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Thoughtful Edge, Episode 4: Interview with Viktor Matusov the Hiring Strategy Expert.
50 Plays1 year ago
Behind the Scenes of Successful Hiring: A Conversation with a Hiring Strategy Expert In this episode, I talk to Viktor Matusov who is the AVP at GlobalLogic about Successful Hiring. We discuss the hiring process, what skills are important, bias mitigation, and a lot of other interesting topics. #leadership #management #careerdevelopment #thoughtfuledge
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode with Viktor Matosev
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Thoughtful Edge Podcast. And this is episode number four. And today we are going to be talking about hiring. And we will have a conversation with the hiring strategy experts. This is Viktor Matosev, AVP of Engineering at GlobalLogic.
00:00:23
Speaker
And we will cover everything related to that particular topic.
Overview of Viktor's Role and Global Reach
00:00:29
Speaker
So Victor, please tell us about yourself, about your role at Globalogic and about the experience and whatever else you want to share with us.
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah. Hi, Dmetra. Hi, everyone. My name is Victor. As AVP engineering and global logic, I lead an engineering division. It's more than 400 people globally, engineers, developers,
00:00:58
Speaker
quality engineers, designers, engineering managers, serving more than 20 clients, some of them are Fortune 500, and we are doing amazing software solutions for them across multiple industries.
00:01:17
Speaker
Also based on this experience, I consult founders and CEOs of smaller IT businesses in terms of how to bring their maturity up and also how to scale.
00:01:34
Speaker
Nice, nice. Welcome. I'm glad to have you here as my guest today. Let's dive in then.
Scaling Up: Hiring Thousands Annually
00:01:42
Speaker
I have several questions to ask you today. When it comes to the hiring process and hiring in general,
00:01:51
Speaker
different organizations might have different approaches, might have different pipelines, might have different views on that. Could you please describe how your organization's hiring process is set up and how does it typically work from start to finish?
00:02:10
Speaker
Well, I would probably start with the fact that we are hiring at scale. Pretty much as well as everything we do, we do it at scale. Right now, as we speak, we are 30,000 engineers globally. And we are talking about roughly 10,000 hires per year.
00:02:37
Speaker
for us and Obviously, we are hiring for very different positions from intern level all the way up to sea level positions for a global corporation and We we use a multitude of sources multitude of what we call talent acquisition engines and also a variety of of
00:03:05
Speaker
processes that are involved on every stage. I personally hire mostly either senior delivery managers, engineering director types, or top architect level engineering talent. So that's my recent hands-on experience.
00:03:31
Speaker
Nice, nice. But is there any difference between hiring the engineering manager, director, comparing to hiring just usual software engineer? And what's the difference is?
The Hiring Funnel: A Marketing Approach
00:03:47
Speaker
Well, there is and there isn't at the same time, right?
00:03:54
Speaker
Candidates for both positions are human. You need to check for hard skills and soft skills. It's just a matter of
00:04:09
Speaker
We can approach and we do approach hiring pretty much as a marketing funnel.
00:04:23
Speaker
You need certain success conversion rate and you have certain numbers on the entrance of that funnel. And then when it goes about like more senior positions, by definition,
00:04:43
Speaker
a company needs fewer of those and it usually means that we as hiring managers and our partners from recruiters and employer brand marketing can dedicate more time to that process and the process itself might get longer, it might get more sophisticated
00:05:12
Speaker
in order to select better because obviously from one side a great hiring case doesn't guarantee a great performance at the end of the day. From the other side the cost of mistake is pretty high.
Managing Risks in Massive Hiring Campaigns
00:05:33
Speaker
With engineers, it's equally important, but we need to optimize. We need to apply economy of scale, so to speak.
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Like going through hundreds of interviews, like making the hundreds of interviews. From my experience here, totally can like emphasize on that thing that you never know how the candidates will how the
00:06:08
Speaker
professional will start delivering and performing once hired. Disregards of how well he did on the interview. It could go either way. And we hear just mitigation.
00:06:23
Speaker
Mistake that we can make or the probability of that mistake during making this hiring decision. Right. When we go into some massive hiring campaigns, we sometimes
00:06:38
Speaker
basically prioritize onboarding and probation period over the interviewing process. It's basically shifting the decision right, so to speak. So, we are pretty quick in making a decision to hire. We acknowledge the fact that the risk is high that
00:07:02
Speaker
or higher that it might be a mismatch, but then during usually up to three months of a probation period, that's where the actual decision happens and that's where we can pull the trigger.
