5 Interviewing, Choosing and Onboarding
This chapter covers
- Interviewing and evaluating candidates
- Making the candidate feel special
- Scoring candidates to make it easier to compare and contrast
- Making an offer, and then, saying no to the others
- Onboarding the new hires
When you do get to 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, but also note to the others they didn’t make it over the line. Doesn’t stop there, they still have to show up and start working. You would be surprised at the amount of times I have heard from other CTO's (and personally experienced firsthand) the candidate goes through the acceptance process, signs the papers, and then never shows up.
In this chapter, I am going to present how to take the mystery out of this area. The one piece of advice I give to CTO’s is that you should never see recruiting as a one time event; you need to make it as part of your routine, with the mindset that you are always hiring. You never know when someone just 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 CTO's I know are skilled at bringing people on near immediately, as they have built up a great pipeline of candidates.
You are only as strong as your team - tend to its future growth now.