Considerations Before Hiring

Being given the opportunity to hire and grow a team is generally thought of as a positive. Larger teams tend to look good for internal promotions, hiring experience is favorable on resumes, and more people generate bigger results. But before you engage in empire building, consider what’s best for the business

Consider: Baseline & Plan

Before engaging in hiring using the same job description and assessment profile as last year, take a moment to strategize your plan of action. Establish a baseline of what skills and behaviors that exist in your team today. Then look 6-12mo out if anything needs adjusting, and then again beyond the horizon to next year. Don’t wait until Q4, assess and re-evaluate each quarter. Engagement with sales, product, and marketing leadership should better clarify where to make investments or change. And above all, maintain a solid pipeline of qualified candidates regardless of headcount, acutely aware of the Rule of Three: Someone will be promoted, someone will quit, and someone with surprise you (quit or migrate internally).

Skills

Immediate

What missing skills are currently needed to support the business?

What additional or advanced skills can improve or accelerate business goals?

What is the skill and experience level cross-section of the team today?

6-12 months out

What products or acquisitions are rolling out in the next 3 quarters? What skills will we need to support it?

What knowledge is needed to maintain market dominance?

What positions or structures will we need to support a growing business?

1 year out

What wild idea could the business invest in exploring? And how will we attain market dominance or disruption when it does?

What are you seeing that is gaining momentum in the market that may not yet be mainstream?

If growth continues, what is the tipping point to create change?

Behavior

Immediate

If you woke up tomorrow and your team was behaving perfectly, how would you know something changed?

What is missing in your team or business that is described in your job description or About Us on the website?

6-12 months out

How is the business evolving and what new behavior will we prefer?

Do we have the proper diversity for experience, ideas, and culture?

Can behaviors that no longer serve the business be changed?

1 year out

What will the business become and what will be the expected behaviors at this maturity?

How is the market evolving and how will that change your approach (e.g. work from anywhere, millennium buyers, freemium software)?

Consider: Prioritization

Being busy is a not a reason to hire. Being busy is a result of not prioritizing work or activities that provides meaningful value. I’ve gone through this exercise with some top performers who simply can’t get their head above water and are drowning in activity. It’s not your job to manage their calendars, we are all adults afterall, but it is your authority that allows them to act on necessary changes.

Ask your direct reports to reflect on their existing workload and activity list. Have them list everything they do in a week and estimate how much time is allocated for each task. Then have them order their activities based on value and priority to the business, in descending order. Ask them for recommendations on things they could afford to not get done. Finally, review their assessment and recommendations with you making the final decision so they don’t feel as much risk about the analysis. It also gives them protection when their absence from menial activities is noted.

Source: “The Effective Hiring Manager” by Mark Horstman. 2020.

Consider: Efficiency

Similar to prioritization, but an ongoing mentality is to be mindful of things and produce hypotheses on how things could be automated, simplified, made repeatable, made to scale, and more. Here is a mental model of how I approach this:

Regarding Micromanagement

What is core to get the job done? → What is distracting from core responsibilities?
What does leadership need to track?
Do they really need to track it? (because typically their team spends time reporting it)
Can they get it a different, low-calorie way?
Do they really need it?

Regarding Automation and Scale

Are there repetitive activities that consume excessive time?
What parts are repetitive and which require actual thought? —> How can we automate the mundane?
What opportunities does automation unlock?
What productivity does the time savings provide?

How can we scale this or simplify the objectives?
What is the broader implication or value we can achieve?
Who else could benefit from this? How can we monetize this?
Can we tie this into bigger initiatives for additional resourcing?

Start/Stop/Change/Delegate

What can we start doing that will save time across the board?
- Templates, Presentations, Runbooks and Playbooks, Success and Failure debriefs, Win Library

What should we stop doing?
- Timecards, managing post-sales engagements, tracking escalation tickets

What should we change to make life easier or better?
- People.ai SFDC activity tracking integration, automating PoVs, simplified licensing/bundles

What can we delegate (often to another org or person)?
- Marketing Whitepapers, Post-Sales Deployment Guides/Sizing, Marketing Event Management

Consider: Reorganize

Sometimes accounting ratios throw a wrench in hiring plans that may not be as troublesome as they first appear. Take for example a common scenario regarding AM:SE ratios, which follows that for every, say, 4 account managers there should be 3 sales engineers to support them. So if sales begins to over hire in a region then the sales engineering leader needs to follow suit. Not so fast! In the following example, not uncommon to larger orgs, personnel changes disrupted this ratio and territory lines caused frustrations.

Sales Regions in 2018 (left) and 2020 (right) with counts for Account Managers and Sales Engineers. SEs were pooled in each region but generally had a primary AM (or two) to support. SE headcount lagged in the Mountain and Desert regions, following a sales hiring spree. The impact was immediate:

- New AMs observed early call conversion in both regions were low, citing so few available SEs to support them
- Lead conversion time was long because SEs had significant travel times to cover multiple states in their patch
- Sales leadership was calling to immediately hire two SEs in Desert and at least one more in Mountain, without available budget

Observations

SoCal had some AM attrition in 2019 and became flush with roughly 4 SEs to every 3 AMs. Mountain was struggling to support the business of 5 AMs with increasing activity in Boise when their two SEs had to travel from Boulder and Salt Lake City. Desert had an SE in Albuquerque but was desperate for local presence in Las Vegas.

Actions

+ Since Las Vegas comprised all Desert sales activity, we joined Nevada and Arizona with the SoCal region, just an hour flight away.
+ We retained our SE in Albuquerque, now merged into Mountain region, who could more easily support increasing activity in Salt Lake City and Boulder.
+ To cover the growing demand out of Boise, we negotiated that one of the two PNW SEs out of Eugene, OR would temporarily cover, with plans to hire in Idaho or Salt Lake City if Boise closed enough business.

(Bear in mind that Sales needs to make territory adjustments)