Hiring Software Engineers
Hiring may be the single most important factor for a company for a few reasons:
1. Investors invest in people, not in great ideas
2. For start-ups and small businesses, every hire is crucial
3. Great people attract great people
4. Culture is defined by hires
Hiring is a skill.
But if it’s so important, then why is there so much ambiguity around it? Why do so many companies trust third party vendors to staff their teams?
It’s difficult, time consuming, and easy to outsource. Now, let’s focus on Software Engineers…
How long does hiring software engineers generally take? According to Glassdoor, it takes 40.8 days to hire each software developer.
Here are just a few things that go into the hiring process:
- Understanding hiring needs (skill specific)Understanding the market (supply and demand)
- Sourcing candidatesInterview process (Intro chats, tech screens, onsites, references)
- Job posting boards and potential Agencies
Hiring Needs — How many additional engineers will your company need this year? If you’re planning on doubling an engineer team from 10 to 20, that’s about one hire a month.
The Market — Are you aware of how many candidates are actually in your market?
Sourcing Candidates — Do you have sourcing strategies to fuel your hiring funnel?
Interview process — What is your interview process? Is it shorter or longer that your competitors? Are you asking the right questions?
Job posting boards and Agencies — Is your position public or stealth? Does your company have the budget to use Agencies?
Now, let’s dig a bit deeper into the interview process and for simplicity, let’s reserve each process for one week at a time.
Does your interview process look like this?
How many intro chats do you have with a candidate?
How many tech screens/onsites?
How many references will you check? How long do you give candidates to accept/decline the offer?
Keep in mind that every extra step increases the time that it takes per hire.
Now think of all the factors that go into a single candidate’s interview process. It’s a lot. It’s no joke that hiring software engineers is challenging. And to make matters worse, it can get really messy as you add more candidates in play.
Thankfully, there’s hope. There are plenty of resources to make the hiring process more manageable (Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday to name a few).
Creating a standardized interview process will help with the following:
- Candidate experience
- Time per hire
- Employee engagement
- Offer acceptance rate
Brainstorming great interview questions and assigning each interviewer to different questions is one way to help reduce ambiguity.
Another is to define what a good and bad answer looks like. Don’t assume that everyone is on the same page.
Does everyone on the panel know what we’re expecting from this candidate? Is everyone prepped on the candidate’s background? Is our interview environment threatening? Did we do everything we could to make the candidate feel comfortable during the interview?
Hiring is a skill.
In the blogs to follow, I’ll be discussing topics such as Agency Recruitment, Importance of Diversity and Inclusion, Candidate Experience, Attracting and Retaining Talent, and more!
Always here for comments and questions. Thanks for reading! See you next time.
