● 9 min read · 1962 words

The People Lifecycle: Hiring, Onboarding, and Departures

Hiring

Building a great team starts with hiring the right people. A thoughtful, structured hiring process is essential for growing your engineering organization.

Hiring planning

• Quarterly hiring plan: Align hiring with business objectives and team capacity.
• Headcount allocation: Distribute headcount across teams based on priorities and workload.
• Timeline considerations: Account for lengthy interview processes — typically 4-8 weeks from req to offer.
• Budget planning: Plan for compensation, relocation, equipment, and onboarding costs. See Budgets & Headcount.

Job descriptions and interview plans

Job descriptions. Be specific about the role, its responsibilities, and the skills required. Include the technology stack and tools the team actually uses, and set clear expectations about level — junior, mid, senior, staff, and so on. Describe the team’s culture and working environment, and highlight the growth opportunities and learning paths a candidate can expect.

Interview plans. Design a consistent interview process for each role level, with multiple stages: an initial phone screen (around 30 minutes), a technical screen (roughly an hour of coding or system design), an onsite or virtual panel (four to five hours with multiple interviewers), and a final conversation focused on culture fit and leadership. Assign interviewers with diverse perspectives, and define evaluation criteria and scorecards for each interview so feedback is comparable across candidates.

Hiring manager and interview panel

Hiring manager responsibilities. The hiring manager owns the req from opening to close: defining role requirements and success criteria, reviewing all candidates, and making the final hiring decision. They coordinate with recruiting, schedule interviews, ensure consistent evaluation across candidates, and ultimately make offers and close candidates.

Interview panel. Assemble a diverse panel — different levels, backgrounds, and teams — and invest in interview training and calibration so the bar is shared rather than individual. Assign each interviewer a specific area to evaluate (coding, system design, culture fit, leadership, and so on), run a debrief after every candidate, and expect timely, structured feedback from everyone on the panel.

References

Always check references before making an offer, and ask specific questions about performance, collaboration, and growth areas rather than settling for generic endorsements. When appropriate and with the candidate’s permission, pursue back-channel references — they tend to be more candid than the list the candidate provides. Use the conversations to validate claims about past work and achievements, not just to confirm a positive impression.

An opinionated aside: hire PhDs for the important jobs

For the hardest, most load-bearing roles on your team — the people who will define systems, solve problems nobody has solved before, and carry the company through technical bets — I look for candidates with PhDs. Not because the degree itself matters, but because completing one is a costly signal for a specific combination of traits: endurance through a long, low-paid, high-pressure period; the discipline to stay focused on a single long-horizon goal; and the habit of going deep on problems rather than declaring victory at surface level. Self-driven, motivated to learn, willing to think hard about things that resist quick answers — these are the traits the PhD filter selects for.

The usual caveats apply: this is a heuristic, not a rule. Culture fit still has to pass. And some of the best engineers I’ve worked with were drop-outs — so the filter cuts both ways; stay curious when someone doesn’t fit the pattern.

For the repetitive, well-specified work, the PhD filter is overkill and usually counterproductive. Match the filter to the role.

Giving offers

Making an offer is a critical moment in the hiring process. Handle it thoughtfully to maximize acceptance rates.

Total compensation discussion

Components to discuss. Walk the candidate through every part of the package, not just the headline number. Start with base salary, informed by market rates for the role and location, and cover equity compensation — options or RSUs, discussed in more detail below. Explain any bonuses in play, whether performance, signing, or relocation assistance, and the benefits that surround them: health insurance, 401k matching, PTO, and so on. Be explicit about the vesting schedule (typically four years with a one-year cliff) and about how refresh grants work for top performers over time.

Best practices. Be transparent about your compensation philosophy and explain the full package rather than letting the conversation collapse to base salary. Give real context on equity value and upside so the candidate can evaluate it honestly, and be prepared to negotiate within the bands you’ve defined. Move quickly once you’ve decided — top candidates almost always have multiple offers, and speed is part of the message.

Job description and responsibilities

The offer letter should clearly state the job title and reporting structure, the key responsibilities and initial projects the candidate will own, and the start date along with the location or remote policy. Where applicable, it should also cover the probation period and the at-will employment terms.

Understanding options and RSUs

Equity compensation can be confusing for candidates. As a hiring manager, you should be able to explain it clearly.

Stock options

Stock options give the holder the right to purchase company stock at a fixed strike price. They typically vest over four years with a one-year cliff, and come with an exercise window — the period after leaving in which options can still be exercised — that is usually 90 days, though some companies extend it to as long as ten years. Taxation depends on whether the options are ISOs or NSOs, with different implications at exercise and at sale. The strike price itself is set by a 409A valuation, which is worth explaining to candidates who haven’t encountered it before.

