What qualities should you look for in good tech talent?
Within our Techspace community, finding and hiring the best talent is often cited as one of the biggest struggles to overcome. But when your key objective is to scale up, it’s a challenge you need to face head on.
We asked our community about the right approach to take when interviewing and searching for good tech talent, and how you can determine if your candidate is right for the job.
First, we spoke to Hung Lee, CEO & Founder of Workshape.io, a matching service for tech talent, who explained the importance that CEO’s should be placing on recruitment.
“Founders need to allocate appropriate budget and time to find the right sort of people — it’s not something you can do in an administrative fashion.
“Often recruitment isn’t perceived as important as growth, sales, or investment but it needs to be a top table agenda item. And at early stage, the CEO has to be spending the appropriate amount of time doing this.
“There’s also a big change going from 1–10 employees compared to 10–50. In these cases, it’s no longer about hiring the people you already know, you need to be going beyond your immediate network. Everything that worked before is likely to have to change. For that type of scale-up — you ideally need to hire a Head of Talent or an interim recruiter to support the work.”
Hung also explained that you need to be clear on the mindset of the tech talent you need to hire at the stage of your business growth: “Do you need innovators or optimisers? As a CEO you’ve got to be really careful of the personalities and make sure they are ‘stage appropriate’.”
“A developer who only wants to work on fresh greenfield projects might not be great fit to your team if your product is already code complete, gaining traction and generating revenue, regardless of how great his CV might be.
At this stage, you’re more likely to need an optimising mindset — someone who can work with the existing codebase and improve it, as you’re not in a position to tear it all down and start again.
Of course a developer who can do both is ideal but is a truly rare bird.”
We also turned to our own software developer Matt Blewitt to share some insights into the key things he is looking for when interviewing talent.
“They must have a desire to learn and be coachable. Two things so closely related it is unusual to see one without the other.”
He added, “Having a desire to learn and grow, be it their programming ability, to writing or public speaking, and also being receptive to guidance and constructive criticism is invaluable.”
Matt also mentioned that candidates must be task relevant mature, a term from Andrew S. Grove’s High Output Management. “They must have an ability to do the job without supervision, so look for relevant experience and skill depth. The exception to this is when you are hiring specifically for low TRM people like junior developers.”
Finally, Matt advised that you should be looking for able communicators, “From intra-team communications on technical decision making, code review and coordination, to inter-team communication on requirements and solution delivery, being able to communicate their ideas and feelings is paramount.”
To sum things up here are our top tips on what to look for when recruiting good tech talent:
- Allocate appropriate budget and time to your recruitment
- Decide whether you need an innovator or an optimiser
- Look for a desire to learn and be coachable
- Look for confidence to do the job without supervision
- Candidates should be able communicators
Look out for our upcoming programme of events for Techspace members coming soon.
