Promoting Internally Versus Hiring Externally

Is it better to hire internally or externally? VP of Engineering Roman Kleiner weighs in on this complex subject.

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Promoting Internally Versus Hiring Externally

Is it better to hire internally or externally? VP of Engineering Roman Kleiner weighs in on this complex subject.

Or listen on

Description

In this episode of The Tech Trek, host Amir Bormand interviews Roman Kleiner, the VP of Engineering at Egnyte. How and when do you decide to hire external talent when working on a task? When should you promote internally over hiring externally? These are just some of today’s topics.

Show Notes

00:50 – What factors cause companies to look for external help?
06:27 – Is it possible to seamlessly integrate external talent with your team?
11:03 – The pros and cons of letting internal talent handle a challenging task.
13:21 – How far does institutional knowledge go?
17:22 – Culture fit versus culture add when hiring externally.

Roman Kleiner

VP of Engineering @ Egnyte

Meet our guest

Roman is a technical engineering leader specializing in rapidly building and scaling SaaS products. He brings a strong focus on execution, domain expertise, and operating at global scale. He was also responsible for building and expanding teams that took new cybersecurity products to market.

Episode transcript

Roman Kleiner: [00:00:00] My name is Roman Kleiner and I am a very vice president of Engineering Ignite, which is leading vendor in the content collaboration and data security and governance space. And within that, I’m leading distributed teams that provide the infrastructure and DevOps capabilities for all of Ignite 

Amir Bormand: solutions.

So Roman, thanks for being on the show. The topic we’re talking about today is, you know, promoting internally versus hiring externally. I know before when we talked, you have some thoughts on that and I think the, the one question that I want to start off with you is at the top level when you’re looking at the company and you’re trying to make that internal decision whether you are actually promoting or going externally, When and how do you decide that, hey, you know what, we actually do need to go external.

What are some of the factors that potentially would want, you know, cause you to go external versus looking [00:01:00] internal? 

Roman Kleiner: Yeah. So, Mentally, I start with a bit of a, what you would call a requirements list, like a shop spec. I’m trying to abstract myself from, whether it’s internal or external. First think, what do I need?

Like if I were to build a sports team and then I’m doing ether or explicitly something that’s called like a succession plan or a iron plan for that role, you might say, oh, you know, internally they have tors A and B, and they. They can be there in a year or two years, and this is how they need to be built up for there.

Maybe they’re even available immediately. And then based on that, I decide don’t have enough of a runway to go and get that person to that level, or do I need to go to externally now? And of course, the urgency behind filling in debt role on the roster plays a big role as well. 

Amir Bormand: I, I guess when you mentioned urgency, Maybe, maybe dive in and tell us what that actually means in terms of, you know, the urgency that the team might be feeling.

Roman Kleiner: [00:02:00] Yeah, I think this is probably best answer through examples. For example I have a team that’s in an unhealthy situation. Attrition is about the technology they’re responsible for is not doing that well. And I quickly need a technical leader or a manager to go and execute a turnaround right there in 10.

So the urgency, that situation is high because we are, might be talking business continuity. Or vice versa. I see that there is some kind of business domain that’s expanding and today I’m okay with how it’s runs, but I suspect that in the sixth, 12 month, looking at my crystal ball, this will need a highly different scale with adoption coming in.

And I would need higher order architect who dealt with that scale before. So the urgency is less there stare, but the need is still cute and they’re all kind of other examples on that skill that I can. 

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. When you’re looking at, you know, the notion of bringing somebody outside into manage, right?

[00:03:00] Obviously you have a team, you’re deciding to go external versus internal. When you make that decision, what are some of the potential negative impacts to the current team? 

Roman Kleiner: I mean, to stay the obvious. When you go externally, you do send a signal internally. You guys are not cutting it to put the bluntly to fill that in.

Maybe, you know, maybe I could sugarcoat it, but at the end of the day, that’s what people would read into that. And I think you need to mitigate it by, it’s just being transparent. What I would dislike doing is just doing some kind of plan. Einstein search for a role, and then presso. There is some kind of check in the box popping up with a person appearing.

And now everyone needs to deal with that. You need to be transparent. Say, I’m looking for this role and this is, these are the qualities that I’m doing. And ideally, in a very ideal world, Everyone would take an honest look at themselves, say, yeah, you know, I’m not that person practically. Of course it’s rarely the case, but at least you start by really being open about whom you’re looking for and why.[00:04:00] 

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. I, I, I guess, you know, just thinking about what you said, if I’m on your team and you bring somebody in from the outside, you know, I might be looking at that going, well, where does that lead me? When can I become a manager? Obviously, I’m sure you’re thinking and worrying about that. If you do bring somebody in from the outside, how do you help the team understand, hey, for you to be a manager, this is the gap.

