Selecting a winning engineering team can be intimidating, especially for first-time, non-technical founders. Recruiting great engineers involves four main challenges:
- Discovery.
- Commitment.
- Evaluation.
- Hiring.
Finding good engineers is a complex topic in itself, and there is a lot of information on how to structure offers, so the keys presented focus on how to engage and evaluate great candidates.
Commitment
Winning the attention of good candidates is key. Skipping the basics like getting featured through your network or posting engaging LinkedIn and StackOverflow ads, there are other things to consider.
Finish all interviews in two weeks maximum. This is one of the few advantages it has over recruiters and established companies.
It targets the top 25% of engineers, putting them in direct competition with the best recruiters in the industry. Because recruiters approach engineers all the time, they have become wary and even opaque around them. This offers an immediate advantage as a founder or startup manager.
Think of your opening message as a launch and make it interesting for them: talk about the magnitude of the problem you are solving and the impact it could have; talk about the cutting-edge technology being used and how they will have the freedom to shape the future of the company. No exaggeration, but it shouldn't look like they're swapping one cubicle for another either.
Most of the people you're contacting are probably not looking for a job, so you can't approach them with a dry copy-and-paste invitation to apply. Look at profiles, what communities they belong to, their interests, skills, background, who they follow, their GitHub profiles, etc.
Then customize your presentation accordingly and tell them why they're a great fit for your company, and vice versa.
Evaluation
Bad hiring choices can delay a project for months, even permanently, and lead to large technical debt. Experienced engineering managers are probably familiar with technology hiring, but non-technical founders and technical founders with no management experience should learn two basic rules first:
- Move quickly: Contact candidates no later than 48 hours after interviews, respond to questions promptly, and complete all interviews within two weeks. This is one of the few advantages you have over recruiters and established companies.
- To be interesting: You are being evaluated as much as the company is evaluating you. Build on the initial pitch as you get to know them better and keep selling the opportunity.
The reclaimer also wants answers to two fundamental questions:
- Can they get the job done and deliver results?
- Will they prosper in the company?
Data to answer these questions can be obtained through a screening call and, if authorized, three one-hour in-depth/on-site interviews. A good pool of candidates results in a screening pass rate of 20% to 30% and a start-to-finish conversion rate of 1% to 2,5%.
Contact point
The selection round should be a 30-45 minute call deciding whether both parties should spend more time on the process. Some things to watch for are:
- Communication and listening skills?
- Have you delivered significant projects in the last three years?
- What technologies were used?
- Do they know the technical and commercial KPIs of the projects?
- Do they know who the clients were and how their work affected them?
- Enthusiasm and passion when referring to your work?
- What interests you about the company?
- ...
It should not be used more than 20% to 30% of the time, as there is no time to go deeper.
Finally, it is necessary to highlight what were the individual contributions of the candidate with respect to those of the team. Some engineers can inflate their achievements by focusing on the team and the company, even if they have a small role in the performance of the project. You can proceed to the next stage if you are approximately 70% satisfied with the answers to avoid excessive filtering.
Software engineering
Good software engineers know more than just code. They know how to build usable, scalable, and secure solutions to spec, on time, and on budget. The great professionals can do it with one or more unknowns from the list.
If you have a technical background, check out software engineering fundamentals through a coding and troubleshooting interview. Startups should use real-world benchmark problems that cover basic data structures, scaling, design patterns, data manipulation, and more. Avoid the synthetic, granular exercises used by larger companies—you want someone who can deliver value from day one as part of a small team with diverse skillsets.
Provide compelling evidence, such as adding caching to an API that makes complex database calls, refactoring a large service into smaller, more efficient and powerful ones, finding bugs in non-obvious code, or efficiently storing and retrieving data based on of a particular use case.
Good candidates must be able to guide you through the thought process and ask good questions. Check if they have a good command of the language, with some room for maneuver for the pseudocode typical of a technical conversation in an interview.
If your interviewer is a non-technical founder and you can't trust a senior engineer (could be an employee, friend, mentor, or advisor), look to third-party recruiting services like automated code evaluation platforms like hacker Rank, coderbyte o codeility and interview-as-a-service companies like Carat, expertlead y Geektastic.
Both types of services work well, but more experienced, senior engineers tend to prefer the latter. Talking to good technical interviewers is much more engaging and tolerant of nuance than automated tests, to the point where many candidates may simply refuse to take them.
These services cost money, but the time saved and the reduced risk of contracting outweigh the costs. They can also interview several candidates in parallel in case they have the (mythical) problem of too many good prospects.
Alternatively, you can learn the basics through websites like somethingexpert, which has excellent basic data structure and system design courses. Learning the basics of a programming language like JavaScript or Python is easier than you might think, and helps to better understand the functions of a good engineer.
System design
Many engineers are competent at solving narrow technical problems or writing ideal code, but they can't go back from a business problem to a real-world solution. Established companies can compensate for this by having different skill sets on a team. In a startup, you need flexible, pragmatic, and skilled people who know how to build complete systems.
If you have a strong technical background, this is the time to ask questions like “doesHow would Uber design?» or “How would you implement Google Maps?”
Good candidates will ask a lot of clarifying questions about target performance, who the users are, what you want to achieve, and so on. Good candidates can calculate most of these points from basic fundamental assumptions, such as how much storage you need to power a Maps-like app for millions of users.
It may also be a good idea to ask your candidate to draw a concrete architecture diagram, choose the key components (eg, it's good to hear "Kafka" and why, not just "pub/sub"), and walk them through it. through your solution. It's important to choose a challenge that is related to what your business does, but make it clear that you're not just getting free advice from them.
Finishing the entire design is not important, but watch for signs that the candidate is overcomplicating the solution and provide suggestions to help them see the complexity.
If you are not a technical person, then the aforementioned interview-as-a-service companies can be of great help. It is key to specify what kind of challenges you want to use; For example, “Engineers who can solve problems related to e-commerce are required for the startup.”
Alternatively, you can study and use some design challenges available online and assume the role of a non-technical product manager during the interview. You may not be able to understand the finer technical details, but you can dig into the requirements, the pros and cons, what candidates leave out, and how well business needs are understood. This is also representative of how teamwork will really work in the future.
Values and capabilities
In this phase, a candidate's ability to communicate, work in a team, understand the business and customers, deal with difficult situations and get results are explored.
Check their motivations and what they want to achieve. This can be the difference between staying on hard times (which is a given in startups) or jumping ship when the new project feel is over. What are your long-term goals? What do they see in the new company that they are not achieving in their current role? What do you like about engineering, about your job in general (not the current position)?
You have to understand how their aspirations work and what they value. What were your greatest achievements and what did you learn from those experiences? What about your biggest mistakes? Do they blame others or focus on lessons learned? Do they know how to give and receive constructive feedback without confrontation? Do they like to tell others what to do or collaborate? How did they handle high-stress situations, like a major power outage or a critical deadline?
Finally, check what they know about business models. This is particularly important in startups, as you want engineers who know that the goal is not to produce software, but rather to serve customer needs. Do you know who your customers were and what mattered to them? What were your technical and business KPIs, and how did they correlate? What is the business model of your current company?
Once you've built a mental model of who they are, what they value, and what they want to achieve, you can understand whether they'll thrive in the new company. Combined with the functional knowledge and real-world problem-solving skills proven in previous milestones, a confident decision can be made as to whether it makes sense to move forward.
