Interviewing senior engineering leaders.

A friend recently reached out for advice on interviewing and hiring senior engineering leaders. I’ve spent a good deal of time on this topic over the last couple years, starting with partnering with Laura Hilton to design Stripe’s采访循环对于工程领导，最近经过寻求自己的角色。作为一个组织心理学的窗口特别有趣，招聘是特别有趣的：对于最高的股权决定，他们是否转向结构体or to intuition?

For many topics I can write the algorithm that I’m confident will lead to a pretty good outcome, but this definitely isn’t one of them. Rather these are just the notes of what I’ve seen so far.

For clarity’s sake, I’m defining “senior” as managing an engineering organization of 30+ folks, likely with a Director-plus title at a pre-IPO company or the VPE/CTO at a smaller startup. These ideas will apply to folks outside of these narrow lanes, but will require some adaptation.

为什么这很难

虽然招聘可能很困难，但我发现在这个层面上发现招聘是以几种特定方式具有挑战性的。首先，公司希望从这些雇员中汲取这么多：一支用于管理300+团队的人，在特定的利基拥有经验，并在一家时尚的公司工作。这些交叉的要求将留下候选池，留下少数人追捧的人。

Further, you’re hiring for a skillset you’re missing, which makes it hard to know exactly how to evaluate the candidates. Worse, while these folks will fit many aspects of your culture to some extent, you’re also hiring them to bring a new influence into your culture, which may generate mixed results from a overly rigid approach to assessing culture fit.

你也不能依靠招聘量来教你你要找的东西，因为你希望只在任何特定的公司规模和复杂性阶段雇用一个这样的候选人。当您雇用另一名CTO时，您将寻找一个非常不同的技能。

最后，投资准备的高级人士往往会采访真的很好。足够很难刺穿面纱并准确阅读他们是谁。如果您依赖非结构化和直观的评估，这尤其如此。

标准过程

好吧，没有真的一标准过程，但我见过的大多数是用来压缩成相当均匀的东西。您通常在这些过程中看到的面试是：

• Topgradingwhere they dig into your accomplishments and trajectory over the course of your career. These look for career acceleration across each role. Note that most places won’t call these topgrading, and may not even be familiar their interview is influenced by topgrading.
• **深度潜水**询问您对相关主题的经验，如建立工程品牌，招聘，构建组织等。
• 小组介绍关于相关主题的执行，对等体或团队。一个频繁的主题是你的first ninety plan.
• Group Q&A为了评估您的展示能力，以及让房间兴奋地与您合作。
• Working sessionwith would-be manager or peers on a relevant problem.
• 适合对话with critical stakeholder, including the folks you’ll manage, to learn about you and understand your approach, beliefs and style.
• 参考您提供从您的同事中了解您的信息。
• Backchannel referencesto learn about you, ensuring they don’t only hear from folks particularly positively predisposed towards you.

The majority of processes I’m aware of are some combination of those, over the course of six to twelve distinct interviews, emails, phone calls and texting threads.

我的感觉是，这种方法可以获得足够好的工作，以评估对招聘公司目前的需求的人们，但往往努力评估明年或两两个角色演变的“围绕角落”。无论如何，在我看来，普遍缺乏结构，一般都是更好地识别差距而不是力量的工作。我常常与某人相当大的成功协调面试表现，我至少是一小部分，这是由于这个过程提取了不充分的信号。

是备份的不道德吗？

除了旁边，当我用关于标准过程的人们聊天时，最具争议的地区围绕了后扫描的参考的可接受性。我一直是后备参考的长期拒绝器，并可以背诵对抗它们的所有参数。

BackChannels缺点已经在每一步中有可能阻碍它们的结构不平等的人。被称为恐吓他人是否可能被描述为粗体的那种人。威胁他人可能被描述为喧闹的东西。如果您与不与单独的回报率密切合作的人聊天，它们也可能比八卦更少。他们可以以一种创造相当多的过度悲伤的方式公开候选人的求职。此外，它们代表了对您评估人士的能力的不信任 - 不应该更多地信任您的过程吗？

我听到所有这些批评backchannel, and I agree with it: backchannels introduce considerable bias along with all the other issues.

However, I still think they’re necessary when hiring for executives. Rather than skipping backchannels, I think your obligation is to do them well. Listen to feedback very carefully and knowing full-well that it’s packed with bias. Ensure you ask folks who worked with the individual closely. Let the candidate know that you’re planning to do backchannel references and try to incorporate their guidance. (That said, as a candidate I’ve always accepted that this will happen without folks letting me know. It’s just “how it works” in my experience.)

进入事物的核心，我认为背包是必不可少的，因为高管在组织中影响人们的生活巨大机会。Executive candidates are, with some exception, far more privileged than the folks they’ll soon be responsible for, and you owe it to the team to ensure that the person you’re entrusting them to hasn’t left a trail of ethical concerns behind them. Inconveniencing one relatively privileged individual to prioritize the needs of dozens or hundreds of relatively less privileged folks strikes me as totally reasonable behavior.

也就是说，我很乐意找到更好的方法来获得较少的缺点。如果人们找到了更好的方法，请将它们发送过来。

Demonstrating expertise

我们参加条纹最近的高级工程访谈刷新的方法是专注于人们demonstratingtheir skills rather than描述他们的技能。我们集思了经验丰富的经营者在花时间开启的活动，并设计了对这些活动进行了设计的面试。这种方法在某种程度上在“标准过程”演示文稿面试中，但我们想进一步走得更远。

Much of senior leadership is editing and providing advice to folks on your team, so we tested an interview where folks had to give feedback on a poorly written set of team goals. Another common activity is reviewing an organizational health survey, something along the lines ofCultureamp., so we synthesized an organizational health dataset and asked them to analyze it, identify themes and propose how they’d address each of those themes.

我们还保留了几个角色扮演的访谈，这长期以来一直是Stripe的经理访谈中的一个主干。这些角色扮演剧烈关注剩下的同时，同时发出明确的直接反馈。

I found this approach gave a very clear sense of how directly and seriously leaders had engaged with these specific areas that we considered integral to successful senior leadership. They’re particularly good at extracting depth (relative to asking folks to describe a time they did something along those lines) and they get signal even if the candidate is an unstructured communicator (while still capturing the signal that they are an unstructured communicator).

This demonstration of expertise approach is certainly notthe onlysort of interview you should do, but personally I think it works quite well and I hope to shift more of my future interviews that direction.

What else?

It feels like there must be better techniques out there, so我问，并有一些有趣的观点：

• Yvette Pasqua建议的更多主题for demonstrating expertise like translating business strategy into technology strategy, navigating your P&L statement, mediating complex conflict
• Rushabh Doshi.分享他的帖子招聘工程领袖, which links to Martin Casado’sHire a VP of Engineering, and in particular pushes back on backchannel references
• TechTello建议评估the role a year out (not the role today), and digging into their willingness to take unpopular opinions, something negative they’ve learned about your company and how they’d try to change it, dig into your company values, design a layoff, and their questions around the company and role
• 保罗罗宾逊引用了他写的一篇文章The Problems of the CTO Role, which includes a short section on hiring focused on understanding what sort of CTO/VPE you wish to hire

我相信还有其他好方法也有。

Recommendation

我一起拉动所有这一切，我的面试高级候选人的一般性建议是确定他们需要执行的任务，设计一个循环来拥有它们证明mastery of the related skills, check for alignment on company价值, and keep doing backchannel references.