Hiring the wrong person is worse than not hiring someone.

The team needs to onboard the person and it needs to stabilize to a new norm with the new configuration. This all takes time away from writing code.

Then if you hired someone who doesn't fit the team, you have to start the search again, the hiring process and the onboarding and normalizing starts again.

So how do you ensure a good fit?

Firstly, what is a good fit?

I like to think a good fit is someone adds to the team in terms of raw mental horsepower, experience, a different perspective and enough friction to keep the team creative.

There is a lot written on team fit and tools you can use like Strengthfinder. Some teams use the discredited but still fun MBTI (Myers-Brigg) and some use 'gut feel'

In the 25+ years I've worked in software, I've designed and tweaked the recruitment process at every company I've worked at or advised.

This is the current instantiation of the fit part of the recruiting process:

1. 20mins intro call. As a CTO your main job is to find talent. Do these calls, explain the recruiting process, pitch the company and get buy-in from the candidate that they want to go through the recruiting process.

2. HR interview. Ensure HR is going through the company values and using scenario based interviewing to check for fit with the candidate. Be sharp with the questions - its better if the candidate self-selects out due to a lack of company values fit.

3. Technical interview. 2 engineers on your team pair program with the candidate to get a sense for what it would be like to work with them

4. Product Owner interview. The candidate will work closely with the product owner. Its important the PO has a say in the engineers.

5. Designer interview for frontend or full stack engineers. For frontend or full stack engineers, they will work closely with designers so make sure they have a say on engineers as well.

6. Final interview. This should be with you as the CTO. I will write another post on what I tend to ask here. But the overall outcome is that you should get a sense for what the person wants to learn, their goal for the next year or 2 and what lights them up and motivates them intrinsically.

By going through this process, the candidate gets to meet at least 5 people in the team, including you as the CTO.

Anyone doing the interviews can veto a candidate. Its best not to waste the candidate's time by making them do the rest of the interviews. Give the candidate feedback - explain what they did well and give some honest feedback on what wasn't a good fit.

Is this process something you could implement in your team tomorrow? What else would add/subtract - let me know in the comments!