This is what we need to work with. If somebody’s actually approaching you so they can understand, you know, why they weren’t potentially select, 

Roman Kleiner: Yeah, the now we, I think, go into the whole domain of career development and and career planning of sorts with people. And now in many cases it starts with just learning the aspirations of people, but also making sure they, and I have a.

A common understanding of what they can do today and what they could be doing tomorrow. And again, it’s much easier said than done because there’s always, in real life, you would [00:05:00] find some kind of divergence, but in most cases you wanna be completely off. And and then coming back to that transparency from my previous answer, or maybe I’ll even go all the way back to that example of a team that’s in thermal and needs fixing.

And I might say, sure, you know, iir, you want to be a manager. And here’s, let me talk to about that team. We had this atrition, we have this instability. What do you think would take to solve that? And could somebody who has never been a manager solve that? You know, of course you might, you know, depending on your level of confidence, you might answer differently.

But it puts something that somebody can relate to immediately and understand what kind of challenges they would need or kind of capabilities they need to build up in themselves. Fair. 

Amir Bormand: I guess we were talking about the standpoint of the impact on the team, right? I think a couple of the questions we’ve talked about is around that.

I guess if you were to think about the person coming from the outside in, you’re bringing an outside manager. Again, [00:06:00] the team’s aware that there’s a gap, whatever that gap could be. That person coming in. They have some work to do. They have to o o overcome some maybe hard feelings, you know, some, some of the exact opposite things that we’ve been talking about.

When, when you do bring somebody in, how, how do you help that person assimilate? How do you make sure that person will transition comfortably into the role or as comfortably as they can? 

Roman Kleiner: It’s not a question that has a very simple answer because it, it would vary a lot depending on the role. And in many ways it’s also to do with my management style, even if I promoted somebody because apologies if I’m going a bit a roundabout way, but even if I promoted from within, I suddenly have completely different expectation for a person who is already there.

So I need to help them too. This, now I’ll come to them with a very different set of demands. But coming back to the essence of what you asked First things first. I want that person to draw their own impressions because if I come in and I’m telling ’em, Hey, this chap has these problems and that one has this potential, [00:07:00] I’m already, I think, diluting the picture a bit B, and that’s more upon me.

I want to really be certain that they will be adding value, not just coming as another layer of management, not come in to kind of go and fill in a some kind of gap in the org chart, but they have something genuine to bring in, not just for. Something that the rest of the team will recognize. And I want to know that during the interview process itself, because at that point I don’t need to do much.

Once they’ve joined, I just let them do what they already have been doing before in their career or what they’re promised to be doing. And see, I think, and that’s going to sound very standard, but we crisp and clear about your three, six month expectation with them so that they don’t, will not be second guessing what I’m asking to.

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. I, I guess maybe this is a different question, but outta curiosity, when you’re looking at, you know, you’re, you’re a manager, your boss, and you have to go externally, obviously there’s a gap on [00:08:00] the team. Does that affect you? Does that, does, is that a Im implication or was there some mis, you know, is there some issue with career development, some issue with hiring aptitude?

Obviously if it’s urgency, that’s a different scenario, but if you have to bring a manager from the outside, does that mean that potentially there, there was something missed so that, you know, obviously everyone loves to promote internally, right? That’s a, that, that’s everyone’s goal. But, but what? For the manager.

I guess in, in your case, you know, we’re gonna have to use specific details about you, but just generally speaking, what does that reflect on, let’s say the VP of engineering in, in terms of their boss having to go outside of the, the ranks to bring 

Roman Kleiner: somebody in? Well, it’s it doesn’t always mean that there was some kind of gap in internal development.

And I’ll bring a bunch of examples. Your org might, might have just grown and you never needed anyone at VP level for a while, and you didn’t even expect to need one before too long. And suddenly you do, [00:09:00] you’ve grown by a factor of five or four or whatever, and this need appeared. And second another valid reason and that comes from personal experience is that you have work that’s been really originating from engineering excellence.

You, you’ve hired to build people who love building stuff. And at certain level, those roles become less about building. They’ve become more about. The risk in liaison, strategize and whatever really will, but that’s just not stuff that people even may perhaps want to do. You suddenly need to bring somebody like that in and All of that happened to me on both sides of the fans in my career.

But then, yeah, sometimes it might mean that you could have in, in the presence of a time machine or a crystal ball gold two years ago, one year back and say, oh, that this might happen in 2020 2 23. Let me now go and work with somebody to bring them there. But hindsight is always 2020. So basically [00:10:00] long answer saying that, that’s that’s perfectly valid.

And I never, never had any negative thoughts or any like, misgivings about somebody who had to go outside in institutions like that because none of us are perfect. 