00:07:18
Speaker
But usually, in the vast majority of cases, we don't part ways with candidates. And that's actually a mutual process. So it's been a while already since the time when we had, so to speak, employer-dominated labor market.
00:07:42
Speaker
So a candidate on the labor market right now is equally as important as an employer. So it's a dialogue.
00:07:54
Speaker
Right. I definitely like this approach because, as I mentioned before, it's very hard to determine the future performance of the candidate just from the interview experience. And I know that even some companies, they embraced this approach of having several days of the real work experience for a candidate
00:08:18
Speaker
as a part of the interview. So they actually just invite you to work with them for two or three days, and then they make a conclusion and make a final decision based on their experience working with you and seeing you in action. So this is quite a smart move, I would say, and quite a smart approach. But nevertheless, when we are in the hiring process and we are talking to the people,
00:08:49
Speaker
how to determine which qualities and skills are important for a given
Balancing Hard and Soft Skills
00:08:54
Speaker
role. I can imagine that different roles might have different requirements and might require us to look for some different attributes, for some different clues and some different particular skills that might be required.
00:09:11
Speaker
Right. Well, in engineering and specifically in engineering services where I'm coming from, ultimately for engineering positions, the hard skills usually are the priority. And
00:09:32
Speaker
I feel me and my colleagues being in managerial roles, we are counter balancing that. So hard skills go first. We usually require deep hands-on engineering experts to run those interviews. Sometimes they involve some live coding exercises or maybe test tasks in a homework mode.
00:10:01
Speaker
whatever, or working on real life or close to real life challenges that are faced on a particular project or product. But then when it comes to my level, I'm more focused on the soft skills. And for each position, I usually have a competency matrix.
00:10:31
Speaker
Not only in mind but also documented on paper and I basically chart a piece of paper in front of me in several squares where I mark certain notes in a particular competency.
00:10:52
Speaker
So that's how I balance my engineering experts. They take care of hard skills. I take care of soft skills. But we also overlap a little bit. I check a little bit on the engineering side. They check a little bit on the teamwork side. But that's how we complement each other.
00:11:14
Speaker
Nice, yeah, like very collaborative thing here. This is definitely what the majority of companies do as well. We at Kinesis do the same actually. We assess the hard skills, we do the coding exercise, probably for all of our candidates, and then go and assessing the soft skills, how they communicate, how they might fit culturally. By the way,
00:11:39
Speaker
What about the cultural fit and how you go about assessing a candidate in this kind of area?
Evaluating Cultural Fit and Professional Tendencies
00:11:50
Speaker
Are there any specific questions or exercises that you use for that?
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, it starts usually with asking about past experience. And not only experience, but rather thoughts in terms of whether it's difficult, whether it's easy. What exactly was the best experience? What exactly was the worst experience? It also helps when
00:12:24
Speaker
When you give a candidate a certain choice, without a bad option, what is the tendency? What are professional tendencies for a candidate? Better to work alone or in the team? Better to work with code or in a Scrum meeting?
00:12:51
Speaker
Better go and speak publicly and help juniors or better work on a very difficult technical issue that no one else can do except for you.
00:13:05
Speaker
And there are no bad options, but then you know whether a person is more, so to speak, people oriented or things oriented. And the same goes for various cultures.
00:13:21
Speaker
We internally know which cultures certain position will need to deal with. So, we specifically ask about experience and about comparison. Who is better at what? What was candidate's experience about collaborating with a particular culture?
00:13:45
Speaker
What did he or she hear about a particular culture? What he or she thinks about certain stereotypes associated with a particular culture? And such an open-ended discussion without black and white answers usually helps to understand pretty well the position and the competency in various questions, including this multicultural aspect.
00:14:18
Speaker
And yeah, and always when we talk about the culture, are there any specific values that you try to identify and the kind of that's when like you're trying to assess their cultural feed to your company or to that particular position?
Core Values Guiding Hiring Decisions
00:14:34
Speaker
What I personally did is I adopted the values of our company, gave them my personal interpretation and I'm using them on interviews. So pretty much every company has certain official values.
00:14:59
Speaker
Not always they are equally shared between all the employees. But I decided at the very least we will be using them. They will stick better if at least within my division I am giving them my personal definition.
