How to accelerate hiring processes

Problem

Last year, Doordash was facing a situation where our direct team was not able to hire people quickly enough. This occurred because our engineering managers were not aligned with our recruiting team in terms of how to be involved with the recruiting process.

"Our engineering managers were not as incentivised in terms of recruiting or building up their team as the recruiters were."

Up until this point, we had treated the recruiters as a kind of contract firm. They would bring us profiles, and if they looked good we would take them through our interview process. However, this wasn't an effective process, as engineering managers were not as incentivised in terms of recruiting or building up their team as the recruiters were. Things needed to change, but it took us a few iterations to get our process right.

Actions taken

We started to make sure that our engineering managers were more involved with the recruitment process. This covered everything - sourcing, writing the job description, changing the interview process, and being held accountable for close rates and offer accepts. We also set up a dashboard that connected with our ATS that displays what the pipeline is looking like for each team and shows how many people a manager has sourced, how many went through a technical phone screen or take-home test, and how many went on-site.

Now, every week all of the engineering managers will look at each of the pipelines. When there are pipelines that look bad, we question why that is, and we'll set up working groups to tweak interview processes to get better results. However, I set the engineering managers concrete hiring goals, and I hold the managers accountable to these goals. These aren't based on how many people they source, but on how many people actually join the company. If they don't meet their goals, they know that they're underperforming. Figuring out how to bring in more senior candidates by tailoring the interview process was particularly challenging for us, and it took us some time to work out.

"This approach greatly accelerated our hiring process. We have already doubled our hiring rate, and we plan on doubling it again."

Lessons learned

When trying to accelerate your hiring pace, it's really important to make sure that your engineering managers and directors are truly focused on recruiting. Setting concrete hiring targets for your engineering leadership team is the most effective way to do this.