(no title)
kradroy | 3 years ago
Once I joined I learned that 30% of my time would be dedicated to hiring. The company had a pooled hiring process, and I came to hate it. I spent several hours a week reading resumes, interviewing, reading interviewers' feedback, sitting in roundtables, strategizing with recruiters, and if all that went well, pitching candidates to the hiring committee. Then I would sit back, with no control over the comp, and watch the candidate choose another team, largely because my team wasn't a "sexy" team; very critical to business, but not sexy.
In the handful of cases where my team was the only option, the candidates would turn down the offer due to "insufficient compensation". The company had a "no negotiation" stance on offers. So once the offer went out, that was that. In my first performance review my manager put "hiring" as an area of improvement. I felt this was a trap and would be used to let me go eventually, in spite of the fact my team grew from 3 to 10 engineers from internal transfers and we were hitting all our deliverables.
Between hiring and navigating the terribly siloed corporate structure to build cross-functional teams I had almost no time outside of 1:1s to spend with my own team. It was a really disappointing experience and I felt really bad when I left, because my team and stakeholders were all delightful and capable people. Like you, I felt I couldn't protect them and keep my mental health intact at the same time.
strontian|3 years ago