Howtohireengineers,byanengineer

It has been a few years since I have been part of the recruitment process. Still, I recently went through the hiring process myself, so I will mix a bit from both sides for this article to give you some insight from the perspective of a job seeker and from the other side of the table. I’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and what caused me not to consider a company—because, spoiler alert, engineers are contacted a lot.

First, I need to introduce a hard truth, as it will be the foundation of many of my points and is likely the most important takeaway: Your company is not unique.

Unless your tech brand is among the top X in the world, your company alone isn’t a selling point. I have been contacted by so many companies that thought because they were leaders in their field or had a “great product,” candidates would come banging on their door. If I could disclose all those messages, it would be easy to see that they all say almost the same thing, and chances are your job listing is the same. Sorry. The takeaway from this is that if everything is equal, any misstep in your hiring process can cost you that candidate. So if you are not among the strongest of tech brands, you need to be extremely aware, or you will not fill the position.

Okay, after that slap in the face, we can take a second to look at something…

A lot of people focus on skills when hiring. Of course, the candidate should have the skills for the position, but I will make a case to put less focus on the hard skills and more focus on passion.

Typically, screening for skills through an interview is hard, and techniques like code challenges have their own issues, but more on that later. Screening for passion is easier; you can usually get a good feeling if a candidate is passionate about a specific topic. And passionate people want to learn! So even if the candidate has limited skills, if they have passion, they will learn and outgrow a candidate with experience but no passion.

Filling a team with technical skills can solve an immediate requirement, but companies, teams, and products change. Your requirements will change along with them. Building a passionate team will adjust and evolve, whereas a team consisting of skilled people but without passion will stay where they were when you hired them.

Another issue I see in many job postings is requiring a long list of skills. It would be awesome to find someone skilled in everything who could solve all tasks. In the real world, whenever you add another skill to that list, you are limiting the list of candidates that would fit. So chances are you are not going to find anyone, or the actual skills of any candidate in that very narrow list will be much lower than in a wider pool. A better way is to just add the most important skills and teach the candidate any less important skills on the job. If you hired passionate people, this should be possible. (Remember to screen for passion for learning new things.)

While we’re on the expected skill list, a lot of companies have this list of “it would be really nice if you had these skills.” Well, those could definitely be framed as learning experiences instead. If you have recruited passionate people, seeing that they will learn new cool skills counts as a plus, and any candidate who already has the skill will see it and think, “Awesome, I am already uniquely suited for the job!”

I promised to talk a bit about code challenges. They can be useful to screen a candidate’s ability to just go in and start to work from day one, and if done correctly, they can help a manager organize their process to best suit the team’s unique skills, but…

Hiring at the moment is hard! As stated, pretty much any job listing I have seen is identical. So just as in a competitive job market where a small outlier on your resume lands you in the pile never read through, it is just as likely in a competitive hiring market that your listing never gets acted upon.

Engineers are contacted a lot by recruiters, and speaking to all would require a lot of work. So, if a company has a prolonged process, it quickly gets sorted out, especially by the best candidates who most likely get contacted the most and most likely have a full-time job, so time is a scarce resource. So, be aware that if you use time-consuming processes such as the code challenge, you might miss out on the best candidates.

Please just disclose the salary range. From being connected to a few hundred recruiters here on LinkedIn, I can see that this isn’t just me but a general issue. As mentioned before, it takes very little to have your listings ignored, and most of your strongest potential candidates already have full-time jobs and would not want to move to a position paying less unless the position were absolutely unique (which, again, yours most likely isn’t). Therefore, if you choose not to disclose the salary range, be aware that you will miss out on most of the best candidates. A company will get an immediate “no” from me if they don’t disclose the salary range.

Lastly, I have spent a lot of words telling you that your company or position isn’t unique, and well, we both know that isn’t accurate; your company most likely has something unique to offer, be that soft values or hard benefits. Be sure to put them in your job listing to bring out this uniqueness; it is what is going to set you apart from the other listings. There are a lot of other companies with the same tech stack, using an agile approach, with a high degree of autonomy, with a great team… But what can you offer that no one else can? Get it front and center. Recruiting is marketing, and good copywriting is key.