Scaling a team while ensuring the quality of talent stays high
Don't hire too quickly!
How do you scale your team while ensuring the quality of talent stays high?
1/ Encourage your leaders or managers to only hire folks that have better skills vs themselves in several dimensions (e.g. ask the manager if they can see themselves working for the hire in an alternate universe, and if the answer is no, it’s a no hire)
2/ Have the hiring manager justify the hire by coming up with a short list of anticipated projects the hire will work on, and relevant skills and experience. Benefits include more thoughtful managers, and better scope definition for the candidate.
3/ Designate several culture interviews to screen for values, centralized around teamwork, transparency, and collaboration. Teams build enduring products, not individuals. Look for a “we, not me” mindset.
Many organizations make the mistake of growing their teams way too quickly, resulting in higher costs, more problems, without increasing output.
Ah yeah, that sounds like the right direction. As realistic a work exchange as it can be would be ideal, at least from my perspective. I have test anxiety pretty bad and a clock ticking away paralyzes me. But if the time limit is less important than the dialog, then that seems like it should work well. I know that not everyone has that timer anxiety but I'm finding out that it is more common than most people think. If split-second decision making is mission-critical, then by all means, hold the candidate's feet to the fire. But if they will just be working a roadmap and delivering features, then adding in hard time limits just shrinks your valid candidate pool. My three cents (inflation, don't ya know).
Interviewing your own interviewers for calibration and training them goes a long way too.
Asking managers for their north star and justification helps too.
On a side note, most Managers like to grow by adding more people to their team (horizontal growth) more than working on the growth of their existing team (vertical growth). If we reward vertical growth more than horizontal growth for managers, we will automatically discourage inflated hiring and hire only what’s required.