I wrote this document when we were a five person team. I had just joined and we were about to really ramp up and scale our hiring. We went from a five person team to a 50 person team in a year or so. This was a useful foundation so that we were having some consistency to the process. Consistency is really important for me in a hiring process so that we're being as objective and fair as possible with candidates. That was the genesis of this.

Having a playbook for sourcing folks, but also a playbook for the stages of the process and how much time you need to devote to each stage helped us all plan accordingly for how much bandwidth we need to set aside for rapid hiring while also getting our day-to-day work done too.

The Rule of 4 was initially proposed by our recruiting team at Oyster, so I adopted it for use with our marketing team. The Rule of 4 technically states that it only takes four interviews to know if a candidate should be hired, so our change was to take those four interview stages -- each of which scored a different capability -- and distribute the capabilities into various questions within our stages. For example, Google might have one interview focused on role-related knowledge, we might have six role-related knowledge questions over the span of all four interview stages

One of the biggest time expenses within the hiring process is going through the initial batch of candidates and qualifying folks.

We had some help from a recruiting firm and some help from our talent team on that very initial stage. I remember when I was first hiring folks I agonized over every conversation I had with someone in the interview process. Let's say you meet 15 people in your first couple weeks of listing a role, that's not sustainable. To be so emotionally connected to every single person that comes makes it hard to make decisions and you feel a bit paralyzed.

I really encourage my team to trust what they see in this process. There are guardrails in each of the roles themselves, interview plans and questions. And ideally we're building an ideal answer and a pause answer. So there's an objective lens to apply to it. And then I encourage them to have high conviction in their decision so that they can quickly move ahead to the next.

Sometimes that takes training. I know a couple of times folks were back and forth between 3-4 candidates. I could come in with my experience and say this person is clearly the person that fits this and needs to move ahead, and these ones don't. And I think calibrating on that as quickly as possible was helpful to save us time.

I think there's a perfect world in which you almost don't have to think when you're interviewing folks. The more thinking I do in the hiring process, the more chance I have for my unconscious biases to creep in and for me to choose folks based on factors that are not relevant to the role but are relevant to me. So I think to whatever degree possible, a plan like this that articulates the process, questions, etc. is intended so that you don't really have to think too much. It's almost becomes a rubric at that point where you're able to assess based on answers and experience. 

That's where my advice typically starts: don't hire someone because they'd be fun to work with. Don't hire someone because you got a good vibe from them. Those things can be data that you include, but they should not be decision points. Be really deliberate about what you know you need for the role and make sure you're asking the questions to get the answers you need on that front.

We're a fully distributed team at Oyster, we don't have a headquarters. We're all online all the time so communication becomes really important. The one thing that I would encourage folks to trust their gut on is how it feels to be communicating with someone during this process, because that's going be what it's like to communicate with them when they are there. To a certain degree we can coach people into that and train them on how to communicate better. But at the same time, like it is part of the decision process. How well do you communicate?

That's one of the big reasons the async interview is a key stage for us. How do they communicate outside of a Zoom call? Because that's how they spend most of their time at work.

There's a written portion that assesses if they are able to clearly articulate their thoughts. Are they able to organize their thoughts in a way that makes sense? Are they able to understand the question and answer the question appropriately? And if they don't understand, are they reaching out to us and asking us for clarity? Do they use good grammar and punctuation? Do they use a bunch of idioms, which not everyone may understand? There's all sorts of different data that we pick up from the written portion.

The video portion then is how comfortable are they with technology. Was this a real struggle for them making a loom video? Sometimes that can be okay. We often would hire folks from developing countries where maybe this tool didn't exist or internet connection's not great. Setting that stuff aside, are they otherwise comfortable being on video because they'll need to be day-to-day. And more, how do they communicate verbally? Did they send us a 10 minute Loom for one question, or a 90-second Loom for one question?

And I think overall, almost everyone makes it past the async stage. I think that's partially intentional. It can assess, are they willing to engage with us in this way? And if they're not, then they will probably opt out. It gives us a good insight into what would be like to work with them, and then it also helps us include others in the hiring process who are not listed in part of the interview. We could send the entire content team this candidate's loom and written response. So they get to know the candidate a little better without having to show up for a live interview. It helped us scale the get-to-know-you process, too.