Amir Bormand: I think that’s very fair. Yeah. I think obviously it’s, it’s hard to forward predict. Success or, or career development or like you had mentioned, career, you know, company growth, a pandemic, and having to manage differently, all those things.

Who could predict those? But when you’re looking, I guess to kind of focus back on your internal team, when you are looking to evaluate the internal team and you’re looking at the skillsets you need, how far of a gap it might be based on urgency, I don’t know, but how far of a gap are you willing to go?

You know what this person is, is not far off. They can stretch to the. Versus, you know, it’s just something that I can’t potentially take a, a risk on now is, 

Roman Kleiner: has that come up? Yeah that’s a great [00:11:00] question. It’s a bit of an art, but, but I’ll reveal my personal bias. My bias is that if I see that there is a decent chance for somebody to tick all of the boxes in six, 12 months or even most of the boxes.

I’ll rather make a mistake that way because it’s, it sends a good message to the org as well. It says, yeah, you can build your career here. Again, it doesn’t need to come all the way back and say, let’s try and make everyone happy and always promote from within. But if you see and you compare, and it would go there because at the end of the day, they do come with a very healthy baggage.

They come with institutional knowledge. They come with all kinds of things. Even a talented one will take one two month build. So, but that again depends. Sometimes you just have some. Core, basic thing that you want that role to fulfill. And I’ll like, let’s say to use a basketball analogy, I need like a center there to dominate the four court.

I cannot [00:12:00] ask the rest of my team to grow seven inches. You do need a tall guy for that. So if you, if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it. You cannot build it and you take now a closer example. If suddenly I want my team to be cross geographical and I want somebody to manage across different. You cannot just go inside, ask somebody, can you do it tomorrow?

You need to. You need somebody who’s done it ideally, especially if you are in a very sensitive story state of doing that. So, and then you have all kind of examples between those two. 

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. Institutional knowledge. You brought up an interesting point and I’m gonna ask you a question about that.

When you consider institutional knowledge in information that potentially is not documented, this person you mentioned might be close, but they have some of that When you do bring somebody, Ian from outside, and I mean a lot of companies might have this gap, but the question is institutional knowledge and ramping up that external hire.[00:13:00] 

What have you seen that’s helped somebody? Succeed with, with absorbing as much as they can so that they’re not relying on watching them more or 

Roman Kleiner: less. Yeah, that’s not a really good question. I would say it really varies on the role and its seniority. Because if I brought it in, let’s say an architect, then the answer is really standard.

They need to get heads on really quickly. They need to get tickets to work on, they need to get some something that they are accountable to deliver even within their first month. And then it. It is just learning to swim by thrown in the, with the water kind of environment. If you bring a director or a vp, it’s a different deal.

They, but I would say for me it begins even at the interview level. Like, understand culturally do they, will they even want to do that? And how will they approach and were they technical before they came in? Will they be a cultural fit? Because again, at that point, They’ll know what to do. Of course I’ll help them in all [00:14:00] establish the contexts, but they’ll know what to do, how to quickly acquire that knowledge.

Yeah, it’s maybe somewhat fit generic cancer, but it’s hard to go and kind of, cover the gamut of all of the different roles use in one measure. Sure. 

Amir Bormand: If you’re gonna dive deep into that, if you’re gonna look at an external, Person coming in, in a manager management position and to absorb institutional knowledge to minimize the impact on culture.

What have you seen work? 

Roman Kleiner: First, make sure that person is a cultural fit and they, it’s been really put in clear words. For example, if they are coming in into an organization where managers are expected to review code and comment on code and take architectural decision, you see that during the interview process, at the end of it and after.

And when you come and says, you. Specify your success [00:15:00] criteria. You see, you know, you, you are expected to know technically more than I do about your domain within X days. I mean, maybe I’m like putting that too much in a blank or white, but at least that’s the idea. They, they need to know. They hopefully again, that comes to hiring, but technology the team is working on is not nice to have.

They need to have some background from their engineering career in that technology and. Typically that team would have some good roadmap or some technical debt tackle. You might say, you know, here’s again, part of your 30, 60 days is to go and deliver on that. And I, I find it hard to imagine that they’ll do that by complete delegation if coming into culture of that team.

So it’ll start coming in through the day to day. But maybe if I may add something that I’ll add from my own personal experience, something I really like doing and I love on others. When they join a team and they want to acquire that institutional knowledge, often they will come and say, oh, [00:16:00] the commentation is not there, or It’s outdated.

90% of the groups are like that. Say, okay, you know, here’s a great chance for you to apply the Boy Scout rule and write it yourself, and if you write it yourself, we know for a fact that he understood it after you talked with everyone else and you improve your own team. I like that. That’s, 

Amir Bormand: That’s a good answer.

