How we hire and motivate employees

The technical basis can be checked with problems and professional discussion. It is more difficult to understand the candidate’s motivation: what product he is interested in, what level of independence he is comfortable with, how he accepts feedback and what he expects from the manager. Therefore, an interview is not an exam with one-sided questions. The team should communicate in detail the objectives, rules, limitations and how decisions are made so that both parties can back out before exiting if expectations diverge.

Lowering the bar for the sake of rapid growth is dangerous. New people will indeed add hands in the coming quarter, but weak compliance with requirements and culture will increase the cost of coordination, complicate the system and slow down strong colleagues. It is better to formulate what behavior and results a specific team needs, rather than looking for an abstract good developer. This way, hiring becomes an extension of the product strategy and design, rather than a separate recruiting function.

The most difficult part of a performance review is to agree on the employee’s and manager’s ideas about the result. If a conversation occurs only once every six months, disagreement has time to turn into conflict. Regular one-to-ones are needed to discuss priorities, challenges, expectations and the development plan in advance.

The assessment includes the result delivered to production and growth relative to the previous plan. Self-review helps restore context: the engineer describes not a list of tasks, but his contribution to the product and the team. Feedback from peers completes the picture of technical skill, collaboration, and reliability. The immediate manager is able to collect high-quality feedback for ten to fifteen people; on a larger scale, the assessment should go through the management hierarchy, where everyone actually observes the work of their employees.

Money is important, but it’s not just the bonus formula that creates sustainable motivation. A specialist needs a clear goal, influence on the result, a strong environment, fair feedback and the next step. The leader is responsible for the context and results of the team, helps formulate a development plan and removes obstacles. Internal tools can gather feedback and target history, but they support the conversation rather than replace management work.

A horizontal transition is useful when the current role no longer provides the desired scope or the product topic no longer matches the interest. A large organization can retain a specialist by offering a different team, technology or trajectory - including a return from management to the engineering track. To do this, vacancies and requirements must be transparent, and the manager should not retain a person at the cost of his development. Mobility transforms a company from a collection of closed departments into a marketplace of opportunity.