- Finding a Head of Engineering who fits your organisation like a glove is a challenge to say the least. But after recently placing 4 of these critical leadership roles, Lab17’s Head of Talent Cloë Stanbridge knows a thing or two.
Talking with Cloë, we learned more about her experience – and the lessons she’s learnt throughout the hiring process.
- Which clients did you place these roles for?
- – Athena Home Loans: These disruptors in the finance industry empower Aussies with shortcuts to financial freedom.
- – Lyka: Australia’s freshed dog food, delivered.
- – Easy Agile: The world’s most loved agile apps for Jira.
- – SimConverse: Ai medical simulation platform.
- Athena Home Loans and Lyka were replacement roles and Easy Agile and SimConverse were hiring their first Head of Engineering.
- What were your biggest takeaways from these hires?
- Engineering leaders come in different shapes and sizes.
- These three companies varied in size from 250-150 people and candidates would be leading teams of 7-30.
- Importantly, these businesses are GROWING. So we needed to ensure these were hires who could scale their teams beyond those numbers.
- This could have been:
- – A CTO at a 150 person company
- – A Head of Engineering at a 200 person company
- – Or even a Director of Engineering at a 300 person company.
- Responsibilities also varied from company to company. An engineering leader in consulting plays a very different role in a B2B SaaS company versus a fintech. It was important to establish the make-up needed for these roles early on.
- If you could speak to the Cloë of 2 years ago, what hiring advice would you give her?
- Go in with a plan:
- The time you spend up front deep-diving into what the hiring manager is looking for will pay off later. Big time.
- Play back their requirements or create a persona to ensure you’re all on the same page.
- Build out a 3-phase plan over a course of 6-12+ weeks for sourcing. This involves exhausting the pipeline for the ideal candidate.
- Create a market map and agree on the candidates that you or the hiring manager will approach. Once this is exhausted, recalibrate with the hiring manager to open the pool, then do another targeted search and so on.
- This keeps both you and them accountable for making the hire.
- Build an interview process:
- This might sound simple but it’s something a lot of companies miss.
- Neglecting this creates uncertainty across the interview process, makes for a bad candidate experience, and wastes a lot of time.
- Here’s what you want to do:
- – Use the job description to pinpoint the key skills and behaviours you’re looking for.
- – Design an interview process to assess them
- – Get folks in your business who are really good at that to do the interview
- – Coach them on writing objective feedback.
- Bring the hiring team together
- Once you have the Job Description and interview process built out, it’s time to bring the interview panel together.
- It’s essential everyone knows the key competencies being assessed and who is responsible for what.
- Reconnect at the end of the process to debrief on any yellow or red flags. This lets the hiring manager know the candidate’s growth areas to work on together if they hire them.
- What are the common challenges of finding a Head of Engineering? And how did you overcome them?
- 1. Finding candidates at the right stage in their career and willing to make the leap
- The companies we partner with at the Lab17 are in a growth phase. This means their business is growing faster than their people can develop in their careers.
- It’s wise to bring leaders on board who have already been through growth, made mistakes and learnt from them. The challenge here is that these folks tend to be high performers and are looking for the next step in their career. Finding someone at the right level who isn’t chasing a bigger title and is excited about this role is hard.
- To manage this, I invested time with candidates to really unpack this with them. Then, when I found strong prospects, I continually checked in with them throughout the process to ensure they were still aligned.
- 2. Learning what the company is really looking for during the interview process
- It would be nice to always be 100% crystal clear on what the company is after before we go to market. But in reality we sometimes learn through interviewing candidates and assessing the market.
- At times this meant interviewing 10-15 candidates with none of them progressing to hire. In one company we called a retro to reflect on what was going well and… well… not so well. That’s when we pinpointed what we really needed and what were ‘nice to haves’ – then put a new plan in place.
- Finding gender diverse candidates
- A quick Linkedin search showed that diversity stats for Head of Engineering were terrifying.
- We needed to demonstrate to potential candidates that diversity was important to us. We built collateral that candidates could read in their own time and provided plenty of opportunities to show this throughout the interview.
- When each partner has a different approach to who they wanted and why, what’s your advice for the prototyping of a Head of Engineering role?
- It’s wise to spend the time up front to build a persona. Stuff like:
- – Years of leadership experience
- – How technical they need to be
- – Whether they need strong experience in a certain domain.
- Check the persona with the hiring manager before you get started to ensure you’re focusing on the right profiles.
- Any stand out moments from these hiring journeys?
- The 4 journeys were all very different. With one company we made the hire in less than 3 weeks, while another took 6 months!
- In one case, there was a long process after we already had a candidate at offer. A lot of emotional energy went in from everyone involved. So when the offer was rejected (for personal reasons) it was really tough. The candidate was really strong but we had to go back to the drawing board.
- I think we cried happy tears when we received that signed contract! The hiring team had been on a big learning journey together and everyone was over the moon.