We are now intensively hiring in outbrain and will extremely grow the team in the near future. As the head of the Israeli tech team, I took the lead on the hiring effort. Alen Stern wrote nicely about it here
and I agree that the higher manager possible should be the one to lead the hiring effort. A co-founder and CTO is the most appropriate one to lead the effort of hiring tech people.
Good people are coming from many sources and I learned not to judge any of them. I never say no to CVs coming from recruiters, nor head hunters. I judge the CVs by their content only.
We have a great team in outbrain. It is professionally balanced between experienced people and those who are 'young' and eager to learn. We have those who are family people and those who are young singles. We always encourage them all to have the right life/work balance.
I want to keep the larger team on that balance and looking for the right people to be contributers as well as contributed during their time in work.
The blogosphere also have some gems about picking the right people for your team.
Joel wrote a great post about it long ago. I call it the "Smart and get things done" criteria for recruiting. The people he is hiring are the people how have those 2 attributes together, they are smart and get things done.
Greg Linden, in one of his last posts quoted someone else about the people who are "Done, and get things smart". Those are pure gold to the team.
They do their work well but also improve stuff and get the rest of the team smarter.
I like it and advice everyone who is building a team or interviewing people to read them.
enjoy
Comments