RSUs (Restricted Stock Units)

RSUs are company shares granted outright that vest over time, usually on a schedule similar to options — four years with a one-year cliff. Unlike options, they’re taxed as income when they vest rather than at exercise. Their real value depends heavily on liquidity: RSUs at a public company are straightforwardly valuable, while at a private company the timing of any actual payout is much less certain.

Explaining equity value

Walk candidates through the current valuation and share price, and be candid about both the potential upside and the risks. Compare equity value honestly against cash compensation so the tradeoff is legible, and be straightforward about liquidity timelines — whether that means an eventual IPO, an acquisition, or access through the secondary market.

Onboarding

First impressions matter. A structured onboarding process sets new hires up for success.

30-60-90 day plans

Create a standard onboarding plan template and customize it for each hire.

First 30 days — Learning. The focus in the first month is absorbing context. The new hire should work through the onboarding checklist — access, tools, documentation — and meet with team members and key stakeholders across the organization. Shadowing experienced engineers accelerates this, and small contributions like bug fixes or documentation help them get hands-on with the codebase without pressure. By the end of the month they should have a working understanding of the codebase architecture, the development workflow, and the team’s processes and rituals.

Days 31-60 — Contributing. The second month is about starting to produce. The new hire takes on their first substantive project and begins participating meaningfully in code reviews. Regular 1:1s with their manager should be a fixture by now, and they should be building relationships across teams rather than staying confined to their own. Expect them to contribute to team discussions and planning, not just observe them.

Days 61-90 — Ownership. By the third month the new hire should be owning a feature or component end-to-end and leading a small project or initiative of their own. They should be in a position to mentor or help onboard newer team members, and to demonstrate real proficiency in the team’s tech stack. This is also when they should receive their first performance feedback — a checkpoint on both progress and fit.

Onboarding best practices

Assign an onboarding buddy who is not the manager — the dynamic is different, and new hires will ask a buddy things they won’t ask their manager. Schedule regular check-ins (daily in the first week, then weekly) and provide clear short-term goals and success criteria so progress is legible to both sides. Over-communicate expectations and context rather than assuming they’ll be picked up by osmosis, and solicit feedback on the onboarding process itself — the people who just went through it are your best source of signal on what to improve.

Attrition

People leave companies. How you handle attrition defines your organization’s culture and reputation.

Types of attrition

Regrettable attrition. The worst kind — losing high performers you wanted to retain. Minimizing this is a core part of the job.

When someone resigns, the first instinct is often a counteroffer: can you match what they’ve been offered? In practice this is usually a temporary fix. Money is rarely the real root cause, and if someone is actively interviewing there are almost always deeper issues at play — counteroffers rarely hold for long. The more useful move is to understand why they’re leaving. Is it a lack of growth opportunities? A poor relationship with their manager (which may mean you)? Misalignment with the company’s direction? Or a genuinely better opportunity elsewhere that no counteroffer could match? The longer-term retention strategies that actually move the needle are regular career conversations and growth planning, competitive compensation with equity refreshes, recognition and visibility for contributions, and — above all — challenging, meaningful work.

Non-regrettable attrition. People who aren’t meeting expectations or are poor culture fits. Sometimes it’s best for everyone if they move on.

This kind of departure is often the best outcome for all involved, with the minimum blast radius. Keep the transition amicable and communicate it clearly to the team, and stay in control of the narrative rather than letting rumors fill the vacuum. Provide fair severance and references where appropriate, and run an exit interview so you actually learn something from the experience.

Attrition benchmarks

Startup attrition and tenure typically run in the two-to-three-year range. Startups that are doing well and growing tend to see tenure stretch into the five-to-seven-year range. Industry benchmarks vary by sector, but 10-15% annual attrition is typical for tech.

Startup years are like dog years. One year at a startup can feel like seven at a larger company — things move faster, responsibility ramps faster, and burnout arrives faster. Plan your retention investments accordingly.

Managing departures

When someone resigns, start with a candid conversation to understand their reasons — an exit interview done with genuine curiosity, not HR theater. From there, manage the transition by defining a clear knowledge transfer and handoff plan, and communicate to the team transparently about the departure rather than letting speculation fill the gap. Run a short team retrospective on what you can learn from the exit, and then plan the backfill deliberately: hire a replacement, or redistribute the work? Don’t default to “backfill” without thinking about whether the shape of the team still makes sense.

Reducing regrettable attrition

Conduct regular stay interviews, not just exit interviews — the time to learn why someone might leave is before they’ve decided to. Monitor team engagement and satisfaction continually rather than annually, and provide clear growth paths and opportunities so ambitious people don’t have to leave to advance. Recognize and reward top performers visibly, and address toxic team members quickly — one bad actor drives out several good ones. Invest in strong manager-employee relationships, both yours with each report and theirs across the team. Finally, ensure compensation is competitive: you don’t need to win on comp, but you can’t afford to lose badly.

The best retention strategy is hiring the right people, giving them meaningful work, and treating them well. Everything else is damage control.