When you are hiring new developers for your team, do you start thinking about how to best evaluate their coding chops? While evaluating skills is certainly a very important part of evaluating job candidates, it’s not the only criterion at what will make the candidate, team, and organization successful in their mission and goals. This article explores all the key criteria in making a successful developer hire.
Recruiting and hiring is an expensive process, taking hours of people’s time to recruit, interview, hire, onboard, and train developers. Hiring a person that is a poor fit for the job can be a significant setback.
When hiring a developer, adapt the process to your business
Recruiting, hiring, and interviewing techniques must to be adapted to your business’s size, culture, location, job responsibilities, and other factors. What works for Google and Microsoft isn’t fully applicable to a startup looking to hire its fifth developer, an enterprise seeking a software architect to lead application rationalization, or a small business that’s looking to develop mobile applications. And if your organization doesn’t hire a lot of software developers, the techniques used to recruit developers are likely to be different and potentially more challenging than for hiring for other roles.
Hiring the right developer requires some marketing and sales techniques to pique a developer’s interest and strong interpersonal skills to recognize quickly whether candidates will be good fits for the team. It often takes a developer to hire a developer, and having technologists directly involved in the full recruiting process is a strong necessity compared to hiring for other business and technology roles. This hiring collaboration with developers may be a new concept for technologists, in-house recruiters, and human resources staff tasked with filling open positions—but you should do it.
What follows are seven specific steps to take when hiring a developer. Be sure to adapt them along the lines just outlined.
