Strong product managers and engineers are critical for business success. As a result, hiring product and engineering talent is one of the most common agendas in the funding news of most companies. In today’s bullish market, funding is fortunately not the most pressing issue for several high-potential companies. Nevertheless, the hiring process of technology talent has become a complex endeavor due to the stiff competition for the best candidates. After screening hundreds of applicants via resumes, identifying the top candidates, and conducting the first of five interviews before finally hiring, the process involves sifting through hundreds (if not thousands) of candidates.
When it comes to hiring, it is valuable to invest time in exploring suitable candidates, but it is highly inefficient to interview the wrong ones. What are some of the challenges you should prepare for if you’re about to jump onto a hockey-stick curve? We considered asking this question to Praveen Nair. He heads talent for Meesho and joined the likes of Flipkart and Ola when they were still upcoming startups in the Indian ecosystem and stuck with them until they became one of the country’s most successful unicorns.
Mudit Srivastava, Host:
From one perspective, if you looked at it last year, India Inc saw some 50 plus companies becoming a unicorn, and many are in the pipeline of becoming one. What’s one thing that changes with the processes? As someone who hasn’t built a unicorn yet from scratch but having worked with a few of them, I feel that the velocity of hiring changes very quickly during that phase. Even you mentioned the number of people at Meesho quadrupled in a brief period. Now, for someone in that phase, where they’re catching on that curve, there is access to a lot of capital there is an obligation to hire very quickly. How does someone prepare for what’s coming ahead of in terms of tech hiring at their organizations?
Praveen Nair, Guest Speaker, Meesho:
We run this exercise every quarter, where we are sizing up – what are the opportunities for the coming quarter, and now that we have reached some stable state, we actually plan for four quarters together and maybe then revisit that every quarter where the most critical aspect is to figure out what sort of a team strength you have.
What kind of capabilities have you built internally and externally. You may want to use the right partners to augment certain parts of the capability, as I said earlier. So capability sizing is one of the most critical parts of scaling up rapidly.
The number two aspect is also to be mindful of how you can sustain the scale-up. So what sort of tools that you’ve used? What kind of backend processes that you’ve been able to develop? And how do you make sure that those are giving you enough insights and data to sustain?
Today, recruiting is not just sourcing resumes, facilitating interviews, and closing selection conversations, but it is also planning. Within the recruiting team, there are think tanks, which work with you to identify specific areas of projects where you need to build better efficiency, you relook at, or you sidestep and look at what sort of sourcing channels is working well with you. Is your employee referral program giving you enough bandwidth and is giving you enough leeway in terms of finding good people there? Is your internal sourcing capability improving, you know, is your vendor dependency decreasing so that there are some cost savings there?
So, coupled with all the three, three things that I talked about, one is to build the capability of the team, to figure out the right partnerships to have a think tank, which will allow you to plan and measure on a quarter to quarter basis can be the only way for you to scale up in good time.
Liked the conversation?
This chat was taken from a recent episode of Hiring Diaries with Praveen from Meesho. You can view the entire episode on-demand as it covers several other topics, including:
- The best practices for optimizing hiring funnels at scale.
- Culture-first tech hiring in a time of skewed supply-demand.
- Surging recruitment with the right technology stack
- Forging the right partnerships at high velocities
- Preparing for hiring sprees at growth-stage startups
- And more.
To view it now, visit here – https://skllspace.ai/hiring-diaries-203/.
More about Skillspace.ai and Hiring Diaries
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We have created Hiring Diaries to support the engineering and talent acquisition communities that have entrusted us so far. Hiring Diaries is now a series of live discussions with the top 1% of talent and technology leaders who share our passion for giving first. It covers a variety of topics regarding scaling technology teams and hiring the best talent. You are welcome to attend any of our upcoming events.
Visit https://skillspace.ai/hiring-diaries/ for more information.
