Asking this one question will increase the quality of your Software Engineering hires while also decreasing your time to hire

How about that for a click bait headline?

In my experience, the biggest hurdle in hiring for a team is not labour market constraints, salary packages or any factors outside of the team’s control. It is down to the team not knowing what they are looking for. Sorry for anyone coming here looking for the magic interview question.

So here’s the one question

“Can you define (or describe) a good hire for this vacancy?”

As a Tech Recruiter, you have to adopt the persona of both the good cop and bad cop to sometimes get an answer to this and it normally takes a good 15 minutes of probing and pushing the Hiring Managers to get an answer. They always finally give in, though/

So here’s why it’s such a good question!

There are normally at least 2 but likely to be more people involved in a hiring decision. Each person involved has a different idea in their head of what a good hire is, but they all think they share the same thoughts. In addition to this, at least 1 person in the hiring decision process will be risk adverse so will base their decision mainly on a tick boxing exercise of technical skills and experiences.

Normally when you keep pushing on getting an answer to the question with the decision makers, they find a common answer which normally includes the following characteristics with some other customer/team specific requirements

1 — Relevant technical background, but not to the level of expertise that the most risk adverse of the hiring group had thought

2 — Someone who has experience in making their team better, or for more junior roles, someone who has the desire and interests in making their team better

3 — Someone who can read code. If you can read and improve code, then it’s almost guaranteed you can write code.

4 — Someone who cares about what they do. This does not mean they have a github account brimming with personal and side projects — but it means they write solid, well tested code during their working hours.

Now here’s the most important part of this question — when you get an answer, document it and hold the hiring decision makers accountable to it. This simple exercise will open up a whole new talent pool to your teams that who invariably will be from a diverse background and will bring experiences that your team will not have.