How does hiring change as the business scales?
- In some regards, it's not different at all, and I'll come to that in a second. In other regards, it's vastly different. The machinery that goes into hiring at scale once you achieve critical mass, when you're at 15 people, and you're hiring single-digit people to add to the team, that's something the team can do. When you're at 150 people trying to scale to 300 and you need double the size of the company, at some point you're going to need to have dedicated recruiters. When you're at 300, and you're growing to 3,000, you're going to need sourcers, and then you're going to need people to support them. You're going to need recruiters and schedulers and the apparatus, the machinery behind recruiting at scale is quite substantial.
In that regard that changes. That's very logical. What shouldn't change, but unfortunately does is once you recognize who you are as an organization, your culture, your values, the more you can hire against your culture and values and not compromise, I think the more likely you are to be successful. Where a lot of hyper-growth companies go off the rails is they need to grow from 150 to 300 to keep pace with the competition, to develop that next breakthrough innovation, to hire sales people to fulfill demand, to hire people in G&A functions to be able to support the rest of the organization, and without putting butts in the seats, there may be a fear that it's going to limit the growth of the organization.
What happens inevitably is whereas you set the bar very clearly and explicitly in terms of where you want to hire, who you want to hire, the quality of people, the cultural fit, you start to compromise. For example, you'll see someone. They'll come in and on paper, LinkedIn profile for example, they have great skills, but for whatever reason during the interview process, you got the sense they're not going to be a cultural fit. Where an organization's headed for trouble is when you sit around with your hiring team, your hiring committee, whatever decision making process you have for recruiting, and someone says, "Look at the skills of this person." We interview them.
They're not a cultural fit, but we'll make it work. We'll coach them. There'll be a process of osmosis here. They'll just figure out how we do things. I've talked to folks who have hired in that situation, and they'll tell you that inevitably it did not work out. It actually created a bunch of problems. Where an organization's in a position where it can scale effectively is the next time that conversation is had, it's "Look at the skills of this person. "They're not a cultural fit.
"Let's move on to the next candidate," and when your team is having that conversation without you needing to be in the room, that's when you're onto something, and that's when you can truly scale.
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/jeff-weiner-on-establishing-a-culture-and-a-plan-for-scaling/how-does-hiring-change-as-the-business-scales
