How Automattic’s Amandeep Scaled Tech Recruitment from 50 to 500 Engineers in 18 Months

How did Automattic’s Amandeep scale his tech recruitment from 50 to 500 engineers in 18 months?

Back in December 2022, we ran a webinar with InHouseRecruitment and Amandeep Shergill, Director of Recruiting at Automattic.

The objective was to help 100s of in-house recruitment teams learn from Amandeep’s experience of rapid scaling hiring of 500+ engineers in under 18 months. As anyone working in tech recruitment would know, this isn’t easy, let alone for a rather unknown brand.

Unknown did you say?

Automattic is weirdly both known and unknown. Seeing Automttic owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, we already know they run 40% of the web with 1 billion+ users every month. Yet, nobody really knows the Automattic brand. It’s not quite like Bloomberg, Google or Facebook.

Below you’ll find the full 40 min webinar if you’d like to revisit it. To make it faster and easier to digest, here’s a summary of what we covered:

So what did we cover?

1 | Build the Right Team

If you need to scale fast, using outside RPO type companies like Scede.io helps, but treat them as part of the core team.

The right team is important, and we hear it’s difficult to find good tech recruiters. Recruitment companies like VentureUp use TechMap to train non-tech recruiters to master tech in a few weeks — Jake told us it was a cheaper and more efficient way to hire versus trying to find an experienced tech recruiter

If you want a way to rapidly teach non-tech recruiters tech, it’s the ideal programme. Within 2 weeks of completing the course, the first consultant to go through TechMap was working on a CTO level role and comfortable with having conversations with leaders in our field.

• Jake Whittall, CEO/Founder Venture Up

2 | Your Tech Recruitment “Stack” Matters

Amandeep tested lots of tools. Above is his hit-list with the likes of Calendly, GreenHouse, Diversely, Prelude, LinkedIn and StarCircle.

Amandeep really insisted on 2 important points:

Be sure all tools you use are fully integrated, so the data can flow nicely between your tools, else it’s a bit of a waste of time. Don’t over-do it. Too many tools kills the broth, as they now say. Have less tools but each actually providing a good ROI.

3 | Onboarding onboarding onboarding

One thing managers ommit is having an in-depth onboarding process. We want people to hit the ground running fast, yes. But we shouldn’t do this at expense of making sure our recruiters actually get the team, the culture, the tech and exactly the kind of people to look for.

As they say: sometimes it’s better to slow down, to run faster. At Automattic, recruiters like software engineers spend time on customer service as part of their onboarding — this is useful to really understand the product and the culture.

4 | Train them up

This is of course where we come in. We met Amandeep via an introduction. Amandeep is extremely knowledgeable about tech, which makes him really good at his job and an excellent leader.

This is why it was a no-brainer to him to invest in training his entire team (yes, the entire team, including those with 10+ years experience in tech) with TechMap.

When we spoke to Amandeep, he said something like:

Truth be told, I don’t know how tech-savvy is everyone in my team. I can expect those with more experience will know more, but how much more? Best to put everyone through TechMap, this way I know for sure they have at least that same foundation

After the recruitment team, we’ve now started training Program Managers at Automattic.

5 | Your Hiring Process

A 40 hour paid trial? Yes, that’s nuts!

We thought so too when we first discovered what it was like to interview at Automattic. In a candidate-poor market, does it make sense to make it so long and complicated to hire a tech person?

Turns out: maybe yes! Whilst it’s a painful process, and it won’t work for everyone, at least it stands out and provides both the candidate and Automattic with a clear view on whether they want to work together. For this reason, their pass-through-rate is out of this world and with a 95% acceptance rate.

Important side note: as for being fully distributed, having such a long trial also makes it more difficult for more diverse candidates to apply, including junior engineers. So not all is perfect in this world.

6 | What do candidates care about?

Tech recruiters should really aim to focus the conversation with tech talent around their aspirations in the following years.

What they previously did matters, for sure. But what’s most important is what they’d like to learn next. Software engineers (I include the whole stack here, including data, devops, cybersec etc.) are hungry learners, always wanting to master new tools, skills and grow. So rather than focus on the perks (which is now all expected), how about changing the conversation around future aspirations?

That’s a short summary of the 40min conversation we had. Want more? Check-out the full-blown webinar.

Here’s the Webinar if you want to re-watch it