When you do reach the decision that you need to grow your team, you have to go through a whole sourcing, interview, and evaluation period. Then, once you have decided to make an offer, you have to communicate this to both the successful candidate as well as the others who didn’t make it over the line. It doesn’t stop there—your chosen hire still has to show up and start working. You may be surprised at the number of times a candidate goes through the acceptance process and signs the papers, yet never shows up on the start date.
In this chapter, I present how to take the mystery out of this area. A good piece of advice for CTOs is that you should never see recruiting as a one-time event; you need to make it part of your routine, with the mindset that you are always hiring. You never know when someone might leave your team or you need to scale up quickly; having bench strength is a wonderful tool to have in your back pocket. The most successful CTOs are skilled at bringing people on nearly immediately, because they have built up a great pipeline of candidates.