LOOKING TO HIRE SOME GREAT ENGINEERS?
Great engineers have the right personality characteristics baked into their DNA. What are they?
If you’re looking to hire software engineers, what kind of experiences, technical skills, knowledge, and more make up a good-to-great software engineer? Could the “soft” less tangible personality and approach-to-work qualities of the individual software engineer actually be more important to your organization in the long run than:
- The school that they graduated from?
- The list of programming languages that they’re familiar with, can code in, and can debug?
- The enterprise applications they’ve worked on before?
- The companies that they’ve worked for in the past?
The assertion in this blog post is – probably “yes.”
Therefore, keeping that in mind along with the obvious conclusion that you can’t create great software without recruiting and then hiring great software engineers, it begs several key questions that we hope will be helpful to hiring managers looking for additional software engineers, software designers, software programmers and software QA testers.
4 Key Tips When Trying to Recruit Great Software Engineers for Hire
- What makes a good-to-great software engineer?
- How do you get great software engineers into an interview process?
- How do you pre-screen software engineer candidates to ensure they have the experiences, technical skills, and knowledge prior to the internal interview stage?
- And even tougher, how do you pre-screen software engineer candidates to ensure they have the right personality and approach-to-work qualities that personify great software engineers?
FIRST – What makes a great software engineer?
#1 Start with a list that you and your organization believe in.
Do you have such a list? If not, here is a starter list for you that are looking to recruit software engineers, culled from (what else) some Google work:
- Have the right educational background
- Possess a strong analytical aptitude
- Show an ability to think and speak logically
- Are mathematically inclined
- Can explain software and software code to others clearly and in simple terms
- Have the right technical knowledge and experience to fit your requirements
- Get the big picture of what the over-all software effort is trying to achieve
- Understand software security and software code that is vulnerable to unauthorized manipulation
- Understand how software procedures impact software performance
Once you have such a list that works for you, someone should next develop a list of interview questions that can be used to “test” all candidates against these key attributes.
SECOND – How do you get great software engineers into an interview process?
#2 Don’t just post openings and wait
In today’s competitive hiring market for talented, experienced software engineers, post-and-wait is not the best strategy. Particularly when the good-to-great software engineers all have jobs, and aren’t necessarily looking for a new one!
Finding good software engineers is a job best suited for people that specialize in this area: people that are employed in an on-going effort of building a living, current database of “passive” (and even super-passive) engineer candidates. These people are called:
These are the kind of professionals that are employed in an on-going effort of building a living/current database of “passive” (and even super-passive!) engineering job candidates. It’s a hard job! It takes a lot of work and skill! And you should definitely hire one if you realistically hope to find “passive” candidates as you will likely never find them alone by just employing a “post-and-wait” hiring methodology.
Engineer recruiting and staffing firms such as those just described above (like George Konik Associates) live, eat, and breath searching out and finding engineers that have the right skills, experience, and personality characteristics that you’ll want to interview for your organization. And professional recruiting firms like GKA are continually building and maintaining a proprietary database of passive candidates. And when done correctly, the candidate database can be sliced and diced and searched through in granular detail to help you find just what you’re looking for. Furthermore, in many (if not most) of the cases the recruiters have had on-going personal contact with many of the potential passive candidates over time. Which means that the candidates both respect and (most importantly) trust them.
A passive candidate is defined as: presently employed, but not currently looking for a new opportunity. When including the 15% of professionals who are super-passive, this group of potential software engineering professionals accounts for up to 75% – 90% of the engineering workforce at the present time. And a key benefit of pursuing “passive candidates” for you is that since these passive candidates are not presently/actively looking for a new opportunity right now, they’re by definition not interviewing with anyone else and may be both pleasantly flattered and intrigued by a new job opportunity just “coming out of the blue.”
THIRD – How do you pre-screen software engineer candidates to ensure they have the experiences, technical skills, and knowledge prior to the internal interview stage?
#3 You don’t, your recruiter does.
Trust your chosen professional recruiting firm to their job. They do it all the time. And if they’re good, they will take the time to closely align with your needs and thinking and therefore vet every candidate thoroughly and properly before ever presenting them to you. Their reputation and on-going success depends on it. You can and should trust them to do this job well.
FOURTH – How do you pre-screen software engineer candidates to ensure they have the right personality and approach-to-work qualities that personify great software engineers?
#4 You work with your recruiter to develop a list like this one below, and then it’s THEIR job to ethically research the candidates personal and professional background, endorsements, and so forth, and interview the candidates deeply and thoroughly against your list.
Here below is a great list we found to get you started building your own list!
SOURCE: What Makes A Great Software Engineer? Paul Luo Li, Andrew J. Ko, Jiamin Zhu + Microsoft Seattle, WA {pal,jiaminz}@microsoft.com The Information School of the University of Washington ajko@uw.edu
To conduct further research on this topic of recruiting great software engineers based on their personality characteristics do this simple Google Search: http://bit.ly/1qE54eQ
George Konik Associates http://www.georgekonik.com/about-mn-technical-recruiting-specialists