Welcome to Course 1, Module 2, Hiring Your Team. In this lesson, we'll cover why hiring is essential for your success. At the start of this specialization, we shared 10 common engineering manager interview questions. The following content helps you answer the questions that imply that you have substantial experience hiring engineers. Those questions are, who was your best hire and why, and who was your worst hire and why? By the end of this module, you will explain why hiring is among the most important management skills and why the majority of engineering managers are unable to meet their hiring target, illustrate how you shepherd candidates from your hiring pipelines into your hiring funnel and explain how you can make confident, data-driven decisions on candidates after spending only a small amount of time with each candidate. As an engineering manager, your ability to hire is essential for your success. Why? As I mentioned during the start of this specialization, engineering managers are responsible and accountable for interrelated goals. One, grow your engineering team, and two, deliver on your commitments. Your ability to hire has an immediate impact on both. By hiring, you reap a number of benefits, including you directly make progress toward the goal of growing your team. Often, this will be a tangible goal, such as hire five engineers in the next six months. You also increase the number of engineer months available to deliver on your technical commitments and deliverables. Each new hire gives you an opportunity to increase the diversity of backgrounds and strengths on your team. You demonstrate to a wider organization that you're a high-growth leader. Finally, you negate impacts of attrition on yourself and your team. Remember the definition of attrition from our prior lesson. Attrition is a natural process of losing members of your team through any number of factors, including an engineer deciding to retire or pursue a role at a different company. According to HackerLife, the median software engineer only stays for 1.5 years at small companies and 2.3 years at large companies before this move to somewhere new. This chart from HackerLife asserts that the median engineer stays for three years at Netflix, 2.6 years at Microsoft, 2.3 years at Google, and 1.3 years at Uber. If you start managing a full team of engineers and two years without hiring, you might be down to a team of half of that original number. What is the impact of your attrition? Well, attrition can frighten you and your team. If a senior engineer leaves, your team might not have enough expertise or direction to deliver on its commitments. If a junior engineer leaves, the senior engineer might get mired in more work, which can cause them to leave. When a team member's exit impairs the other team member's ability to do well in their own roles, it can be tempting for other team members to also think about whether they too should leave. Either way, one member of your team leaving can cause more people to leave and create a downward spiral until no one is left on your team and it becomes impossible to deliver on your commitments. How do you prevent these negative effects of attrition? Simple. You hire ahead for future attrition so when one team member leaves, one or more other team members is already trained and ready to inherit their role. These team members are already familiar with your team's deliverables, systems, and processes and are ready to take over immediately. Although you and your team might miss the engineer who is leaving very much on a personal level, you're hiring ahead of attrition avoids business interruptions and protects the psychological health of your team on hold. How good are engineering managers at delivering on their hiring goals? One organization that's studied hiring across software engineering organizations is Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lightspeed backed more than 400 startups from early to late-stage, including Snapchat. Snapchat's founders declined an informal three billion dollars purchase offer from Facebook in 2013, and another $30 billion purchase offer from Google in 2016. In 2017 it achieved a value of $33 billion through its initial public offering. According to Lightspeed survey of over 300 startups, only half of tech startups surveyed by Lightspeed were able to achieve their annual hiring goals. That means maybe half of engineering managers fall short of meeting their commitment to staffing their teams. That also means that one way to distinguish yourself as a great manager is to consistently meet or exceed your hiring goals. Why do managers have such difficulty in meeting their hiring goals? After all, in the previous module, we discussed the relatively high levels of compensation that employers offer for software engineers? The answer is that at least in the United States, there might be a shortage of qualified software engineers. According to a projection by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, "By 2020, there will be 1.4 million computer science engineer jobs available and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills to apply for those jobs." That means one million software engineering roles might go unfulfilled. Meanwhile, software engineers with computer science degrees go through each week getting bombarded with tens or even hundreds of messages from recruiters on LinkedIn and in their personal mail. There's a further complication, which is that a bad hire can severely diminish your team's performance and even cause existing team members to leave. The pool of talent is not all seemingly qualified engineers according to LinkedIn profiles, but the smaller pool of qualified engineers who are also knowledgeable, mature, professional, and a culture-add for your team. This all means that engineering managers, like you, will spend a great deal of your time, energy, and intellect on hiring. Do you remember this chart that I shared with you during my lectures? It shows a manager's time commitments. The second-largest commitment of a manager's time, that green 20%, is team growth. That means that is entirely reasonable for hiring activities to take up one full day of your five-day workweek, and very important that you schedule it on a regular basis so hiring becomes a pattern and a habit for you. For example, for me and my managers, we typically schedule about an hour or even sometimes multiple hours a day in order to look through profiles of candidates to build our pipeline and to make sure that existing candidates are moved through the hiring pipeline, through on-sites, through phone interviews in a quick manner. Since you'll spend so much time on hiring activities, it's important to spend your time efficiently. That's how we'll spend our time together. By the end of this module, you will be able to explain the recruiting funnel and the manager's role at each stage of the funnel. Two, explain the different roles of the manager and the recruiter and how to work well with recruiters. Three, how speaking with qualified engineers and convincing them to join your team. In addition, we'll have a number of activities for you to complete that might lead you to helping your team make its next hire.
