CHAPTER
1
Introduction
This chapter describes the audience and scope of this book and suggests how you can use it to recruit the best software engineers available. It explains the central themes: hiring well is a competitive advantage, treat candidates as well as you treat customers, and take an engineering approach to the recruiting and hiring process. This chapter also provides a troubleshooting table to identify the appropriate chapters for answers to the most common and easily articulated questions.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is intended for technical managers who need to hire software engineers to build core software applications. Technical managers at all levels of hiring experience will benefit from this book—from absolute beginners looking for a place to start to veterans looking for ways to optimize the hiring process. That includes software development managers, directors, chief technology officers (CTOs), and entrepreneurs.
This book is not meant to be a deep analysis of the realm of recruiting. Some topics, such as sourcing candidates, are treated lightly, as hiring managers are less likely to need to drive that process personally. You will, however, learn enough about sourcing to work with and help sourcers and to pinch-hit in that role.
The topics addressed in depth are the most useful to hiring managers, addressing critical points and issues with detail. That includes optimizing the overall process, evaluating résumés, conducting interviews, asking interview questions and interpreting answers, and maximizing the use of allies and partners, such as professional recruiters.
The software engineers who are the subjects of the hiring process described in this book work under many titles:
- Software Engineer
- Software Design Engineer
- Software Development Engineer
- Software Development Engineer in Test
- Principal Engineer
- Programmer
- Lead Engineer
- Java Developer
- UI Developer
- .NET Developer
- Systems Analyst
To a lesser degree, this book will also be helpful when hiring people with the following job titles:
How to Use This Book If You’re Pressed for Time
The chapters of this book are modular, in the sense that you may read a given chapter in isolation from preceding chapters. After reading this introduction, you may jump to the parts that are specifically relevant to your current recruiting needs. Here’s a quick troubleshooting guide.
| Not sure what kind of person to hire? | Chapter 1 |
| Process is slow or unwieldy? | Chapter 2 |
| Not finding enough candidates? | Chapter 3 |
| Résumés don’t help distinguish good candidates from bad candidates? | Chapter 4 |
| Interviews aren’t going well, or not hiring at all? | Chapter 5 |
| Interview questions are mysterious? | Chapter 6 |
| Hiring decisions are difficult or random? | Chapter 7 |
| Candidates don’t accept offers? | Chapter 8 |
| New hires don’t thrive? | Chapter 9 |
Content Overview
There are several professions dedicated to aspects of recruiting and entire sciences dedicated to measuring human capability. This book is not a replacement for or even an introduction to these professions and sciences. It is a compendium of the practical knowledge, heuristics, and tips that I have found and observed to be critically useful for managers hiring software engineers.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are concerned with defining what sort of engineers you want, evaluating and optimizing the overall process of hiring them, and finding candidates, respectively.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 drill down into the interview process: reading résumés, running interviews, and creating and asking technical questions.
Chapters 8, 9, and 10 discuss hiring decisions, making offers, and getting newly hired engineers off to a great start.
Hiring is closely regulated by federal and state law. Although the information I present here is, to the best of my knowledge, both practical and legal in my jurisdiction at the time of writing, I am not a lawyer and I proffer no legal advice in this book. Always consult your company’s human resources (HR) department and counsel before making changes to your hiring process.
Analytic versus Intuitive Styles
Everyone has a different style of approach to solving problems. Some rely on intuition; others rely on analysis. Any person usually uses a combination of these methods with one predominating.
The stereotype for engineers and engineering managers is that of a highly analytical person who uses careful reasoning, charts, logic, and mathematics to make decisions. The truth is very different: most people are not analytical most of the time.1 In my experience, engineers analyze only slightly more than the average person does. That modicum of analysis is usually sufficient, but it’s a mistake to assume that there is a careful framework behind each of an engineer’s decisions.
It is possible to be quite successful in any number of fields going by intuition and rough estimation. I present analytical tools in this work—such as maintaining and analyzing detailed records of candidates, interviews, and interviewers—but I do not condemn or deprecate decision making by other means. As a professional, you should rely on the tools that you know work. The existence of an efficient tool is not sufficient reason to compel you to learn it and use it. All tools require training and investment, and the more they resemble tools you’re familiar with, the easier they will be to master. If you’re an intuitive person, some of the tools and methods in this work may seem like overkill to you.
That’s all right. This is not an all-or-nothing system. Pick out the parts that are sensible and feasible for you and your situation, and disregard the rest or stash them away for future use. Where there are tools and methods that work most effectively in concert together, I point that out. Adapt the ideas and make them your own. If you can make sensible judgments without a calculus, go right ahead. If you find that the analytical results don’t match your experience, needs, or sensibility, do the right thing for you and your business.
As I tell my employees: never suspend your judgment (especially when I ask you to).
The Competitive Advantage
The day-to-day activity of the employees of a company at all levels—from broad strategy set by executives in the C-suite to the commonplace choices and prioritizations made by interns in the mailroom—drives success in the short and long run. Each person contributes to the whole by performing or failing to perform every day.
Productivity compounds. Improvement, optimization, eliminating waste and unnecessary tasks, deftly creating a brilliant customer experience with small and easy touches—all the natural and continuous kaizen that occurs by the actions of talented, skilled, and motivated employees—will drive (or in its absence, fail to drive) growth and success.
Employees are the lifeblood of the organization—your organization—and your success depends on their success. You set up them up for it with tools, comfortable environments, encouragement, guidance, strong coworkers, and appropriate and strategically important goals, but the raw material of talent and prehoned skills you start with determines how they use this and whether they achieve today’s and tomorrow’s goals. As a result, a discrepancy in employee capability between competing companies will drive a widening gap in their productivity and innovation levels, which in turn results in a gap in serving customers and overall competitiveness.
