<aside> 💯 Finding new people to join Human can be a high effort thing to do but it has a huge impact throughout the organisation

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Planning for a new hire

Planning the number, type and experience level of new hires you need in the future can be hard but getting started as early as possible is crucial. Hiring people can generally take between 1-3 months, so looking ahead is important for making your projects succeed. Without the right people we can't build great things for our clients.

Planning ahead

1. Determine what work needs to be done, looking 6-12 months ahead, and decide if we have enough resources to do so.

   Our basic premise is that we work with the team we have and we hire reactively. But ask yourself a few questions.

   • Do you have the right number and type of people?
   • What kind of skills, expertise, experience do you need in what amount?
   • What can we fix internally?
   • What can we teach the people who are at Human?
   • What can we just try with advice from outside?
   • How long is the project
   • Do we need this role temporarily or permanently?
   • How is the current workload?
   • Can we afford to delay this hire?

2. Keep teams small. More then 4-6 people in a project creates more overhead (mainly communication like e-mail/slack and interactions in general) and doesn't necessarily mean that the team performs better.

   Jeff Bezos calls it the 2 pizza rule and Ringelmann discovered 'social loafing' in 1914. People unintentionally slack when the group gets too big.

   Read more about this here:

   The psychological theory that explains why you're better off working solo

   What is the optimal group size for decision-making? - Sheila Margolis

3. Keep budget in mind. You should focus on getting the best team for the work you need done, but budget and project costings do play a role in this. People are our most important and most expensive resource. Hiring, therefore, is an expensive solution to a problem.

4. Plan. Discuss this step with your lead and HR.

   To be able to plan you need to consider these variables:

   • Team
   • Role
   • Profile and role description
   • Priority
   • Scarceness (1-5)
   • Years of relevant experience
   • Salary range
   • Planning.

Defining the role

<aside> 🧐 Unsure? Feel free to Ask for help from recruitment/HR with this. They can help you out.

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Ok so you've decided you need to hire someone. The next step is to define what you are, and are not, looking for in a potential candidate. This step us super important and should not be rushed or we may hire the wrong person for the wrong roles, in the wrong projects.

Some questions to get you started

• What team will the new person be joining? What is the goal of that team and how does that new person's job fit in there?
• What problems are we aiming to solve by hiring this person? What would it look like when the problem is solved?
• What impact do we expect this person to make in his/her - let's say - first 6 months?
• What does good performance and success look like for this person? What do you expect from him/her?
• What challenges or downsides does this role have?