Your most important role
Concepts discussed in this book sound like they might work well at a tiny start-up. The big question is: Does all this stuff scale as we grow from 3 to 25 and beyond?
Well, so far, yes. And we believe that if we are careful, it will work better and better the larger we get. This might seem counterintuitive, but it is a direct consequence of hiring great, accomplished, capable people. Getting this to work right is a tricky proposition, though, and depends highly on our continued vigilance in recruiting/hiring. If we start adding people to the company who aren't as capable as we are at operating as high-powered, self-directed decision-makers, then lots of the stuff discussed in this book will stop working.
Since April 2017, we have grown from 3 to 20+ people.
We believe a size of 40-50 people would be a reasonable target to reach in the next couple of years.
However, we do not have a growth speed goal. We intend to continue hiring the best people as fast as we can and to continue scaling up our business as quickly as we can, given our existing staff.
Fortunately, we don't have to make growth decisions based on external pressures — only our own business goals. And we are always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the hiring bar very high.
Hiring well
Hiring well is the most foundational thing in the life of a company. Nothing else comes close. When you are working on hiring — participating in an interview loop or innovating in the general area of recruiting — consider the importance of your role and rise to the level accordingly.
When you are new to Agilytic, it is super valuable to start getting involved in the interview process. Ride shotgun with people who've been doing it for a long time. In some ways, our interview process is like those of other companies, but we have our twist on the process that requires practice to learn. We won't go into all the nuts and bolts in this book — ask others for details, check out the interview frameworks, and start participating in various selection stages.
Why is hiring well so crucial at Agilytic?
At Agilytic, most of what we do is client-facing, so adding individuals to the organization can influence our success far more than it does at other companies — either in a positive or negative direction. Since there is no organizational compartmentalization of people here, adding a great person can create value across the company. Missing out on hiring that great person is the most expensive kind of mistake we can make.
Usually, it is immediately apparent whether we have done an excellent job hiring someone. Occasionally, it can take a while to understand whether a new person is fitting in. A "casting error" is one downside of the company's design — a poor hiring decision can cause lots of damage and sometimes go unchecked for too long. People who cause damage always get weeded out, but the harm they do can still be significant.
How do we choose the right people to hire?
We are continually learning important things about hiring people. Here are some questions we always ask ourselves when evaluating candidates:
- How comfortable am I in letting this person work alone with the client?
- Does this person handle feedback well, towards action instead of seeking excuses or shifting blame?
- Am I confident in this person being able to get quickly up to speed with our way of working?
- Would I want this person to be my boss?
- Would I learn a significant amount from them?
- Or, one of our favorite questions: What if this person went to work for our competition? How disappointed would I be if the candidate chose not to work with us?
Across the board, we value highly collaborative people. That means people who are skilled in all the things integral to high-bandwidth collaboration — people who can deconstruct problems on the fly and talk to others as they do so, simultaneously being inventive, iterative, creative, talkative, and reactive. These things matter far more than in-depth domain-specific knowledge or highly developed skills in narrow areas. Therefore, we will often pass on candidates who, narrowly defined, are the "best" at their chosen discipline.
We value attitude.
That is, the way people think and act under given circumstances. Namely:
- Attitude towards feedback = maturity
- Attitude towards challenges = perseverance
- Attitude towards imperfect situations = pragmatism
- Attitude towards what the person doesn't know (yet) = curiosity
These personality traits are critical for success at Agilytic, and we test for them during our selection process, explicitly and tacitly. For example, through the case studies process, we must pass on people who are very strong technically but display a worrying lack of patience in taking a step back to consider the case's broader objective.
We are looking for people stronger than ourselves.
When unchecked, people tend to hire others who are lower-powered than themselves. We came up with the questions above to ensure that we don't start hiring people who are useful but not as powerful as we are. We should hire people more capable than ourselves, not less.
In some ways, hiring lower-powered people is a natural response to having so much work to get done. In these conditions, hiring someone who is at least capable seems (in the short term) to be smarter than not hiring anyone at all. But that is a huge mistake. We can always bring on interns or temporary/contract help to get us through tough spots, but we should never lower the hiring bar. The other reason people start to hire "downhill" is a political one. At most organizations, it is beneficial to have an army of people doing your bidding. At Agilytic, though, it is not. You'd damage the company and saddle yourself with a broken organization.
Hiring is fundamentally the same across all disciplines. There are no sets of rules or criteria for data scientists, commercial profiles, and support staff. Some details are different — like, creative roles show us some of their work before coming in for an interview. But the actual interview process is fundamentally the same no matter the position.
"With the bar this high, would I be hired today?"
That is a good question. The answer might be no, but that is awesome for us, and we should all celebrate if it is true because it means we are growing correctly. If you continue to bring value and have fun, it is a moot point.
On firing
Why do we fire people?
In the past, we had to let people go. Ask those of us who had to decide and announce it, and you will see that it doesn't get easier over time.
Firing is, by essence, a failure. It means that we — as an organization — could not fit a collaborator with the role & responsibilities we had envisioned for him/her.
The "book" you are reading right now results from one of these failures when we felt we could have been more explicit about what working for Agilytic means.
As much as we'd love to promise you it won't happen again, we are not that naïve. The best we can do is give you a transparent explanation and then work hard together to ensure such situations will be few and far between.
Was that so bad that you had to do this?
Yes. But it doesn't mean someone had bad intentions.
We hire for potential. When we feel we will not get to where we agreed to go, we must make a hard decision. Below is a very simplified succession of steps we take with an employee who is having trouble reaching his/her goals before reaching a final decision:
- Do we see the same issues? It is not always that problems are apparent to everyone. We try to use facts instead of qualitative/emotional criteria to ensure nothing taints the discussion other than the issues' root causes.
- Formalize feedback and decide the next steps: we try to set tangible goals to reach everyone's desired situation. It could be a clarification on the project, training, or anything else that has the potential to solve the issue at hand.
- Follow up on agreed upon feedback: hopefully, we fix the issues thanks to the steps laid out in step 2. If we feel that these steps won't make it work (because of competencies, attitude), we have to part ways.
What can we do about it?
Letting someone go is painful for everyone, not to mention very costly. So, we try to avoid arriving at that extreme at various levels
At the source: hire better
- Job description: drafting a clear job description eliminates many potential misconceptions about a role.
- Recruitment process: from CV to the offer: our responsibility is to exchange, test, and perform reference checks to ensure the candidate will be happy and do great work with us.
At work: clarify mutual expectations
- Communicate more clearly about what it is like to work at Agilytic and what the expectations are of everyone: you are reading this, so it is a start
- Feedback: provide constructive and actionable feedback ASAP and track progress regularly
- Upwards feedback: solicit feedback regularly, in written form (e.g., Weekly Check-ins) and face-to-face, formally or informally. Start at the top: our door is always open. We are learning with you and eager to hear your feedback on how we could do things better.
Bring your friends
Make no mistake; all of this is hard. Mainly because, from day one, it requires a commitment to hiring in a very different way from the way most companies hire. It also requires the discipline to make the company's design more important than any short-term business goal. And it requires a great deal of freedom from outside pressure — being self-funded is key.
One of the most valuable things you can do as a new employee is to tell us who else you think we should hire. If you agree with us that Agilytic is the best place to work on Earth, then tell us about who the best people on Earth are to bring them here. If you don't agree yet, wait six months and ask yourself this question again.
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