How to scale hiring

I wrote down my hiring playbook and it turned out to become a book. I decided to split it in the following 3 chapters:

• The Talent Machine: A predictable recruiting playbook for technical roles.

• Building the pipeline: A sales-driven process for hiring.

• How to scale hiring: Hire hundreds of engineers without dying

I've explained the whole hiring process pipeline thoroughly, but I left out one of its most important aspects: how to scale it. The good news is that hiring is a massively parallelizable process, and it only gets better as you grow.

At the beginning, you are going to do everything yourself. Do not rely on recruiters. You need to build muscle, learn how to interview, make offers, convince and charm. If you don't learn this, you won't be able to scale it.

As I showed in the example above, I highly recommend following the pipeline in strict order. With the ballpark numbers above, this is how your time should be spent:

• One week sourcing: ~14 hours for 50 candidates

• One week qualifying: ~7 hours for 7 candidates

• One week interviewing: ~14 hours for 5 candidates

This means that for each engineer you hire, you will spend around ~35 hours on the process. If an engineer costs you $100k, a recruiter will charge you at least $15k. Not worth it unless your salary is higher than $428 an hour. And even if it is (congratulations!), I would still recommend doing it yourself.

It's your hiring process, your product, and your brand. Don't let others handle it for you. At least not yet.

The story starts changing once your org chart grows. Something magical and terrifying happens: you add managers. And the math of managers is easy to understand if you know how to calculate tree depth.

M = (E - 1) / R

Where:

• E is the total number of engineers

• M is the number of managers

• R is the number of engineers per manager

Whether you round, ceil or floor will depend on how you want to stretch that ratio of engineers per manager.

From this, you will see exactly where your current organization starts to break.

Let's assume R = 8:

• 10 engineers: 1 manager (you)

• 13 engineers: 2 managers (hire your first manager)

• 21 engineers: 3 managers

• ...

• 61 engineers: 8 managers

• 69 engineers: 9 managers (nice, hire your first director)

Each one of these managers will be responsible for hiring 1 to 3 engineers a quarter. These are not crazy numbers, they are perfectly doable, and what they do for you is magical:

• Your recruiting capacity increases exponentially as the team grows.

• Some managers have a tendency to create too many meetings. This is especially true if you believe that managers shouldn't code (I disagree, but that's a topic for a different article). Having them own their own hiring plan is a good way to keep them busy and generate fewer meetings.

Managers will now feel ownership over the whole employee lifecycle: hire, promote and fire.

Standardization

Once you have managers hiring, you’ll start to notice that they don’t hire exactly like you. And depending on your ego, it might even cross your mind that they are hiring worse than you do. That’s normal. After all, you used to have complete control, and now you don’t.

My advice is to always shadow the first 3 or 4 interviews with new managers. Try not to lead those interviews; just listen and participate occasionally. Your goal is to understand how that person interviews and give feedback afterwards.

Once you start noticing patterns, document them in an internal guide. Review this document with each new manager and update it constantly. What’s most important is agreeing on what each position looks like. Luckily, you already documented the rubrics in your Employee Handbook. You just need to prepare questions and ways to uncover what you need to uncover.

Most advice pushes for “structured interviews.” The idea is to have predefined questions and answers for every interview, so it doesn’t matter who is interviewing whom. While useful, I’m also a believer in leaving a bit of slack in an organization. Standardization matters, but I wouldn’t sacrifice a good conversational interview for it.

Recruiters

I would add a recruiter only if:

• The rate of growth your company requires managers to recruit more than 2 engineers a quarter.

• Your managers are also shipping and you feel their capacity needs to be protected.

If you bring a recruiter on board, they are best used for pipeline generation. You share the hiring plan with them, and they allocate pipeline accordingly.

Coda

That’s it. With this 3 articles I’ve described my hiring playbook. It worked for me during the ZIRP years of 2016–2023, in Spain. These were the years of Covid-19 lockdowns, junior developers getting six-figure jobs in crypto, and the Barcelona startup scene blooming like a spring that never ends.

Your situation might be completely different, so my advice is to pick and reject the bits that make sense for you. And once you succeed, please share it with the world.