Steve Jobs was obsessed with hiring.

He believed it was his most important job, and repeated this countless times in interviews and speeches.

My #1 job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself. [...] If the top 50 people are right, it just cascades down throughout the whole organization. [...] A+ players hire A+ players, B players hire C players. Do you get it?

I have worked all my career in startups of various sizes. Startups are high-growth and have limited headcount, so each single person has an outsized impact on the business.

In such conditions, hiring well is a matter of life and death.

In fact, if hiring well fixes most problems, the converse is also true. The damage caused by one or two bad hires is immense, and can literally kill your company.

Joel Spolsky, legendary programmer and founder of Trello and Stack Overflow, explained this well:

It is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can’t bear to fire them, or you can’t fire them without pissing everybody off.

So how do you hire well?

🔄 Hiring Process

In the past couple of weeks I have talked with tens of managers and business owners about their hiring practices. In the Refactoring community this became the most discussed topic of all times 👇

Why are people so eager to talk about hiring?

Because, as you know, the market is incredibly hot today. I don’t know any manager who isn’t struggling to adapt to the new conditions brought on by the remote shift and The Great Resignation.

From these conversations, it is clear that good hiring is first and foremost a matter of process. You do it continuously, train people for it, and improve it over time.

Hiring well requires managing four main steps:

1. 📈 Planning for growth

2. 📑 Sourcing candidates

3. 🔍 Selecting candidates

4. 🤝 Converting candidates

This article covers the planning and sourcing stages, while the next will focus on selecting and converting. Together, this two-part series will cover everything you need to know about creating and managing a good hiring process.

These articles are also the result of the most extensive research I have ever done on a topic — which is well-deserved given its importance.

Let’s dive in 👇