Building anything from scratch is hard work. It takes guts, determination and a bucket load of coffee. Sief Khafagi knows this first hand – he was tasked with building a leadership pipeline for the production engineering team at Facebook – starting with just a handful of talent, he grew this pipeline to hundreds in just six months. The pipeline was so successful that Facebook hired nearly 800% more leaders in that year than the previous two years combined.

Ahead of his session at HR Innovation & Tech Fest NZ 2018, Sief gives us an inside look into how he achieved this incredible feat, and offers some advice for growing your own talent pipeline.

I was brought in specifically to recruit senior and leadership engineering talent. Facebook hadn't had a need for a sourcing function for leadership in the past within this org, but brought me on to start this when their need grew. When I joined there was little process, we didn't know what we were looking for, and so we started everything from scratch and had to figure it out as we went. We quickly found there was a very small pool of leadership talent and we would run out much quicker than we would have liked. So we had to figure out how to continually innovate around what we're looking for.

There were a few things we did that worked (and a lot that didn't as well!). Here are my top 4 pieces of advice for anyone looking to grow their talent pipeline.

1. Understand the Landscape
At the beginning I spent the majority of my time trying to understand the market and doing a lot of talent mapping. We basically spent the first three to six months just trying things and analysing them. This person made sense on paper, but how did they perform in the interview? What did we learn? I've probably read through hundreds of pieces of feedback from previous interviews over the last six to eight years, to understand what has and hasn't worked well in the past in terms of backgrounds.

2. Prepare Your Candidates Well
We noticed that had a lot of candidates who were failing the on-site stage, and we were wondering why. Was it us? Was it them? Was it a combination? We ended up redefining our candidate preparation material, giving candidates more information and resources to better prepare them for the interview. We keep this information high level (we don't give away questions or anything that could be practiced at home and copied onto a whiteboard), and as a result we've seen a dramatic increase in our on-site-to-offer ratio – it's almost doubled since we started doing this. We found that investing in candidate preparation saves time, money, and most importantly it's just a better candidate experience in general. You'll be surprised what happens when candidates know what's coming, they actually do well!

3. Host Events
We started putting on events to showcase what it's like to work at Facebook and some of the cool things we work on. We didn't actually know if we were going to make a hire from the event, but we hoped one day they would work with us or would tell their friends about us. We also did some events highlighting diversity, how we are pushing the boundaries of scale and ensuring we had a great blend of people from companies of all shapes and sizes to throw ideas around. In our first year we did two or three events, this year I think we'll likely more than double that, so we're scaling up our events which is exciting.

4. Look Carefully at Your Post-Interview Process
Lastly, we revamped the post-interview experience with our hiring managers. What were their expectations? How can we influence decision making as we're recruiting? How can we teach our hiring partners what really exists in the market over time? What we've found is it actually changes more often than you might think – every 2-3 months there's a slight shift in terms of what the market can offer and what we're looking for at Facebook. It's quite a struggle because you want to give everyone a consistent experience. So we had to figure out how to best communicate with our hiring managers “Hey, you're looking for this, but it doesn't exist at this moment.â€' There's a lot of back and forth.

Starting a sourcing function from scratch was fun and challenging, and I'm really proud of what we achieved. We've been able to understand our recruiting function on a granular level to continuously improve the outcomes. It's satisfying to see that it is now the benchmark for a lot of other leadership organisations – just the other day I had a guy reach out to me from an organisation without a defined leadership function, wondering how we do our interviews and why. It's great to know we're building a template that can be applied to other organisations to help them thrive, and I'm really looking forward to sharing this with the HR Innovation & Tech Fest community in New Zealand.

I'm excited to learn about how non-US companies operate talent, I think there's a lot to learn. I'm curious to see how other teams hire globally, I'm sure there's a lot of things that we don't even consider, maybe because of cultural differences. And vice versa, I think it's going to be really beneficial for the HR Innovation & Tech Fest NZ community to learn how we do things. And I've never been to New Zealand, so it should be fun!

About the Speaker

Sief Khafagi is responsible for recruiting senior and leadership engineering talent at Facebook. Prior to that he built and sold a technical recruiting agency (KGW), cofounded a career accelerator (Pathrise – YC W18) for students and grads who want to work in tech, and built multiple teams at Apple. Today, he shares his stories, advice, experience, tips, tricks and more on Quora and at events around the world.