Building scalable hiring processes & systems promoting operational excellence w/ Stephen Poletto #184

Today’s conversation focuses on building scalable hiring processes as your org grows and creating systems that promote operational excellence, featuring Stephen Poletto, CTO @ Lattice. He shares examples of how they introduced & scaled their hiring processes to better articulate employee value propositions, implement experience differentiators, and created hiring rubrics & loop documentation. Stephen also reveals strategies for defining what operational excellence looks like within your org, how certain rituals impact company psychology / behavior, and steps for ending & replacing rituals that are no longer working. Additionally, we dissect frameworks for adding incentives within your eng org that improve organizational impact – and how to avoid bad incentives.

ABOUT STEPHEN POLETTO

Stephen Poletto is the Chief Technology Officer at Lattice, where he leads the company's product development, and where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 150 team members. Stephen began his career at Apple before spending eight years building and growing technical teams at Dropbox. Stephen has had the opportunity to incubate new products such as Dropbox Carousel and Dropbox Paper, and also work on at-scale products such as the Dropbox mobile app and Dropbox's platform infrastructure. Stephen lives in San Francisco. In the winter, you can find him snowboarding in the mountains.

"Even very simple things like a candidate's been in back to back interviews. You hop on. 'Hey, how are you? Do you need a five minute break?' We would train interviewers on some of those tactics, right? At the beginning of the call, set the agenda. ‘We're going to spend this amount of time on these topics. We're going to spend this amount of time to give you space to ask questions of me.’ Now the candidate knows what to expect. They're put at ease. It's simple stuff but it really colors the way that people feel about the interview itself. What kind of feeling do they have about the company coming out of it?”

- Stephen Poletto   

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SHOW NOTES:

• Stephen’s primary goal when he first joined Lattice (3:15)
• Steps for building out a systematic & repeatable hiring process (5:51)
• Defining & articulating employee value propositions during the hiring process (8:00)
• Strategies for presenting company culture via hiring / onboarding (10:21)
• Hiring experience differentiators & how to make them the norm (13:27)
• Training the engineering team on how to effectively hire (16:53)
• Stephen’s process for creating a hiring rubric & loop documentation (20:06)
• How hiring systems can be tweaked / evaluating current hiring needs (22:20)
• Identifying what operational excellence means for your org (24:22)
• Rituals / dilemmas to focus on that influence psychology & behavior (26:13)
• Examples of ending & replacing processes / operations (29:58)
• Signals that a ritual is no longer serving your needs (32:12)
• Frameworks for applying incentives / rewards within an eng org (34:57)
• Navigating the balance between output vs. input (38:57)