00:15:21
Speaker
Can you give us them? Sure, sure, sure. So, there are four of them. Number one, in no particular order, number one is integrity, which to me is basically honesty.
00:15:39
Speaker
To me, to a manager, it's important that my subordinate is honest with me. In good situations, in bad situations, I will hear an honest answer. That's number one. Number two is teamwork.
00:15:57
Speaker
It's not only about the particular peers within your team. It's also teamwork with other functions, teamwork with other departments. To a certain extent, teamwork with the client, teamwork with the management, teamwork with the subordinates. So it's more of a people aspect of the work.
00:16:26
Speaker
The third one is openness, which is transparency, which is somewhat correlates to integrity, but it's being open and approachable.
00:16:41
Speaker
throughout our vertical hierarchy. And the last one is innovation. And it's not only in a particular technical sense. It's rather, to me, even more important in a day-to-day sense from the perspective of the work process. What else can I do differently? What improvement suggestions can I make
00:17:11
Speaker
What feedback, what constructive feedback can I give to my peers, to other departments, to my manager, etc. So those four values and those interpretations to me give a pretty comprehensive value-based profile, I would say.
00:17:34
Speaker
Nice, nice. If you strive for your organization to be aligned with those values, then you'll be able to identify those values in your candidate.
00:17:48
Speaker
That definitely will mitigate the potential hiring mistake and will ensure that everyone we are bringing into the teams will be behaving accordingly and the team will accept this person's battle very well and everything will go on the successful path.
00:18:08
Speaker
Keeping our fingers crossed. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, yeah, it's like, as I mentioned, it's all about just mitigation, the chance of this hiring mistake, but there is no way we can avoid that at all. There are cases that we will need to deal with later on.
Eliminating Bias with Structured Processes
00:18:31
Speaker
Okay, how do you ensure that the hiring process is fair and unbiased? Because like, you know, different people might behave like differently. From which perspective? From an employer or employee? No, like, how to ensure that we evaluate everyone the same way?
00:18:57
Speaker
that we don't let our emotion to drive our decisions here.
00:19:07
Speaker
Well, maybe I voice an unpopular point of view, but to me, in any person-to-person collaboration interaction, it's arguably impossible to eliminate subjectivity.
00:19:32
Speaker
And to me, it's part of the game. People are hiring people. It's a particular match between team members, between an employee and manager is important.
00:19:52
Speaker
It's not everything, but it's a significant portion of further success. So I see no issue in certain subjectivity. And in situations where, let's say, my subordinate manager comes to me and says, hey, I don't feel like I will work good with such a candidate.
00:20:18
Speaker
It looks like his hard skills are good, but my gut feeling tells me I would not work well with him. I couldn't explain it. I can get that and more likely than not I will trust my subordinate manager to do this hiring decision. I would not overpower that. But other than that
00:20:42
Speaker
In order to assure a fair play field, we make that through processes.
00:20:54
Speaker
the same competency matrices to all the candidates within a certain role. We usually apply multiple interviewers. We have so-called trusted interviewer pool, especially within particular technologists. And they have well aligned and they have
00:21:19
Speaker
thousands and thousands interviews under their belt. So they approach each candidate in a pretty scientific manner for those respected, trusted interviewers who do it all the time. Certain percentage of their workload is interviewing people.
00:21:47
Speaker
The personality doesn't matter that much to them, so it's more objective, I would say. But I wouldn't eliminate subjectivity even in that scenario.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, I see now that makes sense like having structure and having the same process and having probably the same set of questions asked for all candidates can definitely mitigate this bias somehow and
00:22:16
Speaker
I will reassure that we are not missing some good talent because of some bias or some judgment that was not very well thought out.
00:22:32
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, following the same process, it is what everyone is suggesting following the same asking the same set of questions. And there's, I even said, I even seen a study which showed that, like,
00:22:50
Speaker
They actually had two groups of interviewers. One group of interviewers, they were interviewing people following the same process and the same structure and asking probably the same set of questions for all of the people. And another group of interviewers, they were just conducting the interviews.
00:23:08
Speaker
Like the way they prefer every time differently they would ask different questions like they would like we'll try to understand whether they like this person or they have common interests or whatever.
00:23:23
Speaker
And the outcomes were surprising that that group that were interviewing people based on some common structure and common set of questions ultimately hired more people that were successful in their jobs going on after that.
