
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Assess current skills: do this via maturity models (or your preferred of skill-summary practice).
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Assess past experiences: do this via decision records (or your preferred of decision-making practice).
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Assess future goals: do this via objectives and key results (or your preferred of goal-target practice).
This page explain each of these tactics in more detail below.
These three tactics create conversations with candidates that can start at the surface then dive deeper:
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Because these tactics encourage exploration beyond just a résumé.
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Because these tactics are well-known, well-understood, and widely used practices.
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Because these tactics interconnect two-way discussion, where you share some of your own team's actual maturity models, decision records, and objectives and key results.
Overview: Maturity Models
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Maturity models (MM) are a simple ways of summarizing a group's capabilities, typically on a scale of 1 (meaning lowest) to 5 (meaning highest).
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A maturity model is often shown as a simple 5x5 table of five capability areas as rows, and five capability levels 1-5 that describe some specifics.
Steps:
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Find any typical maturity model (MM) that's relevant for your role. If you know people doing the role, ask them for MMs; otherwise, a typical web search is fine. Provide the MM to the candidate to prepare for screening.
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During automatic screening, ask the candidate to choose the maturity level areas that feel most similar to their capabilities, and provide one sentence of justification for each area (such as 5), and optionally comment on the maturity model in general. Timebox 10 minutes.
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During an interview, ask the candidate to drill into each of the chosen areas and each of the justification sentences. Seek areas where the candidate can describe specifics about the areas' implementations, as well as the candidate's accomplishments (i.e. past experience) and career goals (i.e. future goals). Timebox 10 minutes.
Caveats:
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Some people dislike the concept of a "Maturity Model", or criticize it as "homogenization boxing" or "the map is not the territory" or "unnecessary overhead".
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If you encounter a critic like this, then pivot, to ask them what they recommend instead and why. And also please send us the feedback.
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Then emphasize that the purpose of this evaluation is to talk about how to productively summarize skill sets to be able to evaluate past work areas and current organizational capabilities.
Bonus if the candidate initiates anything about:
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Orchestration: such as teams of teams, or the squad model, or innovation partnerships, or vendor value chains.
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Growth: such as vision-led growth, product-led growth, sales-led growth, research and development.
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Learning: such as upskilling, continuing education, training classes, etc.
Overview: Decision Record
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Decision Records (DRs) are a process for evaluating among choices, especially to solve specific needs, and especially to solicit input from teams then integrate it.
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Decision Records (DRs) can be especially useful for interviewing candidates, because DRs are negotiations and experiments, thus good for driving discussions.
Steps:
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Find any typical DR that's relevant for your role. If you know people doing the role, ask them for DRs; otherwise, a typical web search is fine. Provide the DR to the candidate to prepare for screening.
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During automatic screening, ask the candidate to provide one sentence of review for each significant assertion (such as 5), and optionally comment on the DR in general. Timebox 10 minutes.
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During an interview, ask the candidate to drill into the DR and each of the justification sentences. Seek areas where the candidate can describe specific tradeoffs and options, as well as lessons learned (i.e. past experience) that can help the team with upcoming decisions (i.e. future growth). Timebox 10 minutes.
Caveats:
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Some people dislike the concept of an "Decision Record", or criticize it as "for architecture astronauts" or "death by documentation" or "pointless processing".
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If you encounter a critic like this, then pivot, to ask them what they recommend instead and why. And also please send us the feedback.
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Then emphasize that the purpose of this evaluation is to talk about how teams work together on potential choices, and how teams choose to collaborate and communicate about future decisions and decision-making improvements.
Bonus if the candidate initiates anything about:
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Experiment-driven decision making.
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Lightweight decision making.
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Industry approaches such as meeting preparation memos, or "disagree and commit", or "easily reversible decisions".
Overview: Objectives and Key Results
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Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are simple ways of summarizing a group's purpose and progress over time period such as a quarter or year.
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Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are typically shared throughout teams and organizations, to help improve collaboration and coordination.
Steps:
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Find any typical yearly planning technique that's relevant for your role. If you know people doing the role, ask them for their OKRs or equivalents; otherwise, a typical web search is fine. Provide your role's best-guess anonymized OKRs to the candidate to prepare for screening.
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During automatic screening, ask the candidate to provide one sentence of justification for how they match the OKR, and optionally comment on the OKRs in general. Timebox 10 minutes.
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During an interview, ask the candidate to drill into each of the chosen areas and each of the justification sentences. Timebox 10 minutes.
Caveats:
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Some people dislike the concept of "Objectives and Key Results", or criticize it negatively as "enterprise-speak" or "startup cargo cult" or "unspecified unpredictability".
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If you encounter a critic like this, then pivot, to ask them what they recommend instead and why. And also please send us the feedback.
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Therefore emphasize that the purpose of this evaluation is to talk about how to work well with objectives a.k.a. goals, and also with results a.k.a. outcomes.
Bonus if the candidate initiates anything about:
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Tactics: such as SMART criteria, GIST planning, ROPE estimation, TEAM FOCUS toolkit.
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Alignment: such as vertical (e.g. managing up) or horizontal (e.g. inter-team influence) or swarms (e.g. squads, guilds).
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Concepts: such as vision-mission-values, futurespectives, value stream maps, project planning, critical path/chain.
This page covered how you can evaluate your candidates using three major perspectives and three technical-oriented tactics:
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Assess current skills: do this via maturity models.
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Assess past experiences: do this via decision records.
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Assess future goals: do this via objectives and key results.
We're well aware that there are many hiring guides, and hiring experts, and many of them prefer different ways. As always, do your own research and find what works for you. We welcome hearing from you, and we welcome your feedback.