1. Create a Great Hiring Culture
How you hire is more important than who you hire. A great hiring culture forces you to focus on the kind of people you want at your company and what it means to be successful. Everyone should be involved in the process – your engineers, technology leaders, and product development managers should work hand-in-hand with People Ops to clarify the company culture and play an active role in making the team better. Your existing team should be incentivized to hire the next great team members; if they’re not referring their friends to join them, that’s a sign something is wrong. Interview training is key; avoid the trap of prioritizing technical skills minutia over the right cultural fit, and letting people ask arbitrary questions is a sure way to reject candidates you should hire and hire ones you should reject. Interviewers should know to avoid generic questions (“What do you do well?”) or ones where it’s difficult to clearly distinguish a bad answer from an excellent one. Have interviewers try out new questions on other team members– to openly discuss and determine what constitutes a bad or good response.