Hiring Software Engineers: Tactics and Postings (1/5)

Note: The thoughts contained in this post are my own through 10+ years of hiring software engineers. I am not a licensed HR professional. This is the first in a series1 that will cover a range of topics for engineering leaders to consider while hiring software individuals.

Hiring is broken. Companies post jobs online, share them through social media channels and hope for a deluge of candidates. In reality, unless the company is FAANG, this NEVER happens. The competition for individuals in today’s hiring landscape is fierce. Unemployment is low and many companies of all industries are vying for engineers. Couple that with a short supply of engineering talent and we get a fiercely competitive environment for attracting talent. If you feel this as a hiring manager in technology, let’s discuss some ways you can make yourself stand out against the competition.

Tactics

At a bare minimum, there needs to be a job posting online and it needs to be circulated on various social media channels. If your company has a talent acquisition department, you need to PARTNER with them as engineering leadership.

Not too long ago Greg, an engineering manager for a team of 5, was tasked with hiring 10 addtional engineers in a year for a company unknown to most candidates. Greg understood the nuances of the hiring landscape and delegated large swatchs of hiring to HR. HR knew how to hire as they just hired 25 new employees in the last month in a company less than 50! HR did everything they could for outreach on LinkedIn and StackOverflow but got a 0% response rate in a month. Greg was astonished and decided to change his tactic. Instead of delegating, Greg partnered with HR and started owning outreach, messaging and phone screening of engineers. Low and behold, Greg achieved an 80% response rate while reaching out to the same number of candidates.

In the above anecdote, Greg uncovered something very interesting. Engineers respond much better to other engineers! Let’s posit some hypotheses as to why this may be: 1) Engineers have reruiter fatigue from constantly being solicited across various channels. It is sad to say but HR and talent acquisition are put into the same bucket as recruiters. 2) Engineers respond better to other engineers because they feel their time is valued.
3) Engineers respond to “higher ranking” engineers in attempts to potentially learn something. 4) Incentives from different parties alter the conversation significantly.

Thinking about my own behaviors, I have realized that I ignore most recruiter communication unless I have an existing relationship with that recruiter. On the flip side, I respond to every CTO that reaches out to me. My rationale in that is solely due to incentive alignment. The CTO is taking time out of their busy schedule to talk to me whereas it is a recruiters/HR’s job to do this outreach. From the CTO, I would expect to get an unfiltered view of engineering and their place in the organization where I would not get that perspective from HR or the recruiter. HR/Recruiters are incentivized to paint a picture perfect representation of the company. I feel this as recruiters are paid by placement and HR generally has incentivization around hiring. CTOs have a wide array of incentives of which hiring may be one piece but is dwarfed by other incentives.

Given these hypotheses, it is highly recommended to have engineering hiring managers employ tactics that involves outreach and initial phone screens. This tactic will drastically improve the top of your hiring pipeline and have an impact on the perceived value from the candidate. Engineering hiring managers need to effectively partner with HR to ensure a healthy candidate pipeline and provide value for the candidates. While hiring is intense these days, if a candidate walks away from interactions and feels either that their time was valued or they received knowledge or value in your interactions with them, then you have drastically increased your chances in having them progress in your hiring pipeline.

Posting Essentials

Outreach and phone screens are helpful in engaging with potential candidates. Prior to these efforts, you need to get them into your pipeline. This is where your job posting will help attract the candidates you desire. Here are five essentials2 to include in your post.

1. Measure Impact, Not Years of Experience

Imagine the following scenario:
1) Tim, an engineer with 10 years experience, has focused on one single aspect of a platform and fine tuned every aspect of that system regardless of the cost or benefit. The company Tim works for can afford this as they have 100s of engineers that are highly specialized and focused on these tasks. 2) Ben, an engineering with 5 years experience, worked on high impact projects like internal automation systems, automated payment systems and more. Ben claims that his systems increased the business by 500% within one year and another 200% within his last two years.

Which of the two engineers above would you prefer to hire? It absolutely depends on the role in question. Tim is an absolute expert in X, one of a handful. If you have that need in your organization, you hire Tim! Every other scenario that does not involve Tim’s expertise, Ben would probably be the right choice. Ben has a proven track record of increasing business value by some nominal value. At the end of the day, we are looking for a combination of expertise and business value.

2. Include Personal Qualities Needed for Success

Every company values different qualities for different roles. The values needed to be successful as a C-Suite individual compared to a Sales Rep are different. It is absolutely critical that these are shared in a job posting so candidates can fully understand what it would take to be successful at your company.

As an example when I was hiring, I generally included empathy as a quality needed for engineers. My reasoning was that we need engineers to be problem solvers of the highest degree. In order to achieve this, we need engineers to fully understand the problems they are solving. Given that most problems are customer (internal or external) centric, you need your engineers to empathize with the customer and eventually prescribe a solution. Without the empathy, it would just be another task on their JIRA board that never gets completed. In addition, empathy among engineers helps with process building, code review, mentoring and so much more.

Regardless of what those qualities are, your metrics of success for the role need to be distilled down to personal qualities that will help potential employees achieve success.

3. Succinctly Describe the Company

There are so many companies out there, competing against one another for the same talent. Not everyone will know what your company does and as such, a brief description about the company needs to be present in the posting. You should not allocate more than a paragraph to this as it is less important than the role itself. Your pool of candidates will probably skim this section to understand industry, culture and a few other items.

4. Describe the Process Involved

One of the murkiest parts of hiring is the actual hiring process. Is it 4 people I have to speak with over 2 days? Or is it 4 days? Is there a whiteboarding exercise? Come on, everyone dislikes whiteboarding right?

Detailing your process will help align individuals that apply and increase your qualified pool of candidates. You would be surprised how many people will drop out during your whiteboarding exercise. Instead of spending all the time to get to that point on someone who will 100% drop out, they should self select at time of looking at the job posting. An exemplary example of this is Gitlab. They have this amazing detailed document dedicated to talking about their process and even embed a small snippet about timelines on a specific post like the below block:

Hiring Process
Applicants for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that applicants can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find her/his job title on our team page.
 
 - Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with our Recruiting team
 - Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute first interview with our VP of Engineering
 - Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute second peer interview with our Director of Backend
 - Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute third interview with an Engineering team member
 - Finally, candidates may be asked to schedule a 50 minute final interview with our CEO
 - Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email
  
  Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

This is exactly what someone needs to know so as to go about their interview process!

5. Include a Salary Range

This is hotly contested in hiring circles these days. The rationale is that anyone performing outreach and phone screens need to ensure the time spent on these activies are high value touchpoints. High value in this scenario means that the candidates being reached out to or being screened are qualified candidates. Without including a salary range, candidates in your pipeline are not fully qualified as they might be too expensive for your company.

Let’s be respectful of everyones time and include a salary range.

Summary

Engineering hiring managers need to optimize their job postings to obtain as many qualified candidates as possible. In addition, engineering hiring managers need to effectively partner with HR and own outreach and phone screens. Generally speaking, due to incentives and other industry nuanaces, candidates respond better when speaking with other technical individuals.

Photo Attribution

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

Footnotes

1. Thoughts on the current hiring landscape and tactics to help you grow your pipeline.
2. Tips on effectively managing your hiring pipeline as an engineering leader.
3. Effective internal hiring processes to keep candidates engaged.
4. Skills to look for that will benefit your company.
5. Making the offer pop.

that are effective at attracting qualified resumes.