Adding a new Q3 goal for Joe #12112
Adding a new Q3 goal for Joe #12112
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it kind of feels unhealthy to me that you and @andyvan-ph it sounds like have to focus this hard on this and we can't support you better. ie i don't see eng team leads doing this when they're all hiring. we are going to keep scaling and it feels wrong to have people in roles that are doing stuff having to focus so strongly here- ie everything goes well when people are shipping, when they're doing Other Things everything will start to feel worse. any idea why is this so much more work for you than other parts of the business? can the people team support you more? we are scaling them a lot and they have this type of thing as a goal. |
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Well, I'm not meaning to knock the People team because they're great. But I think marketing hires work a little different. Marketing roles are unique. We don't need to write a new spec, have a conversation, design a superday, etc, every time we hire a new engineer -- and one engineer can often slot into many teams. But for new marketing roles each one is one-off (e.g. community manager, partner manager, events marketer, illustrator, production designer). Marketing roles are unicorn-hunts. Every role in marketing tends to be much rarer. It's harder to find a developer who is a good writer, for example, than just finding a developer. This means Andy and I end up with longer, more complicated pipelines -- often with much more subjectivity. That's why he and I screen all applications, unlike engineering team leads. Marketing roles don't have the same structure. My understanding is that hiring in engineering is split across a lot of people and there's a rota for people doing interviews and superdays. We don't have that, nor the manpower to do it. Instead, Andy and I do every technical interview and every superday. Andy also joins all my peer reviews, and often vice versa. I think it'll naturally speed up as we make more hires. I saw this with Support, for example, where it was really hard to find @abigailbramble and has sped up a lot since - we just haven't hit the tipping point yet. |
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Off the top of my head, one possible solution would be to hire a talent partner with specific experience recruiting non-technical roles, though I don't if that would make a huge amount of difference. But, just to add some additional colour and a specific example, with the video post-production role we had to figure out:
Anyhoo, TL;DR this was all new stuff we had to figure out just to hire one person, so it just sucks up more energy and time. |
Hiring is taking up an incredible amount of my time — and rightly so. We’re hiring four people for the PMM role alone over the next two quarters, plus an illustrator (which @lottiecoxon will lead on, but I’ll support), then a social media manager/CM, and a partnerships manager.
Some weeks I’m already spending 8+ hours just in interviews for the PMM role — we’ve reviewed over 420 applications so far, all of which I’ve personally screened.
This isn’t a complaint — just an observation that, looking ahead, hiring is probably the highest-impact thing I can spend time on. Getting the right people in will help us move far faster than if I try to fill the gaps alone.
So I’m proposing we tweak my Q3 goals: I’ll have two goals, with Hiring as an explicit top priority (like @andyvan-ph has) — and I’ll prioritize it over my current repositioning goal. We’ll only be able to deliver on that properly once these hires are in place anyway.
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