Hiring a person can be time-consuming and difficult. And it can be costly. According to the US Department of Labor, the average cost of a bad hire is at least 30% of the employee’s first-year income.
In nonmonetary impact, a bad hire will cause mounting friction within the team, team demoralization, and reduced productivity. And I'm sure many of you have struggled with a situation when the "wrong" person joined the team.
Here are the 5 things I look at to make sure I'm hiring the right tech talent:
It’s important that the candidate is well rounded in software engineering. They do not need to know the details of every technology stack out there, but they should have foundational software engineering knowledge. I don't look for an exact match. I look for a good fit.
There’s no job in the world that does not require communicating with others. Whether it's teammates, customers, or people from other departments, a software engineer is expected to collaborate with other people.
When interviewing a candidate, I focus on how they articulate their ideas and if they can convey the message in simple sentences. For non-native English speakers, I assess their fluency in English.
No candidate is expected to exactly match the position requirements. An often-overlooked skill is the ability to learn – and this is what we try to identify in a candidate. We ask questions about what they learned in their previous roles and how much personal effort they made to that effect. More importantly, did they show the desire to learn for the sake of getting that new position?
While good candidates do their work well, excellent candidates produce knowledge outside of their position realm. This can take the form of technical articles on Medium, LinkedIn, their personal blog, or it can be contribution to prominent open-source projects or even YouTube tutorials. Sharing is a sign of abundance.
Nothing beats a passionate software engineer. You can tell if someone is passionate about a topic by just listening to them talking about it. Some other signs that you could watch for include strong opinions on subject matters, a long commitment to a specific technology or work aspect, and – surprisingly – a career shift. People who shift career signal a late awareness to a topic of interest and a strong will to pursue their ambition.
With these 5 criteria in mind, I maximize the odds that the person I'm hiring is the right one - although there's no silver bullet for building a team.
What are the things you focus on the most when hiring a tech talent? Let me know in the comments.
Hiring the right tech talent requires evaluating technical skills, communication, learning ability, knowledge sharing, and passion. Focusing on these traits increases your chances of building a strong and productive team.
Fadi Boulos is the founder of Supportful, a software engineering consulting firm based out of Lebanon. He enables startups in the US and Europe to augment their teams with remote engineers from Lebanon, helping reduce the brain drain in the country and preserve the human capital of its small communities. Fadi has 20 years of experience working in the tech space in the UK, France, and Lebanon, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Nantes, France.
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