Building a “Team of Peers”

Posted on 22. Apr, 2009 by Andy in Huddle Life, Out and About

I gave a talk at yesterday’s TechCrunch Europe Geek’n'Rolla conference about dealing with growth, hiring a brilliant team and creating a great company culture.  As I said in my speech, many of Huddle’s achievements make me very proud but (probably) the thing that i’m proudest of is the team of amazing people we’ve brought together.

(CC) Benjamin Ellis – benjaminellis.org

My slides are below but if I had to summarise in three points i’d say:

  • Get everyone involved in the hiring process; this fosters a sense of family and buy-in
  • Recruit from your network wherever possible but if you do have to use recruitment agents then squeeze them as tightly as possible
  • As a business owner, continually ask yourself “is this a place I’d want to work?”
Huddle.net – Hiring a Team of Peers

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7 Responses to “Building a “Team of Peers””

  1. babul

    22. Apr, 2009

    You did a brilliant talk. Really enjoyed it. Cannot disagree with anything said, which is a very rare thing to happen.

    Love Bobs mantra of peer hiring, totally agree it is a necessity for awesome organisations.

    However… when companies start to grow significantly larger they begin to lose much of this, so it will be interesting to see how the practice evolves i.e. is it scalable without losing value and without becoming behemoths as seen in others companies that started on this route (such as Google with their now infamous 14-interview hire practices).

    Keep up the good work.

    p.s. loved the slides, as good as much of the top presentations I see on SlideShare.

  2. Benjamin Ellis

    23. Apr, 2009

    It was a great talk on a subject that is so critically important in any start up. If a business has the wrong people, it is going nowhere fast. With the right people, money, IPR and everything else follows.

    The Bob mantra (at a previous company we called it the Christmas party test – would you want to be sat next to this person at the Christmas party) is actually a good test of cultural fit – a hiring filter that many start ups slip up on. Hire people with the same values as the rest of the business and you’ll avoid most problems. A put my interpretation of what said in a post, see Mike Smith’s wisdom too.

  3. bob

    24. Apr, 2009

    I think that in order for peer-hiring to scale, management have to be able to trust and delegate hiring responsibility to their reports.

    We currently have two dev teams of 5/6 people; if we hired more devs then we’d probably split into *three* teams, where one team had responsibility for hiring some more members to join them.

    We’d never want to end up with a Kafka-esque series of interminable interviews, but there is inestimable value in having each member of the team vouched for and trusted by their peers.

  4. Benjamin Ellis

    24. Apr, 2009

    Bob, that isn’t Kafka-esque, I’d say it is good practice, as would a number CEO friends who’ve built 10,000+ organisations from start up stage. For Cisco and Juniper we often put people through 3-6 interviews – sometimes short ones.

    Different people spot different things. It also works both ways – candidates get a bigger ‘window’ into the company and it’s culture, giving them more data to base their decisions on. Sometimes they’ll qualify out themselves.

    There is another factor too. If you think of employees on a scale of 1-10 (I don’t recommend it, but just to make a point): 10’s hire 9’s. 9’s hire 8’s. 8’s hire 7’s. Pretty soon you have a less than stellar team. Interviews should be vertical – the candidate should be interviewed by their boss, their boss’s boss and their boss’s boss’s boss – even if it is only for 1 minutes. If that means dragging in the CEO or Chairman, then that is worth it.

    The other reason to do vertical interviews is to stop the culture fragmenting, which can start to happen around the 60+ person mark. Also look out for people in the company who are the natural interviewers (they spot the good and the bad people and tell the company story well) – get them involved in every interview. It is a very worthwhile investment of their time. You are on to something in valuing social cohesion so highly.

  5. beejamin

    01. May, 2009

    3-6 interviews!? That would have to be a complete dream-job, coming from my “recent interviewee’s” point of view.

    If the interviewee’s applying for more than one position simultaneously (which I guess isn’t unusual), and they’re good enough to hire, what makes you think they’re still going to be considering your position by the time you get to the 6th interview?

    How do you pitch the position to make it worth that long a wait?

  6. team building events

    09. Jun, 2009

    Hi,

    One of mine best “Professional Team Builder” friend suggested me this article yesterday from facebook.

    And I agree with her as this is really very helpful informative article about “Team Building”.

    -Symcox

  7. dallas team building

    24. Jun, 2009

    there are many different public and private places where we can offer various methods and philosophies on team building to accomplish the most efficient way. Our expert team coordinators will find a way for all of the team to come together on the same level regardless of venue. They will be in charge of setting up events and even creating smaller teams within the team to mix and match the various skills that can be brought to the table by different personalities.

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