How do you hire technical people? This is always a struggle, especially for start-up companies. How do you ensure that you’re hiring the right technical people for the position? How do you build a robust, dynamic team that works well together?
Here are some guidelines that I follow. I came up with these by trial and error and by talking about interviewing and hiring with others. I used these guidelines when hiring for smaller companies and I have implemented them when building technical teams at large companies.
Before Posting the Job
Figure out the technical functions that will be required of the new hire. For instance, if you’re building a web platform then the functions could include headers like UI/UX, Backend, APIs, etc. Each function should then be broken down into the specific technical skills used. So the UI/UX function may include technical skills like Human Factors Engineering, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, etc. Organize the technical functions and technical skills in a spreadsheet. Leave column A blank and put the technical functions in row 1 and the technologies for each technical function in row 2. Some technologies could be in multiple technical functions. You need to decide if you want to weight those technologies more heavily by keeping them in both technical functions or only have them show up in one of the technical functions. Depending on the needs of your organization and project it’s a good idea to include soft skills. Some examples are Documentation, Communication Skills, Volunteer Work, etc. Choose functions or skills that are important to your organization or project.
Resumes
While reading through resumes put the candidate’s name in the first column of the spreadsheet. Give the candidate a point value for a technical skill they describe in their resume that matches one of the technical skills you’re looking for. The point value is somewhat arbitrary. Start with one point for each technology unless it seems like they have more experience with that specific technology than required by the position. Be sure to evaluate each candidate for any of the soft skills you identified.
Sum the points for each candidate to get an idea of which ones have the skill-sets needed. Interview the candidates with the highest point values but exceptions can be made for candidates that have something that stands out in their resume (like being a volunteer computer programming instructor at the jail).
Interviewing
Before interviewing it’s important to develop a technical skills quiz. What are the most important skills needed for the position? Once those are identified, write the quiz to have two or three syntax questions or find-the-bug questions. The last question should be a programming question that the candidate being interviewed can do on their own time. It’s best to have a question that will take about an hour to complete. Plan on giving the quiz at the end of the interview.
I like interviews to be more of a free-flowing conversation. During the conversation, I want to make sure I ask the following questions with the understanding that the more details the candidate provides, the better:
- Out of all your projects, which one did you love the most and why?
- Out of all your projects, which one did you hate the most and why?
- What are some of the technical problems you encountered on these projects and how did you overcome them?
- What are some of the interpersonal problems you encountered on these projects and how did you overcome them?
From the answers to these questions, I hope to be able to know what types of projects the candidate likes to work on, what types of projects they struggle with, how technical they are, and how well they work with others.
After these questions are answered it’s time for the quiz. Go over all the questions verbally and have them answer every question (except the last one) verbally and discuss their answers. If needed, interject follow-up quiz questions like, “Congrats, you found the bug. Now looking at this code, how could you change it so that it’s easier to maintain?” The last question, the one where they are required to write code, is usually done on their own time. Have them send their answer to you. Tell them that everything is open book so they are free to use the internet to help write the code. Ask that they document which sites they used for references and include links to those sites when they submit their answer. Another aspect of the quiz is to ask the candidate to set the date and time when they will complete the take-home portion of the quiz. If the candidate is unable to finish the quiz within the time they specified, then they may struggle to complete their work on time.
Make a Choice
After each interview write down what you thought about that candidate. Where have they succeeded in the past? Where have they struggled? Do they have the technical skills to complete the required tasks? After every candidate has been interviewed, sit down with your hiring team and decide which ones did the best in the interviews and make your choices.
Hope for the Best
A couple of years ago I was working on a large project and our company hired a consultant firm to help out. We were discussing how to find good, technical people, and one of the project managers from the consultant firm said that’s kind of crap-shoot. Yes, have a technical skills quiz. Yes, try and get the candidates to talk about their past technical problems and solutions. But at the end of the day, you never really know if someone is a good fit with your company until you work with them.
