9 things you need to know to be more successful when hiring engineers
Mehdi Shahinmehr — Head of Backend Engineering at Yoyo
As a hiring manager for a software development team, you can never be 100% sure about how your new engineer is going to perform but you can do things to improve your chances for a successful hiring.
Hiring a good team of software developers is a difficult task. You’ll have to work hard to find the right CVs and make sure the candidate you’re interviewing is going to be a suitable addition to the team, come up to speed quickly and deliver.
There are so many companies looking for the same expertise as you do so you only have a limited amount of time to find, interview and hire your ideal addition to the team. Even if you offer the role to the right candidate, there is no guarantee they accept your offer.
On the other hand, when you hire, there are plenty of things that can go wrong. They may underperform, or may not get along with others in the team well.
Here are 9 things you can do to be more successful with hiring.
Know what the role involves
- Which team will the candidate join? You’ll need to know which team your new hire is going to fit in and what they are going to work on. “Go out there and hire great engineers” approach is not a good idea.
- What is the technical strategy for that team? You should know the teams technical strategy to be able to think about potential skills that you need the candidate to have in the near future and also to know the potential progression for the role.
- What is the cultural dynamics in that team? Think about how to find the candidate with the right working culture. You’ll need to think about it as finding a fine line between keeping the positive aspects of the current collaboration as well as complementing potential areas of improvement in the team. That brings in the subject of diversity both from technical and cultural point of view within the team. For example if your company is in loyalty and payment business and you already have an engineer coming from loyalty background, you may look to hire someone with experience in the payment industry. Same approach could apply to the cultural aspects. Diversity is a vast topic which needs a separate article.
Sell the role
Candidates will be willing to find out about the interesting aspects of the sector your company is in, the culture, benefits, future plans etc. Be prepared to sell the role to them before they ask. To do that, you’ll need to know the areas where your company is strong at and can interest candidates. Examples could be having a great, new and on demand technical stack or having greenfield projects ahead or giving personal development time to your team as we do here at Yoyo.
Be quick
The hiring market is very competitive at the moment and companies have to quickly identify and hire good engineers. Therefore, traditional interview processes where you ask the candidates to do take home tests for you and come in for several face to face interviews won’t work. By the time you get to the second round with your good candidates, they get offers from other companies and move on. So you’d have to be smart in designing your interview process to quickly evaluate candidates as accurately as possible. At Yoyo we do a 20 minutes phone interview to touch on technical and cultural questions and then if all good, we’ll have one face to face interview where we test them in depth from technical and cultural points of view.
Plan your interview
It is absolutely essential for interviewers to know what they are looking to find out about the candidate. Each interviewer will play their specific role in there. It will put off candidates if everyone goes in and asks the same questions and they have to repeat themselves. Things like “Why are you leaving your current role” should be asked once.
Culture over tech
I would not hire a superstar who is not the right culture fit for the company. Hiring the wrong culture can cause many issues in the team and break the whole dynamic and harmony. The new hire may still deliver great job but they might damage the performance of others in the team. Besides, it is much harder to change the working culture and ethics compared to learning new technical skills. There are so many smart people out there who can be superstars within the right environment. So to us, right culture and attitude comes first.
Involve people
For the interviews, try to involve people from all parts of the team that the role is going to work with and give them specific areas to evaluate them for. For example, for a senior backend developer role, I would involve senior backend developers from the team they are going to work with for technical evaluation, product managers to evaluate their understanding of the business and processes and finally heads of engineering or CTO for cultural fit. I would make sure the interviewers know what they are going to cover in their evaluations.
Be decisive
After the interview you should have made your mind if that’s a hire or not. If you haven’t, you have not interviewed well. Anyhow, you’ll have to be decisive. If they have not been able to convince you that’s a no hire. Never compromise the requirements, so if in doubt that’s a no.
It’s just the beginning
Remember, as soon as they accept your offer it’s just the beginning. Now you’ll have to plan a proper on-boarding for your new hire and have an accurate plan on evaluating their probation. In Yoyo, we give new developers a 30/60/90 days set of goals and that would be the base of their probation review.
It’s ok to fail
These tips will only increase your chance of hiring the right engineer. You may do all that and still hire the wrong person. New hires may fail in achieving their goals in probation period or realise the role is not for them. That’s ok. That is why probation period exists. You do the best you can to make sure the candidate is a good fit for the role but nothing is guaranteed.
