Team building is top of mind for any start-up founder or exec. Recruiting and retaining top talent is even more challenging for software engineers.
To get an insight into how successful start-ups
approach team building, we spoke to Sylvain Utard, employee number 1 and VP of Engineering
at Algolia, an Accel portfolio company. Algolia is transforming the search and
discovery experience that businesses can offer their users online, managing
over 50+ billion search queries a month for enterprise customers including
WeWork, Zendesk, Twitch and Stripe. Algolia has been doubling YoY since we
invested in 2015 and has now more than 300 people, including 90 engineers.
We asked Sylvain to share his secret tips
with us.
How
do you attract talent as an enterprise start-up?
Sylvain:
Because we don’t have the visibility of a consumer
brand or a well-established enterprise company, we focus on what differentiates
us. The first is culture. From the very beginning, our founders Nicolas and
Julien talked about building a culture-first company, and for us it provides a
way to both attract and assess candidates.
The second is to demonstrate the reach of
the product. Almost all of the tools, especially technical ones, that engineers
use are customers of Algolia. That is a very powerful statement.
How do we get these messages across? We make
sure the hiring managers are involved in the entire recruitment process, from
sourcing candidates and selling the company. Not only does it ensure that we
get across what the company is about in an authentic way, it also gives our
teams visibility and input into the process.
In parallel, it is essential to tap into
the widest possible talent pool. Many prevalent recruitment tools, including
LinkedIn, tend to produce a pipeline of mostly male candidates - our experience
is that the response rate is 40-60% among men, compared to 10% with women. We work
to broaden our reach, through initiatives including meetups for female
developers at our offices and pro-active reach-out to women. We also over-hauled
the language used in job specs and other communication to remove typical male
tech stereotype words such as free beer and a desire to hire “ninja’s”.
What
are your top tips for assessing technical competence?
Sylvain: For entry level engineers this is quite straightforward and
includes both technical interviews and home assignments. We’ll also want to look
at someone’s previous work, and what they’ve been posting on GitHub (or Dribble
for designers).
With manager level candidates, it’s
important to recognise that they may have become one step removed from
development work. To compensate, we ask them to conduct a mock interview, as if
they are themselves interviewing a prospective new member of the team. This
gives us a good impression of both their own technical knowledge, and how they
would assess and coach that of others.
Retention
is a big challenge for every growth company. What’s your approach to extending
the life-cycle of your engineering team?
Sylvain:
Onboarding is a crucial part of turning a good hire
into a great team member. At Algolia, it includes sales call shadowing (because
engineers need to understand how to sell the product, as well as build it) and
a specific project that will be completed in the first 2-3 weeks, giving new
hires an early opportunity to demonstrate their skills.
You also need to show people how they can
grow their career at your company. This is best achieved by pushing
decision-making power down the hierarchy, to keep your rising stars challenged
and motivated.
Today’s talent expect flexibility and as a
company you need to be responsive. In developing our remote working policy, we
have spent a lot of time thinking about everything from the communications
tools we use (no more whiteboards!) to the question of how client data will be
accessed. Because our product is reasonably complex and requiring a good level
of support, we find it beneficial to have people working closely together at
least some of the time.
There has to be acceptance that retention
is never total, however; People will eventually leave, and that doesn’t necessarily
mean your system is at fault.
Finally,
what’s your approach to team structure and management?
Sylvain: Your teams need to change as your company does. We now operate a
squad model, where our engineers are grouped into smaller teams dedicated to one
specific task. There are currently over 20 squads, across products and focus
areas from APIs to analytics. This model gives you focus, but you also need to
work on connectivity between squads, for times when you want to make horizontal
improvements across the entire product range.
Over time we’ve also come to recognise the
importance of having enough management layers in place. At one point, I was
line-managing 25 engineers and it became clear we needed an engineering manager
to help the teams prioritise tasks and maximise productivity. At this stage,
your role as the manager’s manager becomes important, offering a sounding board
and helping them to learn and evolve in their role.
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Thank you, Sylvain, for sharing your
wisdom. Building a great team is something that requires care and precision at
every stage, but it is worth every minute invested. It is one of the most
important success factors for a start-up.
