How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers

Want a great software development team? Look no further. How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team is a field guide and instruction manual for finding and hiring excellent engineers that fit your team, drive your success, and provide you with a competitive advantage. Focusing on proven methods, the book guides you through creating and tailoring a hiring process specific to your needs. You’ll learn to establish, implement, evaluate, and fine-tune a successful hiring process from beginning to end.

Some studies show that really good programmers can be as much as 5 or even 10 times more productive than the rest. How do you find these rock star developers? Patrick McCuller, an experienced engineering and hiring manager, has made answering that question part of his life’s work, and the result is this book. It covers sourcing talent, preparing for interviews, developing questions and exercises that reveal talent (or the lack thereof), handling common and uncommon situations, and onboarding your new hires.

How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers will make your hiring much more effective, providing a long-term edge for your projects. It will:

• Teach you everything you need to know to find and evaluate great software developers.
• Explain why and how you should consider candidates as customers, which makes offers easy to negotiate and close.
• Give you the methods to create and engineer an optimized process for your business from job description to onboarding and the hundreds of details in between.
• Provide analytical tools and metrics to help you improve the quality of your hires.

This book will prove invaluable to new managers. But McCuller’s deep thinking on the subject will also help veteran managers who understand the essential importance of finding just the right person to move projects forward. Put into practice, the hiring process this book prescribes will not just improve the success rate of your projects—it’ll make your work life easier and lot more fun.

What you’ll learn

You will learn to:

• Find and attract excellent developers that fit your needs.
• Evaluate candidates effectively by resume, phone screen, and interview.
• Create revealing technical interview questions and how to best evaluate answers.
• Organize and optimize interviews and interview teams.
• Work effectively with recruiters, sourcers, and the rest of the hiring bestiary.
• Chart and track the hiring process so you can understand, customize, and improve it.
• Understand the legal issues in hiring.

Who this book is for

This book is for technical managers who need to hire productive software engineers, from absolute beginners looking for a place to start to veterans looking for ways to optimize and hire more effectively. The audience includes software development managers, directors, CTOs, and entrepreneurs.

Table of Contents

Introduction

–Who Should Read This Book

–How to Use This Book If You’re Pressed for Time

–Content Overview

Analytic vs. Intuitive Styles

Legal Issues in Hiring

The Competitive Advantage

–Central Ideas

An Engineering Approach

Candidates as Customers

Chapter 1

Talent Management

–Team Planning

Specialists and Generalists

Talent Portfolio

–Defining and Choosing Roles

–Market Research

–Can You Hire?

Chapter 2

Candidate Lifecycle

–Candidate As Customer

Building a Great Customer Experience

–Lifecycle

–Pipeline: Moving Candidates

Documenting the Process

–Roles

Sourcer

Scheduler

Recruiter

Hiring Manager

–Reverse Engineering

Recruiting Workflow

Diagrams

Candidate’s Perspective

Hiring Manager’s Perspective

Funnels, Filters, and Choke Points

Avoiding Resume Deluge

–Changing the Process

Change and Fairness

–Establish Goals

Hiring Rate

Completion Date

Skill-level targets

Calendar Time to Hire

Predictability

Cost

Time

Capital Expenditure

Optimization

–Sources of Information

–Debugging the Process

Enlist Your Engineers

Chapter 3

Finding Candidates

–The Market

Sizing Your Market

Opening up Your Market

Ageism

Sexism

Racism and Nationalism

–Job Descriptions

Purpose

Investment

Evolution and Multiple Descriptions

Considerations

Alternatives to Job Descriptions

Sell Sheet

Anti-patterns and Pitfalls

Diagramming

–Referrals

–Getting the Word Out

–Career Portals

–Job Boards, Mailing lists, Ads

Job Boards

Networks: Contacts

Specialized and Regional lists

Regional Associations

Targeted General Advertisement

Sponsored Contests (TopCoder, etc.)

Conferences

Stunts

–Professionals: Internal

–Professionals: Recruiting

–Advertising Agencies

–Working with Recruiters

–Recruiter Brief

–Establishing and Maintaining Relationships

–External Recruiters / Headhunters

–Anti-patterns and Pitfalls

–Internal Recruiters

–Contract to Hire

–Doing it Yourself

Your Network

Being a Sourcer

Spontaneous Opportunities

–The Long-Term Plan

Hiring Honeypot

Talent Attracts Talent

Incompetence Repels Talent

Do Something Interesting

Chapter 4

Resumes

–Resumes

–Reading a Resume

Irrelevant Information

Troublesome Information

Errors and Confusion

–Evaluating a Resume

–Developing Evaluation Skill

Red, Yellow, and Green Flags

Minimize Bias

Final Decision

Anti-patterns and Pitfalls

–References

–Searching the Internet

–Verification

–Evaluation Horror Story

Chapter 5

Interviews

–Measurement and Error

–Candidate as Customer

Candidate Guides

Example Guide

Horror Story

–Setting up Interviews

Travel Arrangements

Physical Environment: Rooms

Accessibility

–The Interview Team

–Roles

Coordinator

Greeter

Hiring Manager

Interviewer

–Qualifying Interviewers

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Language

Field of Expertise

–Disqualifying Interviewers

–Training Interviewers

…