There’s nothing easy about building a great team. But the insight from some of our best recruiting and team building posts of the year can help light a brighter path to doing so.
If there’s one prediction that can be safely made for 2014, it’s that recruiting top talent will continue to be a significant challenge.
That said, there are some fairly simple steps your expansion-stage business can take to improve its chances of assembling — and retaining — a top-notch team. Curious what those steps are? Check out the 10 posts below, which feature recruiting and team building insight from some of the world’s best tech companies, including Kayak, HubSpot, Uber, and more.
Our Top Recruiting and Team Building Insights from 2013
With the decision to end the company’s work-from-home policy, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer made a calculated (and hotly debated) decision that she said was a long-term play in the interest of developing company culture. Yes, there were also significant short-term risks and the company lost some talent in the process, but Mayer’s strategy seemed to pay off in the end. Read more.
Kayak co-founder and CTO Paul English might be an entrepreneur with a technical background, but make no mistake — his expertise and enthusiasm doesn’t stop at product development and engineering. His biggest passion? Building great teams — something English says can be the difference between becoming a giant corporation or another startup obituary. Read more.
Today, smart business processes are fueled by data. It objectively analyzes your performance, revealing trends or activities that can point you in the right direction. By the same logic, why wouldn’t you manage your recruiting process the same way? Ultimately, if you want to improve your recruiting process, OpenView’s Carlie Smith says it’s time to start harnessing the data your team naturally generates during each and every candidate search. Read more.
In a lot of expansion-stage companies, there’s a common expression that’s bandied about by CEOs, founders, and management team members: Our people are the only true strategic asset we have. Instead of just echoing that cliché, Lisa Petrilli, CEO of C-Level Strategies and author of The Introvert’s Guide to Success in Business and Leadership, urges companies to prove they actually believe that by embracing three tips that will inspire and leverage their most valuable asset. Read more.
He may have started out as Uber’s first CEO, but Ryan Graves now holds what is arguably an equally important position: Helping the transportation technology company build and grow teams in new markets all over the world. In this post, Graves details his transition from Uber’s first CEO to his current role, and shares his beliefs on the importance of sacrifice and dedication to team building. Read more.
What makes a thriving company culture tick? In this post, HubSpot co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah offers an inside look behind the company’s roadmap for developing what was voted the “Best Company Culture in Tech.”Read more.
Is your star sales development representative’s next job with you or your biggest competitor? In this post, Kevin Gaither, former Vice President of Inside Sales at uSamp (an OpenView portfolio company), explains why it’s crucial to develop a clear sales career path for your outbound sales team, and make certain that each rep understands what they need to do to stay on it. Read more.
When it comes to hiring, the last thing you want to do is guess whether a candidate is a good fit or not. The best way to remove that sort of “gut feeling” analysis and truly begin to understand how candidates think, is to leverage behavioral interviewing, writes OpenView’s Carlie Smith and Katy Smigowski. In this post, Smith and Smigowski lay out an easy-to-follow guide for doing just that. Read more.
Here’s something you may already know: Recruiting and retaining top software engineering talent can be extremely difficult. Why? As Balihoo CTO Paul Price explains in this post, what they really care about doesn’t always align with other employees’ top priorities. Read more.
Entrepreneurs like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and venture capitalist Brad Feld have made the case that cultural fit trumps competence, but should you really turn away someone who is highly qualified if they are weak culturally? That question sparked an incredible debate in the comments section of this post, and the consensus seemed to be: “Yes” — to an extent that’s reasonable and rational. Read more.
How are you changing or prioritizing your recruiting strategies for 2014? Let us know in the comments below.
<strong>Jonathan Crowe</strong> is Senior Content Manager at <a href="https://www.barkly.com/">Barkly</a>. He was previously the Managing Editor of OpenView Labs.
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