- Ask the existing team for a set of dude recommendations, and the reasons.
- Track down a set of dudes myself. Usually from publications, open source, or previous products.
- Discuss with the dudes regarding the greater project target, team, goals, initial tasks, scheduling. Ask the dudes for other dudes they can recommend, and why.
- From here on I pay the dudes for their time and effort during recruitment, always:
- Have the dudes look at previous problems and solutions, if available, and ask for feedback.
- Have the dudes spend time with existing team on current work and ideas. When populating entire teams I have dudes work with each other. I especially look for people who are freely sharing even with people they are (technically) in competition with.
- I always followup on my initial predictions over time, to see where I'm right or wrong, and what to look for in the future.
I often hire scientists or other people who do a lot of work out in the open. It's just so much easier to quickly get a feel for peoples' output by looking at, and discussing, previous work. And most of my projects require bleeding edge specialists.
I advertise <25% of my positions (guesstimate). This is a failing on my part. I have no magic lens to read CVs, so they carry no additional information value for me.
Hiring is expensive and often takes a long time, but hiring the wrong people is much worse.
Throughout my projects I have only had one person leave, and that was for a once in a lifetime offer. I very rarely need to fire anyone.
I would rather hire two excellent dudes than five good dudes. So I tend to have the budget to pay good rates. Then I call up temporary manpower to solve the more mundane tasks so I can keep my excellent people on the more difficult and interesting items.
Red flags I look for when I'm on the other side of the table:
- Who is doing the hiring? Some checkbox HR drone, the owners/investors, or the actual team?
- Hiring evaluation tools. Have they actually bothered to read up on the latest few decades of research, or are they just following dogmatic trends? Do they even track their own prediction skills when hiring?
- What is their understanding of the project, tasks, etc?
- Do they respect my time investment?
1) a "dude" is gender and ageless, of no persuasion, has neither skin nor eye colour, and so on.