Over the years since the formation of the modern software industry, there have appeared tools such as career websites, knowledgeable headhunters, boutique recruiting firms, résumé repositories, recruiting coordination systems, and some specialized HR roles. General momentum in this area has improved the situation across the industry, and companies willing to invest in tools, process, staffing, and training have benefited even more.
In the big picture of business optimization, the science of effective technical hiring has barely changed. It has not received a fraction of the attention and effort that has gone into logistics, construction process, or development tools, such as languages, compilers, and integrated development environments.
I suspect this is due to a general perception that hiring is driven by luck or intuition, and that the managers who tackle these problems are generally uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the process and working for or with recruiters who are not especially technically minded.
However we got here, there are opportunities to do much better than average. Bring in better talent and more skilled employees and you have built or shored up the foundations of a great and successful business.
A small difference in hiring effectiveness will amplify over time into a substantial competitive advantage. You don’t need to have the best recruiting and hiring method in existence, but any improvement you make and any movement above average will benefit you considerably.
Central Ideas
While engineering my own recruiting processes, I found three key ideas that reliably improved each step and decision. These themes, elaborated here, are taking an engineering approach, relying on evidence, and treating candidates as customers.
Recruiting is a process with inputs and outputs and actions in between, so it’s within the realm of engineering, and we can treat it as an engineerable subject.
This book is not framed as “Here’s my way, which is the right way”—but is instead an examination of the process and its components, highlighting the role of thoughtful, intentional choices. It’s your process because you own the outcome. That outcome is extremely important to your success, so it deserves your attention and the application of your hard-won skills, energy, resources, and creativity.
You may have inherited a process (or find yourself inside one), but that process is not everything it can be or must be to drive your success. Instead, think of that process as a prototype and a list of parts. Look at it like an engineer would: figure out how it works, how it doesn’t work, and what makes it run quickly and slowly. Take care with what you put into it and how it behaves, and examine the output regularly to make sure it’s running the way you want and need it to run.
Every section in this book describes recurrent realities and discusses options for dealing with them and succeeding. It’s not a “this-is-my-method-follow-it-and-you-will-be-successful” book because that’s not realistic. What I do varies with time and circumstance, and your time and circumstances vary from mine. It would be impertinent to insist on a particular hiring process.
Instead, I am lending you my perspective on the nature and purpose of the general hiring process for software engineers and many of the options you have available while building and tinkering with your own hiring machine. It’s an approach that says, “Here are the kinds of parts that fit into this slot, and what’s worked for me best has been XYZ—but keep in mind that I don’t necessarily know all the parts that fit into your particular slot.”
The keys to great engineering are meticulousness and creativity. Attention to detail, and returning your attention to it over time, will drive your ability to find what needs to change. Designing an optimal new process will take all your creativity, and the very best process you can craft will take you past what’s in this book and beyond what anyone currently knows how to make.
Effective decisions require data that represent reality. Much of the information we need to make great hiring decisions is hidden in noise: inaccurate résumés, irrelevant personal data, ambiguous answers to interview questions, and so on. The purpose of interviewing is to identify the useful information by separating signal from noise, so we must be diligent and thorough in rooting out the truth.
Paired with the need for good data is a perennial need for effective decision making. All too frequently we lead with intuition and back it up with whatever evidence is at hand. We have many biases that we don’t normally detect or even know exist, and our colleagues in the recruiting process have them, too.
Humans have built-in cognitive defects that we can adjust for if we are vigilant and purposeful, understanding and working with our limitations. We are unconsciously prone to anchoring, confirmation bias, framing effects, and all sorts of pitfalls described in chapters 4 through 7.
Long-term success is usually the result of consistently applied strategy and principles. This book takes an engineering approach to the strategy and tactics of hiring; making a sound decision also involves applying behavioral principles rooted in human feelings. The principle I have had the most success with is that candidates are customers.
Thinking of candidates as customers caused a shift in the way I treated them and my overall approach to fine-tuning the recruiting process. Teaching my teams to think of candidates as customers not only elevated the candidates’ experience when interviewing with us, it also increased my teams’ empathy with the candidates. The interviewers thought more deeply about their own actions and interpreted candidates’ behaviors more in the context of potentially working together—and less against an abstract ideal. Allies in the recruiting team appreciated how much easier it was to work with happier candidates, and negotiations became more likely to succeed. It also avoided losing or alienating real customers, and every customer counts.
Employees have tremendous investment in their work, from acquiring a job to putting in daily effort to move products forward, so they typically take job hunting quite seriously. You may remember doing so yourself!
Software engineers know that there’s a lot riding on landing the right job. They need to secure suitable compensation, they need an environment to grow their skills and career, they need a job that maintains their interest and stimulates their active and powerful minds, and they need a bit of dependable stability. Too much stress can hurt them; too little can demotivate. Engineers can lose their jobs at any moment through a company’s caprice, so they must have a basic sense of trust that the employer is stable, reasonable, and humane.
You can establish that trust with your own behavior. The hiring process has a large number of actions that a candidate can see, so they are exposed to a lot of what your company does—more specifically, what you do—and will draw conclusions about your character.
All people want to work with and for people who respect and care about others—the fundamental hallmarks of good customer service. Treating all candidates with respect and (affordable) deference makes for a smooth and effective process all around. Your players—interviewers, recruiters, and so on—will know the right thing to do most of the time, whether they are trying to follow a well-established procedure book or winging it.
Last, hiring is a human process. You find, evaluate, hire, or pass on folks just like yourself. This critical idea boils down to a simple prescription: treat candidates as human beings.
1 See, for example, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: FSG, 2011).