Hire when it hurts… or don’t

Hey there—

We don’t hire often at 37signals. In fact, we only hire when it hurts. And lately our Ops team in Asia has been hurting for a third member.

Our Ops team is responsible for keeping our lights on and apps running smoothly. To ensure that happens, our mighty team of 10 uses a follow the sun model. Incident and on-call response flows through team members, region to region — the Americas, to Europe, to Asia — so critical work remains prioritized. The sun touches the Asia-Pacific region for quite a while, so we made the decision to hire a third teammate to distribute the work more evenly.

You might think — hire when it hurts, doesn’t that mean lowering standards? The team is in pain! Hire someone, quickly, and get them some help! But, no, we take a different approach at 37signals.

First, “hire when it hurts” is a simplification. Hurts means mild discomfort, not abject agony. A 2–3 on the pain scale, not an 8–9.

Second, because we work under constraints, because we’re able to say no, and because we’re used to achieving big things with small teams, our teams are conditioned to make highly impactful choices about their scope of work before compromising on something as important as a new teammate. We can be highly selective about who we’re bringing on because our teams are empowered to make such choices while waiting for the right person to come along.

Our SRE search is looking very promising! But there have also been times in the recent past when we’ve concluded a hiring round without the reward of a new teammate at the end of it.

Earlier this year, we put out a call for a new Rails programmer. We received over 1,000 applications! Yet none of those applications convinced us that hiring would be advantageous. Our existing team is in great shape. Adding someone who we’re not excited about means potentially adding bloat to the team. Weighing them down and reducing their capacity, which isn’t fair to them nor does it serve to ease the pain that prompted hiring in the first place.

The work will always be there. If you enable your teams to amp up or throttle that work according to their capacity, hiring becomes a simple exercise. ‘No’ is always an option for empowered teams — within their work, and to hiring.

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Talk to you next time!
— Andrea, People Ops at 37signals