- need to work with your upper management to get the best talent for what may be more money than they are willing to part with. You need to be great at negotiating to achieve this.
- need to find the right culture fit. Will the team want to spend 40+ hours a week with this new person? Do they have any personality conflicts?
- find a way to get the best talent without offending your team. Sometimes you have the option to hire someone whose skillset is radically better than what already exists on your team. Do you hire that person? Does your team handle it well? Does this mean the person who thought they would get a promotion in 18 months is going to slow their output because they assume that their future "slot" is now gone? How do you cope with that.
- balance the time between your "day job" and hiring a new person. I believe when you have an opportunity to hire, it needs to be one of your most critical AND urgent priorities because the impact is ultra-high and the effort is much lower than most long-term efforts (I once made the mistake of moving too slowly on a backfill caused by a lateral promotion, and I didn't see the cracks forming until we lost a 2nd engineer to burnout. We ended up running way too lean for way too long. Eventually we backfilled the two positions with two superior engineers, but it was a very tough time and I could have realistically replaced those positions much more rapidly and my team would have been better for it.)
- need to work with your upper management to get the best talent for what may be more money than they are willing to part with. You need to be great at negotiating to achieve this.
- need to find the right culture fit. Will the team want to spend 40+ hours a week with this new person? Do they have any personality conflicts?
- find a way to get the best talent without offending your team. Sometimes you have the option to hire someone whose skillset is radically better than what already exists on your team. Do you hire that person? Does your team handle it well? Does this mean the person who thought they would get a promotion in 18 months is going to slow their output because they assume that their future "slot" is now gone? How do you cope with that.
- balance the time between your "day job" and hiring a new person. I believe when you have an opportunity to hire, it needs to be one of your most critical AND urgent priorities because the impact is ultra-high and the effort is much lower than most long-term efforts (I once made the mistake of moving too slowly on a backfill caused by a lateral promotion, and I didn't see the cracks forming until we lost a 2nd engineer to burnout. We ended up running way too lean for way too long. Eventually we backfilled the two positions with two superior engineers, but it was a very tough time and I could have realistically replaced those positions much more rapidly and my team would have been better for it.)