You mentioned between culture fit you also hear about being culturally additive when it comes to somebody moving into management position, and let’s say it is an external hire. You have to obviously have a, I think to your point, a certain level of culture fit how much culture. Do you want? That’s, it’s, it’s, it’s gonna be hard.

Not science, I know that, but just from your standpoint, how much of, of, of their background, their toolbox, how much of that do you wanna be additive to your culture? 

Roman Kleiner: Again, it depends. So I’ll answer it first, for example, but please, [00:17:00] please feel free to kind of go and twist me in a given direction. But let’s.

I’m in a company that has grown and now I want more culture of process. Maybe not all the way, but I don’t want to operate again by it, just whatever it takes approach. But I want to install some process and I want to that person to bring that in. So in that case, of course, I will look for people who’ve done stuff like that before, but not completely take them from a different end of the poll.

You know, for example, let’s say. I don’t want to kind of give a particular name, but let’s say take them from an old school vendor and parachute them into a startup that just moved from the C to this stage or whatever. So, and I want to tellme, you know, one of your goals 60, 90 days is solve this problem.

Maybe I had too many outages because people are just doing an organized changes. Or maybe I saw how the repeated outages happen because people didn’t learn enough. So can you fix that for me? And hopefully they. Use that particular [00:18:00] problem to add some cultural element B about more rigor, B about more sense of you, you own it.

Responsibility. Well, whatever I needed it, but I’d rather not be explicit element A, this is how I want culture to be. It needs to come solving particular challenges. 

Amir Bormand: I like that. That’s, that’s a great que that’s a great answer. I I, I guess just to piggyback off of that, you, I mean, obviously you just mentioned you want a certain amount of culture.

Where it’s, it’s, it’s the right opportunity. You obviously have the team who’s also assimilating to the manager, and you don’t want any, I mean, obviously we have to go through some of that storming, norming, conforming process. When you see that culture ad coming and you as the, you know, that person’s manager, how do you help them or do you let them deal with the storming norming phase?

Do you try to step in, I know it’s probably case by case, but just generally what have you seen in your. 

Roman Kleiner: Again, [00:19:00] a good question, which is I’m taking my second to consider, but I’ll so firstly, I do want to show the team that Ikea, it’s not like, you know, I installed the new manager and I just release my hands from the wheel and say, now you go.

So I typically would do some skip one-to-one, and I’ll let the manager know I’m doing it. Skip one to answer a little bit how they feel, what they observe, because it’s important we are talking here about the whole team. It’s not just moving an individual contributor somewhere at the mid level.

So how they feel about that, what works, what doesn’t work. I’ll usually ask the manager for their assessment of their team as well. And those two would probably together paint a picture. Again, it varies, but some managers, it didn’t happen to me a lot or at all, but some managers really come with a revolution in mind and say, oh, Let’s, let’s change everything and, and to be honest, if that was required, I probably wouldn’t have done it myself without waiting somebody to come in or at least call it explicit.

But at that case, of course, you need to reign in a [00:20:00] little bit and sticky note. Yeah, sure. I agree with you. All of this needs solve, but. People have decent, like finite budget for how much they tolerate change and the fact that urn has already changed for them. So let’s, let’s try and play within that budget.

So it’s a bit of a balancing act, but most of time, again, if you’ve done your hiring well, if you’ve done your goals well, it’s rare that kind of, that storming will be truly a big storm. It’ll be more of known problems that somebody solves in a agricultural, a add way to steal a word from. From a previous question.

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. I, I, I love your views on, on the subject. I it’s, it’s art. That’s why I like covering similar topics. You get different point of views. So, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing. I definitely appreciate your time. Yeah. I, I like to wrap up with two questions. One is if you could ask a future guest on this show to cover a topic, what would you like to listen?[00:21:00] 

Roman Kleiner: I’m very interested in hearing more how people seamlessly support the switch into a manager. We talked about that a lot. We talked about promotions, but I think that switch of somebody from, let’s say a technical leader into a manager happens left and right in, in our industry, but many times people still do their previous role rather than the new ones.

So how do you do that? How do you do that? Manor always fascinates me. Awesome. That’s a great 

Amir Bormand: question actually. I think that’s one of the ones I like. I, I, I don’t think I’ve yet found the perfect answer. We’ll keep asking it and I think that’s a great topic to have somebody come on to specifically talk about.

Secondly, if somebody does wanna reach out to you, Roman, to talk about anything you mentioned on the podcast or just reach out to you because of something you mentioned, what’s a good way of 

Roman Kleiner: getting a hold of. Very easy. I’m on LinkedIn, Roman climber. I think there’s one of me I hope and I respond to anyone who wants to chat with me about [00:22:00] such exciting topics.

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