00:23:44
Speaker
Okay, one more tricky question. How do you handle situation where there are multiple strong candidates for a given role?
Deciding Between Strong Candidates
00:23:54
Speaker
Which factors will you consider when making a final decision? Good question.
00:24:07
Speaker
Let's assume that I really need to select one, which is not always the case and I will address that later. Usually that's where
00:24:23
Speaker
Those competency matrices help. Basically what I'm doing and many of my colleagues are doing after each interview with filling or actually during each interview with filling
00:24:38
Speaker
All the same lines in the same spreadsheet where each candidate is basically a column and each line is a competency. And when it gets close and it's two or more strong candidates, that's where
00:24:59
Speaker
a small details matter, a particular marks in particular competencies might make the difference. And also I don't have a competency which is called I like a person, but I do have a competency usually in my interviews which I call
00:25:25
Speaker
energy and motivation and that's probably the most subjective one when I when I like the energy when I like the motivation of a person both what he or she talks about when it comes to motivation and energy questions, but also how they are doing that so that that might also be a factor, but usually
00:25:52
Speaker
One of the advantages of a bigger organization, we find ways to, so to speak, utilize great candidates if we have more than we expected. So, I have my peers.
00:26:11
Speaker
seek for additional budget to hire more than I initially expected because we appreciate how tough labor market is lately and how difficult it is to find great, great candidates. So we might look at it as an upfront investment, so to speak.
00:26:38
Speaker
Mm hmm. Interesting. So you mentioned this competency matrix for several time. Could you please mention some other competencies that are in that, that's I in that matrix, like one of them is energy and right thing else? Any other? Sorry, usually,
00:26:58
Speaker
up to a dozen for me, up to a dozen competences. And a typical profile for me is a delivery manager or engineering manager, a position which is on the intersection of technology,
00:27:17
Speaker
team management processes and clients and that's by the way already four or five competencies that I already mentioned that are present in that matrix and then there are some additional points like communication
00:27:39
Speaker
Since the majority of my team members are from Eastern and Central Europe, and English is not a native language for them, but the vast majority of our clients are English-speaking.
00:27:55
Speaker
And we are internally English speaking as like an equalizer between cultures. So obviously English is a part, is an important part of communication, but it's not all to communication.
00:28:11
Speaker
Then it's also experience with contracts and financials, financial side of delivery. And then it might also be
00:28:28
Speaker
collaboration with support functions, like whether or not a candidate had experience with legal and finance and procurement and vendor management, etc. So depending on a particular position, depending on a particular scope, it might vary, but some of them are pretty permanent.
The Role of Mentorship in Onboarding
00:28:55
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. Those are the good examples. And when we are moving further in this hiring process, and let's say we already made this hiring decision and there is a onboarding ahead of us and training for new hires, how do you approach this? How does this process typically looks like?
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, I personally like the concept of mentorship for newcomers. And it doesn't matter whether it's junior level or C-level position. I believe every newcomer deserves a mentor to guide them through onboarding.
00:29:44
Speaker
An ideal candidate for this mentoring position is a reporting manager and usually it is a hiring manager. So in the vast majority of cases, I am a mentor for my new hires.
00:30:01
Speaker
even though my typical hire is an engineering director with 10 plus years of experience in industry, with technical background, with managerial background. My message to them is that, okay, now we are done with the hiring process. We are into a probation period or as an onboarding period, somewhere in between one to three months, depending on the plan.
00:30:31
Speaker
Let's forget whatever is written in your resume. Let's forget whatever is assumed from your background. Let's start from the ground up. From now on you are
00:30:53
Speaker
you are expected to ask whatever dumb questions you need to ask. And you can ask them twice or three times. It doesn't matter. So, I would hate that you, the situation when you are afraid to ask questions, because you
00:31:16
Speaker
think that you are assumed to know that based on your prior experience and then at the end of the day it will make you less efficient in your job. So from one hand we have an onboarding plan when at least in the high level terms
00:31:35
Speaker
all the areas of responsibilities, all the processes, all the various aspects of job are listed. From the other side we have an iterative process based on questions and answers and we meet
00:31:54
Speaker
usually like three times a week for a status update and Q&A sessions. And that's where the mentoring is happening. So, at the end of the day, I would say it's a pretty significant amount of time, of my time, but it's a worthwhile investment. Because as I said at the very beginning,
00:32:22
Speaker
There is always a chance that the probation period won't be successful. Usually it's a very low percentage in my experience but still. At the very least I want to be 100% sure that I was there for this person. I provided all the possible knowledge and experience and support from my side and if and when I need to make a decision
00:32:51
Speaker
to terminate such a person, then I don't have bad feelings that I didn't do anything because this intensity of an onboarding usually helps me
00:33:10
Speaker
to feel comfortable. And at the end of the day, in 95 plus percent of cases, it ends up not only in a successful onboarding, but in a successful working together for many years to come because
00:33:33
Speaker
I believe that any employee during the first weeks of their employment are
00:33:41
Speaker
It's the best period for forming a bond with an organization and an important part of that forming a bond with the reporting manager, with me in this case, and vice versa. So it works both ways. So that's how I approach it.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The first several weeks or a month is just a perfect time to ask all the questions you have. Maybe ask them several times because I've also seen the situation when someone is coming into the organization and doesn't ask anything.
