Hiring Process
The ideal goal of the developer hiring process should be to bring aboard people that can help you deliver quality software solutions. In practice, many organizations struggle to implement a good hiring process that attracts talented individuals and identifies those who will be happy and help the company succeed. Many hiring practices, especially when not performed well, deter top applicants from accepting offers. These practices include coding during interviews, homework coding assignments, aptitude tests, interviewers unprepared to perform an interview, interviews expecting great answers on very specific technical topics, human resource department screenings that disqualify good candidates for reasons unrelated to how the candidate may perform on the job, and more. The hiring process does not directly contribute to the success your team may have adopting any practices, but it does affect the quality of the personnel on your teams. Some organizations use a selection process, similar to a hiring process, to choose the people to be on a team to deliver a software solution. In such contexts, the selection process certainly has an impact on the software solution that is eventually deployed.
What is your hiring process like?
- We identify gaps in our skill sets and hire people that can fill those gaps
- HR provides us candidates after narrowing the list based on HR/Company guidelines that don’t consider our team needs
- One or two people decide which candidates to interview based on resumes
- One or two people conduct unstructured interviews
- Every member of the team an applicant might join participates in the interview
- Every applicant is given the same questions and tests as part of the interview
Example Hiring Pipelines
- Lightweight pipeline for small teams
- Deep technical pipeline for mission‑critical systems
- Pair‑programming interview pipeline
- Portfolio‑based pipeline for creative engineering roles
Good Practices
- Structured interview rubrics
- Candidate experience guidelines
- Bias‑reduction techniques
- “Day in the life” previews
Anti‑Patterns
- Trivia‑based interviews
- Unprepared interviewers
- Homework assignments with no feedback
- HR filters that eliminate strong candidates
Templates
- Interview scorecards
- Role competency matrix
- Candidate communication scripts