Part 4: The Hiring Process

As a smaller company, each individual comes at a high price and can influence our success significantly. The hiring of talented individuals is crucial to how successful we can possibly be. Because of this, we are always looking for people stronger and more knowledgeable than ourselves, because these are the individuals that will help us move forward and grow our skill set and expertise.

When the workload is high, it might be tempting to hire less skilled people to fill out the gaps. It may be intimidating to hire someone better than you. But as you might have experienced, one good developer can be more efficient than 10 bad ones.

Lowering the bar for hiring will result in less skilled people working with us all. Keeping the bar high is essential to preserving our culture, values, and productivity.

We look for "T-shaped" people

That is people who have a broad experience within multiple disciplines (the top of the T) and experts within a particular discipline (the trunk).

We often have to pass on people with a purely multidisciplinary skill set, if we are not sure their skill set will raise the bar for the whole team, even if they do add to the amount of work that gets done.

Likewise, experts in one field are not flexible enough to handle the large variety of projects we belong to.

We don't look for robots

We do not value individuals with a large number of certificates or large amounts of formal training. We value people who are creative and can add a unique set of values to the team.