I try to always include some sort of exercise in the process. It really does vary from role to role in terms of what the exercise is but I don't want it to be something that takes a ton of time. We did play around with the idea of compensating folks for their time if it was going be something longer but we didn't end up doing that.

Again, because you take it home and do it we get a sense of how they share ideas asynchronously. How do they engage with relevant concepts and stuff they'll be doing in the day-to-day?

Some folks can really set themselves apart at this stage and some folks really do not shine. It's a really helpful stage in terms of seeing actual output of effort and work. Much more so than just the talking interviews and async interviews before that.

There's maybe 50 questions in this interview bank and they're broken up into different categories: strategic thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, etc. My philosophy is that you should always ask every candidate the same question so you're not winging it when you hop into interviews and different people get different experiences. And then you should know what a good answer is and what a bad answer is on what you're an asking.

Kevan Lee

I wrote this document to streamline and create guardrails in the hiring process as the Oyster marketing team scaled 10x in a year.  

Goal of the hiring plan for every role is to bring in exceptional people and skilled team members from all backgrounds through an inclusive hiring process that sets them up to succeed.

. A recommendation from a teammate goes a long way. Please send along any referrals of people you know or have worked with in the past. We’d love to meet them. To submit a referral:

Click the (+) in the top right of the screen

All roles are posted to the careers page where they’re categorized into different departments. In addition, open roles are x-posted to the following websites:

. There are a handful of marketing-specific job boards that we use to get visibility into niche spaces. If you know of a great job board that has worked well for you in the past, please drop a note here.

John Bonini’s Freelance 50 (for sourcing)

We aspire to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive hiring process. To that end, we advertise open roles on job boards that serve underrepresented groups in tech. Here are the ones we use today. Again, if you know of any great ones, please leave a note.

We Work Remotely (geographically-distributed)

We use Google’s Rule of 4 for evaluating candidates for roles at Oyster

. This framework puts forth four distinct areas of competency that we will look for during the interview process. The areas can vary from company to company. Here are ours:

- Is this person in the top 10% of people in their field? Questions tailored by the hiring manager for evaluation.

- Are they a dynamic and flexible thinker? Can they think critically? Are they able to see each side of a potential challenge or situation and devise the optimal solution?

- How well do they communicate (especially important in a remote environment)? Do they take initiative & responsibility?

- Do they bring a positive cultural contribution to the Oyster culture? We evaluate based on our Oyster values: joy from work, social impact, trust, diversity and inclusion, and customer-first focus.

The goal is to have an interview process that evaluates for these four criteria four times in aggregate across all interviews (some interviews will assess all four, others just some).

Recruiter does a 30-minute phone interview with candidates to assess their interest and their fit. Recruiter will need three to five qualifying questions about the role from the hiring manager for the role to conduct their interview.

These questions should allow you to review the answer given, along with the candidate CV and feel qualified to decide whether to move them forward or not.

Please submit these questions to the recruiter prior to their first phone screen so they can add them into Greenhouse.

We use this interview as a way to introduce new team members to the way that we

work together at Oyster. The candidate is asked to share a Loom response to a question and written responses to a couple others in GDocs.

The hiring manager conducts this interview. The intention is to assess the candidate’s fit with the needs of the role, typically around the skills and mindset required to do the job effectively.

A teammate conducts this interview. Optional: This can be a group interview if the role is particularly cross-functional. The intention is to assess how well the person will work together with peers and stakeholders.

: This is a skills test to gain a better understanding of how the candidate thinks and works. Depending on the role, this could take a number of forms, including a work review, a portfolio review, a case study presentation, or a take home project.

Format: Varies, but probably Google Docs / Slides + Loom

Hiring manager assesses and shares feedback either sync or async with candidate

: Exec / team lead. Final gut-check as needed on candidates. Time: 30-60 minutes

Each interview stage should be consistent for all candidates within a given role to ensure a fair and equitable process. The goal is to have a completed scorecard / rubric after each stage. See Greenhouse for specifics on how the scorecards are implemented.

Marketing Hiring Plan at Oyster

Marketing Hiring Plan, Oyster

Goal

Sourcing

Sign up to see more