Challenge: An enterprise software company is looking to aggressively grow development capacity for a key new software release.
I worked with product management leadership to determine differentiating features and the market timeline. We agreed that this wasn't a one-off desire for capacity, but rather a need to have a sustained push over the next few years to make the product a leader in target markets.
With the product strategy clarified, I built a team structure meant to maximize our ability to onboard new hires. The dev team was composed of pods, each of which had one or more senior developers who could mentor new hires and could handle a few new hires before needing to be split. I vetted the plan with senior developers and management within the team; after a few iterations, we all agreed it was doable.
That led to a hiring plan more aggressive than we'd previously executed on. We'd already hired more recruiters to build a pipeline, but the interview process was our bottleneck. Working with leaders on other teams, I standardized the process across the majority of dev, and made sure we had a bench of trained interviewers. Recruiters were able to schedule promising candidates quickly, and the standardized process let us make a hiring decision the same day as the interview. We frequently beat out our competitors by making a candidate an offer before they even managed to schedule them. I also trained interviewers to build a rapport with candidates, which further differentiated us from larger companies that could offer more generous compensation packages.
Result: We hired the capacity necessary to create the market-leading product. The hiring practices were so effective that we applied them generally across dev, allowing us to continue the aggressive growth in future years. Hundreds of people were hired using these methodologies.