Manage talent

Managing talent is not only about recruiting new people, it is about the whole process starting with the necessity of a new employee, followed by its search, recruitment, consolidation in the company and the eventual contract finalization.

Hiring process

Preparation

• Know the company moment and know if it really needs new talent for developing new projects or might miss the opportunity of additional income. Maybe we can use an external resource to materialize a small component.
• Define properly the role description for the position. We need to be inclusive because men apply if they have 40% of the required competences, women a 80%.
• Properly define the culture and the product in a few words
• Transmit company culture during the whole process
• Use services such workable to keep tracking of all the candidates
• Show internal talent and demonstrate we used technologies we ask for. Giveaway marketing, technical blog, open source code, coworkers professional branding.
• Keep an active recruiting through social networks, generate interest for the company.
• Have an open space where all the job positions are offered, as it would be a marketplace. We need to keep track of it.
• Find a way to stand out from the competence.
• Emotional salary: career plan, remote work, bonus, team building, etc
• Define responsibilities of each of the interviewer of the whole process.
• Keep a director figure between candidate and company. This figure needs to know the necessities of the position.
• Technologies that are used have to ease the curve of integration of the person in the team.

Talent search

• Try to internalize external hired talent or promote internal
• External help with head hunting companies for search is an option
• Internal recommendation referral programs can be helpful
• Search candidates based on their professional experience and personal attitudes
• Do not focus on local one-field seniors or you might not find roles
• Bring cognitive diversion: different experiences, knowledge and personal habilitates
• Offbranding. Take care of the details in order to make them not talk bad about you afterwards
• Make boolean searches in Google, like searching on Github a developing language
• Talent search is for covering a need. It is good a candidate if he knows more than you.
• Tools like codewars help us to know the candidate level

Interviews

• Make a personal engagement with the candidate to make them feel comfortable
• If it is a video call, look straight to the camera from time to time
• Always give feedback on each of the process steps
• Appreciate the knowledge the candidate has, it's the principal value that is going to offer to the company
• Process:
  • HR interview
  • Small technical questionnaire, 30 minutes with plain questions and how to refactor a code
  • Review questions. If valid, request technical development of the refactor proposed.
  • Technical interview with the test
  • Take final decision HR and TL

On boarding

• Define an onboarding process appropriate to the position
• Establish adaptation times (30-60-90 days): learning, improvement, perfectionism, etc. Time To Deployment is an indicative heuristic to measure the time onboarding takes. If a colleague stays 36 months in the company but the on boarding takes 6 months, is a lot of time.
• The sooner the person knows and tests the full process of developing to production the better.
• Candidate must know on which point of the onboarding process is the candidate in.
• Make weekly followup to know how is he feeling
• Know their personal interests and how they are, that way we can assign them a Buddy (company colleague with same interests) from any department for guiding, partnership or being a reference colleague.
• Assign a mentor in case the position requires it
• Must dispose of a documentation where he can check all the processes in the company, guidelines, operations manual, etc. If no operations manual is set, new hiring could be in charge of starting it.
• Provide a place, intranet for example, where candidate can see organization chart, meetings, schedules, benefits, etc

Internal colleagues

Unlike company - worker relation from decades ago where the employee was a mere tool for the company to reach its objectives, nowadays employee has a more human treatment taking into account employee objectives, concerns and feelings.

To handle that, we need to introduce management 3.0:

• We are working with human beings, not employees
• Happiness door. We need to know on which professional and personal state is the person
• Help them reach their professional and personal objectives, their moving motivators
• The important part is the global performance of the team
• We must establish synergies between all colleagues
• Reward: without compromising to them but making them public and symbolic
• Gamification: make more entertainful routinary tasks

Career plan

• Define profiles by department, levels, what do expect for each of them and set salary ranges for each of them.
• Single contributors can be separated from Team contributors in different levels
• Example gitlab

salary revision

Company factors that affect:

• Company benefits are usually established by March, when previous year is closed.
• Growth prevision, made on Q4 of previous year. Personal factors:
• performance. Range from 1 (nearly firing) to 5 (rockstar)
• inside same level, placement in salary range During the interview, explain in which performance level is positioned and re-comment One to Ones for justifying the performance level.
  

Once everything is considered, comment in another interview the result of the revision.

Talent retention

• Have a good leadership style from the manager.
• Try to keep salary range with the market.
• Challenging project, both for its company impact and personal-professional growth. Rotation of 0% is not always good because new talent always come with new ideas an enthusiasm.

remote work

Define a proper remote work policy based on the company culture and values. Here is an example of a well structured remote work policy in gitlab

low performers

to identify them we have One to Ones from him and other colleagues, how is he feeling, motivation, HR department, etc. To try to solve we must know:

• if he doesn't know how to. If he doesn't have the knowledge we have to evaluate and try to train him.
• if he can't. An external agent doesn't want to use the technique.
• if he doesn't want to. It's mainly a motivational problem, personal or professional.
  • from the personal point of view offer the help of the lead, team and company.
  • from the professional part: is it a problem with the manager? Be open to radical feedback. Other team member? Take note and investigate.

Performance Improvement Process (PIP)

It is a process where we try to improve the worker performance. We inform the person that is inside this program an takes about 3 to 6 months.
We must inform HR team that we are initiating this process.

• Some objectives are set depending on what deficiencies he has.
• There must be tracking of the whole process to evaluate it.

If the process is not successful we must finalize the collaboration.

Other models to apply:

• would we hire this person again?
• if we make an ordered list of coworkers by performance, if we changed the first for the last, why don't we do it? Hiring a new one.

Contract finalization

If we are firing:

• Better done Friday before lunch
• done by the responsible and HR
• be the more direct possible: "we have evaluated the PIP and we consider that you are not suitable for this company so we are going to dispense with your services"
• we must not get into debate, the decision is taken
• inform the team and be open to general questions without details

If the person is leaving:

• Get feedback

Have a re-contract policy in case employee leaves and wants to return