I’ve written often about how to build and maintain a healthy team culture. The context for all of that is the team you have. Sometimes you need to recruit and hire a team. The reasons for that are various. Perhaps your organization is going through a growth spurt. Perhaps your organization is going in a new direction and you need a new mix of skills. Besides the routine one-at-a-time hiring that we all do as a normal course of business, I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of hiring twice in my career. Once, nine years ago shortly after I joined RCIS/Wells Fargo, and another time, nearly two years ago, when I joined CHS.

Before you start creating positions, you need to think long and hard about the organizational design that will help you achieve your goals. While you never truly have a blank slate, this sort of circumstance is as close as you can get. Your organization is more malleable before the new team is in-place than after. You can feel pressure to rush through this. Especially considering the “opportunity” to hire a team is most likely leaving you woefully understaffed and overwhelmed in every waking moment. You probably feel like you just need some bodies to throw work at. Even such, resist the urge and think carefully through this before you begin, gathering plenty of outside and inside input as needed.

Now you are ready to start hiring, here are the options to think through:

Hire People from The Market

This is probably the most obvious course of action, but as we will discuss later, it’s not the only one. When looking for talent, it’s great to put the call out to the market and see what kind of candidates you can drum-up. There are a lot of challenges with this approach. First of all, in the Twin Cities, we have a zero unemployment rate in Information Technology. So nearly everyone is already gainfully employed, and you have the task of finding them and attracting them away from their current employer. It’s much easier said than done. This job is pretty tough if you have to do it alone. If you have the option of using your HR department’s inside recruiting, or external paid recruiting, that eases the task.

Hire People You Know

As I discussed in my Rules for Advancement series, a great way to land a job, (or hire people) is through networking. It’s comfortable to hire people you know, because it feels less risky. You know what you are getting. There are still a couple of pitfalls. It’s distasteful to leave a company, get a new job, then bring all of your favorite people with you. You don’t want to burn bridges with the place you used to work. If you want your legacy to outlast you, then it doesn’t make any sense to gut the places you leave. Another pitfall for this approach is integration into the new company. You definitely want to avoid anything that looks like cronyism. If looks to those around you that you are simply hiring all of your old buddies, that does not fare well for the incumbent team members and your culture will suffer.

Promote from Within

If you are looking to fill management, leadership, or senior engineering positions, look around you to see who might be ready for a new challenge. I love promoting from within, because that’s exactly how I advanced in my career. Even though I’ve only worked for four different companies, I’ve probably had 12 different jobs over the years. I like to pay-it-forward to those who are proactively managing their careers and making themselves promotable. Plus, you get the added benefit of internal company knowledge and known performance history.

Contract-to-Hire

Staff-augmentation contractors are great. I’ve been one, and I’ve hired many. There are several advantages. First, with staff augmentation, the actual recruiting is easier because the staffing company does most of the work. Second, you can “try before you buy.” This also gives your team the overall flexibility to scale up or down as demand changes without altering your FTE base. There are some disadvantages. Some contractors don’t convert for various reasons. Some talent would never consider applying for anything other than direct hire.

The Interview – Be Picky and Patient

Now that I’ve covered the options to get candidates, the next step is screening and interviewing in all of its forms. There are a ton of different methods to apply here, and this could be a blog article of its own, but the main objective here is to add as much certainty as possible to make a high quality and mutually beneficial hiring decision. One way to get good at interviewing is to hire people you wish you hadn’t. We’ve all done it, and it’s painful. Those lessons don’t come cheap, so use them to get great at interviewing. Always involve others in the process and don’t rush to judgment. I’ve had gut-instincts fail me. There is safety in the group-effort. As a side-note, I always try to be generous and kind to the people I don’t select. I give them feedback on what they were missing, and how they could improve. Lastly, make sure you know all of the relevant laws and company policies related to hiring. HR is your friend. Use them and confer with them often.

That’s my lesson on how to recruit talent and build a team. I hope it was helpful. Have any talent recruitment lessons of your own to share? Please comment below and share this blog with your colleagues.