Building a team is really about finding a few good people

Hiring rockstars can create a snowball effect fuelled by your project vision

With no help from HR, most managers struggle to find and retain rockstar candidates for their teams, especially in highly demanded topics like technology or sustainability.

In 2016, James, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for a large multinational bank, had the challenge to grow his team by more than a 1.500 engineers in order to cope with the digital transformation of his company. As usual for him, HR didn’t provide much support, on the surface due to politics but on reality a total ignorance about the roles he was looking.

Still, he understood that its the responsibility of a good manager to shape his own team and therefore took ownership of the recruiting process, starting to look for candidates outside, especially in parts where his current team was not enough, domains that at the same time many other companies in the market were recruiting. The first quarter of 2016 went by and it was obvious that something had to give. If you combined finding candidates, navigating the hiring processes (taking months sometimes) and then land a decent offer, MAYBE it was possible to find 4-5 new engineers by the end of the year. But then, a couple of things started to happen that really made the difference…

In parallel to hiring, the team started to draw ideas of what would later define the technology strategy for the bank. It was an exciting exercise with almost no restrictions and with full empowerment to tackle the issues and leverage the right technology. The team entered a powerful spiral of ideas driven by a pragmatic equilibrium of people with a lot of experience and new talent able to challenge the status quo.

One of the main forces behind the new vision was a new global platform, able to provide the technology capabilities to all business units. In concept its similar to other platforms like Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP or Salesforce’s Heroku but made specifically for the banking industry. With a lot of convincing the project was launched and quickly became a flagship not only for the CTO but for many other leaders including the CEO’s own strategy.

As time passed, interviewing candidates wasn’t only about hearing from them but also selling their vision. More and more, it was obvious that the platform was becoming an amazing selling point for engineers that wanted to avoid a boring job of maintaining some legacy system and wanted to move the frontier of what meant to work in financial services technology. Good people are motivated by difficult challenges and in this case trying to build a platform was probably of the biggest challenges for any engineer due to its criticality and complexity.

Through word-of-mouth people started to come more and more and the “selling” of our project became viral. Hiring started to accelerate but still didn’t reach the point to where we wanted it.

Recruiting is also about “selling” your project

In mid 2016 James got an interesting CV from his team in Asia. It was a senior banking engineer (35 years or so) expat looking to return home. Although he worked for a system integrator (SI) he was interesting in moving closer to James and joining the bank directly not only for personal reasons but because his company had just been acquired. He was unhappy and heard about Jame’s project and wanted to have a peek. After only 4 months of interviews and negotiations with HR he was in…

What happened later was a surprise... This guy was somewhat famous in the market and started attracting candidates, many from his previous company that also shared his frustration with the new owners, bringing around 25 world class engineers in a week alone. It was not only that but the fact that James was getting a cohesive team that already knew each other and were productive in a very short time. 

Finding a lot of people is actually about finding a few good ones

Later that year James repeated the same process with another engineer looking to leave a competitor. He was in his 40s and part of a unit that was dismantled for cost cutting. During his hiring process he delivered around 25 CVs of coworkers that were interested in the change.

This process was repeated at least 3 or 4 times in the following years, but with one important downside, James got multiple teams that were used to work together but they were not used to work… with each other, meaning a lot of work to dismantle the individual mindsets and rebuilding it as one.