Does this sound familiar to you? “There are barely any good senior developers out there. Even the good ones are hard to find.” While this might be true to an extent, it is important to note that there exists a considerable amount of great senior developers in the market. The trick is to know how to identify these talents.
A lot of technology companies are using the wrong parameters when assessing potential senior developers. This inadvertently filters out a lot of great candidates. A rework of the recruitment and evaluation process is needed to enable you to find and select the right Technical Leads for your organisation. This article serves as a guide for Technical Managers, CTOs or HR Managers tasked with the responsibility of hiring senior developers.
A common mistake that hiring managers make when hiring technical talent is to focus mostly on technical competence. While this is important, it fails to capture other soft skills like the candidate’s ability to solve problems, innovate, think creatively and work well with the rest of the team.
Test of Ability to Problem Solve
There are a lot of software engineers who are competent in various programming languages. However, to test for a candidate’s problem-solving skills, pose a coding challenge that is not limited to any programming language. You are presenting the candidate with a problem and asking him/her to code a solution to the problem in any language of choice.
What this test does is evaluate the candidate’s ability to quickly come up with solutions and how creative those solutions are. There are a number of online resources available to help with this part of the evaluation process, however, without proper guidance by technical recruitment experts, these tests have the potential to produce false positives or false negatives.
Test of Ability to Communicate
One of the biggest challenges for software engineers is not technical competency. It is communications. Being able to effectively communicate ideas or thought processes to various teams is a skill that is critical for a Senior Developer to possess. One way to test for this skill is to ask a candidate to talk you through a list of projects they have worked on or contributed to. You want to see how well they can explain it to you in both technical and layman terms.
A great Technical lead essentially has to be able to speak two languages — technical and non-technical. The right candidate should be able to communicate what the engineering team is working on to the non-technical unit of the organisation while relaying the management’s expectations to his technical team in the right technical terms.
Test of Ability to Work with a Team Effectively
Before hiring a Senior Software Engineer, you want to be sure that they will be a great fit for your already existing technical team. This is critical to the growth and success of the team as well as the entire company.
See how they treat non-technical members of the company by asking one of them to have a chat with the candidates when they first come in for the interview. Are they patient or irritated when explaining what they do? Do they have a positive and can-do attitude? Are they comfortable with working on group projects with both junior and senior developers?
The answer to these questions can be determined by asking the candidates questions about themselves in a casual, non-interview manner. Engage the candidate in a chat and ask them a number of questions about their personality, motivation, mistakes made in the line of work, type of people they like to work with etc.