“Creating inspiring products begins with discovering a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible” 
Marty Cagan

If you are working in product development or software engineering, you already know this quote probably. Marty Cagan is one of the best product prophets with a unique experience and a matching style to interpret his learnings.

In Marty’s explanation regarding technical products, that’s the meaning of the 3 characteristics:

1. Valuable: What we are aiming at is a valid problem, and people choose our offer to solve it
2. Usable: people can easily figure out how to use our product
3. Feasible: it is buildable with the current technology, and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available

When I read his best-selling book, Inspired, I tried to adopt his advices to my market: IT recruitment, particularly on the agency side. Obviously, a recruitment service is really something else but still,

• Is it possible to think about recruitment as a product?
• Are the main goals the same in both cases?
• If yes, will it change my view about my work?
• Will I become more conscious?

The following summary is about my thoughts on these questions, and the triangle of valuable, usable and feasible IT headhunting.

I. Valuable

Goal: the perfect match

What is the added value of a recruitment agency? In the best case you won’t need any recruiter at your company on the enterprise side because of your headhunters. On the agency side you have 2 different to-dos to create value: know your partner and know your market. Both approaches are aiming at the recruiter’s dream, the perfect match: your client has 1 open position, you introduce 1 candidate, and the result is a new hire.

Knowing your partner means a close relationship, and not only at the obvious parts (technology stack, product or culture), but the small things as well. For example we are trying to meet the team members, or at least the tech leads before we launch the first interviews. Of course I also know the available coffee resources of our favorite clients.

The market knowledge is a wider area. If you are an IT recruiter, I think some technical understanding is necessary. Because of this we are working on different domains, and growing our knowledge in a T shaped model: we have some understanding of the “big picture”, the whole software development cycle, from the networks and infrastructure through the backend and frontend to the UX. I’m a “mobile specialist”, so I have to understand this domain better than my teammates, I follow the news, trends, participate on conferences, and grow a fairly big network in this domain. You also have to know the players in the market: the competitors, the best products, the strengths and weaknesses of the companies.

Valuable information could be salary benchmarks or hiring trends, programming hypes to attract the best guys, available developers in a niche area, all the information outside google search’s first page. When a client has issues with his selection process, it’s also our time to shine, we know plenty of good examples worldwide. Because all of this you have to open your ears and absorb everything around you from the market.

If you do your homework, as a recruiter you also don’t have to worry about AI. In the forthcoming years no AI will take my job, because if you have all the information, you will also have a better sense for the chemistry between your future candidates and clients, and AIs don’t have a sixth sense yet. But if you are only a CV submitting machine without a solid understanding, you may need to worry.

II. Usable

Goal: provide reliable information asap

Usability is a bit harder. For me it means to always be available for my clients and candidates. I use many platforms to communicate: SMS, email, Skype, Telegram, Hangouts, even Facebook Chat, and I’m always online (some of my teammates use even more communication tools). But I still prefer the personal meetings, which in my opinion could more effective. If a partner has time for me, I like to be informed about new positions personally, at the partner’s office or in a café… it doesn’t matter. The other thing is fast and honest feedback for both sides. If you provide and also get reliable feedback without bullshit, you and your client’s learning curve will be much steeper.

Usability also means comfort and flexibility for me: if a candidate is a night owl, I can talk him via Skype at midnight, if he/she is a morning person, I can wake up with the rising sun. I had a candidate who was a world champion in table soccer, so I talked with him during a table soccer match (he won).

The precondition for these is a close relationship which leads to trust, and trust is essential in recruitment business.

III. Feasible

Goal: Continuous growth while everybody is happy

It’s basically the opposite: if everybody is satisfied (clients, candidates, and your team as well) it guides you to continuous growth. Of course you need some network at the beginning to kickstart your recruitment agency, but from a really early stage your performance will drive your business.

If you define random but fine-sounding KPIs (like send 20 emails per day, organize 15 interviews per week) it doesn’t help you to reach feasibility. For example just a few well-targeted mails are more effective. Copy-pasted mass mails immediately go to spam folder of many devs.

Frameworks are nice to have if you would like to scale and become a big company with many employees and divisions. While the company is small enough, I think knowledge sharing is better than that: it’s faster and able to grow frameworks naturally. If you start with them, it’s easy to build bad habits and useless rules, but if you let your best practices evolve naturally, they will become fully tailored to your team and company. Both ways would lead to some mistakes, but learning from your mistakes is part of progress.

As I see the need for agency recruitment is getting bigger day by day, so for an enthusiastic, tech fan team, with well-designed frames, willingness to learn and work, feasibility shouldn’t be a problem.

To answer some questions from the beginning, I think it’s possible to look at your recruitment service as a product. In my opinion adopting this 3 attribute from Marty is nice and helpful, but still not enough. Just like in the case of a technical product, recruitment is also much more complicated. Simplifying is a cool thing when something is over-engineered, but could be dangerous if you would like to think in a simplified model in a complex business. All in all, I highly suggest looking at your recruitment service as a product you would like to be proud of. Design a valuable, usable and feasible one, and don’t forget to have fun.