00:34:26
Speaker
this case I would assume either he's not motivated like to do anything and that's why he's not asking either he's scared and also he's not like doing anything or whatever else might be a reason I could not even come up with anything else so if you're motivated if you're curious you'll definitely come in and we'll start like bothering everybody around you
00:34:50
Speaker
Like, how did you do that? How that part works? How this thing is organized? How that is set up? OK, so we are coming to the end of the interview. However, there is one more interesting question I wanted to ask you.
Scaling Advice for Smaller Companies
00:35:10
Speaker
You mentioned that you're also doing the consultancy work for some smaller companies on the market. And is there any difference
00:35:20
Speaker
How they approach the hiring process and when they come to you, do they ask you about the hiring as well? Like how better to do that and what is their focus there? Well, they usually don't ask about the hiring process or they don't associate their
00:35:41
Speaker
challenges with the hiring process. Usually those who come to me for an advice or for a consultancy, they are more focused on scaling, on growing, on getting more new business. But then when we started talking to them, in many cases we realized that there
00:36:06
Speaker
the organization structure is a bottleneck for the growth. And usually too much is dependent on a founder or CEO and maybe a couple of more people themselves other than the rest of the team. And it ends up one of the first steps that we work on is
00:36:32
Speaker
transformation and growing the maturity of their structure. And from one side we are building a vision of what a structure of a company capable to scale would look like, let's say, in a year. From the other side there is a process
00:36:58
Speaker
To acknowledge what the current state is, who are the key people on the key roles, what is their opinion on the situation and on the path forward.
00:37:13
Speaker
What I would call a stakeholder interviews with them. And then together with the founder or CEO of the company we form this future state structure. We map existing people to certain roles.
00:37:31
Speaker
whenever it's possible and then only as a last piece of this puzzle for some of the roles we define the job description and we define again the competency matrices and then we go to the market and that's where I can also help
00:37:53
Speaker
act as an expert, as an interviewer for hiring certain key roles. So that's how it works with smaller businesses.
00:38:05
Speaker
Nice, nice. Yeah, okay. But whatever business, I believe everyone will still have similar challenges, I would say, similar problems while going through the habit. Even more so, the smaller the company is usually, the more difficult it is for them to attract great talent. So, it adds up to a question of why
00:38:34
Speaker
Why should I join them? The candidate asks. And that's not an easy question. It's very close to the core of the business itself. It's very close to the question why the business exists. Why are they different? So that's very important for smaller businesses to understand for themselves the answer to that question.
00:39:01
Speaker
When the brand of the company is not well known and people just don't know what they do and what's their priority, what are their values, what their business is, it's difficult to make this decision.
00:39:17
Speaker
Okay, Victor, thank you for coming to me today. It was a quite interesting discussion and was pretty insightful and pretty excited to hear all of your thoughts and ideas about the hiring.
Closing Thoughts on the IT Labor Market
00:39:37
Speaker
Is there anything else you wanted to share with our listeners at the end?
00:39:42
Speaker
Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. It was indeed a great discussion.
00:39:51
Speaker
What could I share with the audience is that IT labor market both from the employer side and from the candidate side is a great place to be right now. It's as dynamic as ever despite all the challenges to the economy that we are facing right now. It's still a very vibrant place and
00:40:16
Speaker
No matter in which position you are, it's dynamic, which means it's very much alive. So, great to be here together with Dmitry and together with all of you who is listening. Okay, okay. Thank you, Viktor. This optimistic note. Thank you. Bye.