Opportunistic Hiring for Organic Growth
Workload in organisations is often not ideally distributed — usually, there are a few folks having permanently a huge backlog — which they both feed on their own and have it filled by others; whereas most of the others, while neither lazy nor incompetent, are rather in a passively-receptive mode, doing work as it is assigned to them or just going with the flow. Those highly-loaded rockstars form a diverse cast — some of them are individual contributors, competent programmers, analysts, QAs, general problem solvers; others are facilitators — being able to conjure up and connect the right people, delegate the right work and just make things happen; as well as decision makers — with both high responsibility and high authority or resources at their command. What they usually have in common is a combination of a drive for the important sort of achievement, acumen for recognising which those are, and expertise in the respective domain (of technical, social or business kind).
A dual problem to this is hiring — there is a list of positions opened because a new project was started, a new team was created, an important person left the organisation. And those positions need to be filled urgently, because the project has already started, the team already exists, the person already left.
The direct solution — open positions ahead in time, hire fast, and don’t overload people — is infeasible because we don’t know what positions will we need in advance, finding candidates requires time (especially if they are senior enough to take over any work from the highly-loaded individuals), and some people seem to just overload themselves anyway regardless of how much you take away from them, with those hand-overs never being really completed.
What I’d like to argue for is that the flaw is often in the hiring strategy. When I skim over career pages of various companies, I see a suite of positions of the rank-and-file kind: “backend programmer with 3 years experience”, “business analytics senior”, “product manager to join our squad”. But no unicorn positions — “we are looking for a very senior person combining technical ability in domains a, b and c, and a business understanding. Frontend developer who can set up their demo backend and train a ML model, ideally with experience in sales and marketing. Needs to have drive and be proactive, identify problems and solve them”.
Such position should not be opened with the same expectation as the rank-and-file positions. There, you expect to aggressively hunt for it, run standardised tests, and fill it in a month or so — because there are enough candidates. You open such positions only if you have a budget for it, a project plan for work; and you are berated if you fail to fill it in due time. Not so with unicorns, as every recruiter would tell you — you need to be lucky to hit the exact profile at the exact time this highly-sought-after person is looking for a job, or is at least amenable.
But that misses the point — this position is for opportunistic hiring. You open it not because of a tangible project plan, but because you believe that your existing highly-loaded individuals generate value already. You open it not because of hunting for it, but because you signal to job seekers that this kind of door is open at your place. You don’t mind if it does not get filled, since you didn’t have a concrete need.
Hiring at the senior levels often happens through professional networks — when senior person seeks a new job, they usually start by asking their friends and former colleagues, instead of plunging into the murky waters of LinkedIn #opentowork right away. Which is a fine mechanism, but if it were the only mechanism, we’d end up with a sort of inbreeding-gatekeeping mishap. Lot of the seniors do have a few dream companies they’d like to work at, or just want to jump to a new domain (e.g., from security to climate) — but don’t happen to have anyone in their network from the target. Next best thing you do then is just to skim the open positions. Rank-and-file only? Uh ok, I’ll continue through my list of 20 alternatives then. Of course, you can just say “well those seniors will email us if they are the unicorns — that’s why we have the ‘email us if you didn’t find what you were looking for’” — but that is, politely said, sub-optimal. You have an opportunity to signal in more detail what you are looking for, give it a story, introduce some preliminary classification by opening more such positions — it doesn’t guarantee a success, but improves the chance somehow.
To sum up:
1. Identify the employees you’d like to clone.
2. Write a few job descriptions for candidates that could autonomously take some load off those employees.
3. Don’t budget for it, but be ready to cut something off if you find it.
4. Instruct recruiters/interviewers to have a high bar, don’t spend budget to advertise this position.
5. Don’t treat it as a must-have-everything position — be a bit vague, leaving the decision which particular employee is this position to take load from for later, based on the profile of the unicorn you got.
This strategy follows the known pattern of “if you can’t solve something exactly and deterministically, relinquish some control, and adapt later.” Which is not something proponents of management-as-an-exact-science and budget holders prefer — so I guess that explains why it ain’t used often. But vicissitudes of fortune spare neither manager nor their perfectmost plan.
Relinquishing control can be also applied in the rank-and-file hiring — for example, when I was leading a team, I knew I needed to strengthen a certain area. But I did not care if it were through 2 seniors, 1 senior and 2 juniors, or 4 juniors — I just wanted to have some people to work with, as soon as possible. Yet I had to make a decision in advance, prior to position opening — which limited my options somehow. What if companies just advertised, “this is the area where we are hiring”, without pre-limiting seniority levels? A good team can ingest people at any level, and make them grow over time. Of course, a “good team” means that it already has some healthy balance of juniority-seniority — so there are many situations where you have exactly one right seniority profile you hire for. I just argue that it is not always the case.
This relates to another important component of organic growth in companies, that of the growth of juniors. Ideally, your hiring starts with interns and students already, and you have a career path up to the highest echelons. While I’m a big fan of working at many companies during one’s lifetime, I think it is often underestimated how potent internal hiring is. Choosing a junior from another department, which cannot currently offer growth opportunities, over a senior from outside has possible benefits of faster onboarding, social connections, in-company cultural enrichment, and existing business understanding or alignment. Depending on a situation, this may or may not be enough to trump the more-seniority and experience-from-outside advantages. So I’m again not arguing for a complete strategy change, but rather, a serious consideration of this as an alternative. Note also how this, again, requires less strict job requirements and static idealised candidate profiles, and instead being more opportunistic and adaptable. And, if your company happens to be large, you may already have some sleeper-unicorns — this paragraph applies not just to juggling with juniors. But if you never open and advertise your unicorn positions, those sleeper-unicorns would instead be awakened by another company’s recruitment, to your ultimate woe.
Disclaimer: I tried to generate some pictures for this article, like “growing unicorns on a garden”, or “young person turning to unicorn”, or “sleeper-unicorn”. Sadly, that gave it such a MyLittlePony-vibe that my masculine ego would have absconded right upon publication — so no pictures again, due to my poor prompt engineering.
