How to kick-off hiring for a new role

Technical Recruitment #1

Hiring for technical roles is always a bit of a different story compared to other positions. The trends in the tech community constantly evolve and new programming languages and frameworks show up much more often nowadays than they used to. The need for qualified developers working with the newest technologies is increasing. At the same time, companies are multiplying actions to attract Software Developers with perks such as salaries above the market standards, full relocation packages, events, hackathons, fully remote roles, unlimited holidays, etc. As a startup, you will constantly compete with the unicorns and well-established tech leaders of the markets having more resources to attract their Software Engineers, especially in tech-hubs like Berlin.

With more and more tech startups on the market, developers are in great need. How do you prepare yourself to face the challenge of hiring them? We want to share some learnings based on years’ of experience in recruiting developers for companies such as solarisBank, Contentful, quantilope, and many others. In the Technical Recruitment series, we will answer the most asked questions on how to hire the best engineering talent.

We are starting with kicking-off the role itself. Hiring great tech teams starts with alignment on the process of hiring them itself.

Steps in kicking-off a role

Before you will start looking for the right people to join your company, it’s important that you will have clear expectations and an outline of the whole interviewing process. Here a few steps that will guide you through the role kick-off:

I — Set up the recruitment team

Kicking-off a role starts with choosing people who will be involved in the recruitment process.

• Hiring Manager(s) — people who, most likely, will manage the person directly once they are hired. It can also be a CTO or a Head of Product in smaller startups
• Interviewers — team members participating in the interviews
• Recruiters — people responsible for the talent acquisition process itself
• HR Team/Admin — people in charge of sending the contract and planning the onboarding. In a smaller startup, it may be a Recruiter

II — Define the role

The next step is to clearly define your expectation regarding the person you want to hire. This may include things such as:

• The vision of the company and how the role will contribute to it
• The vision of the role — what’s the possible career path, and what are the potential team and projects
• Skillset — programming languages, experience level, frameworks, and desired non-technical skills
• Budget — hiring budget, estimated salary, bonus, relocation costs, etc.
• Timing — when do you have to hire the person and how urgent is the role
• Location — is relocation an option, can the role be remote

To clearly define the role, sit with the Software Developers from your company and get their opinions and insights. They will know which skills are mandatory for the role and which can be acquired on the go. You will also get precious information about the biggest challenges of the role, the reasons why they joined the company, what the team workflow is, and so on. This will later help you with writing a great job description and shape your reach-out messages.

Here, you can also identify flexibility points. Decide what your priorities are and where you can make some compromises. Usually, you won’t get a Senior Engineer for a low price and as-soon-as-possible. You will have to make some trade-offs regarding budget, timing, and/or skills.

To help yourself a bit, you can use a scope triangle:

For example, a startup with a limited budget wants to hire a tech team and they need developers starting in 3 months. The budget is set and I need three developers to work on the product. A solution is to make compromises on the candidates’ skills. How? You can’t compromise on the tech stack but you can use the knowledge of two senior-level developers that are already on board to train the new-joiners. Instead of hiring people with multiple years of experience, you can recruit talented Junior Software Developers who just finished a bootcamp (top hands-on knowledge!) and are eager to learn.

III — Define the interviewing process

In this step, you will define the details of every step of the interviewing process For example:

• Who will be the person responsible for the first phone screen?
• Who will do a technical interview (is it going to be onsite or remote)
• Who will draft  the coding challenge and who will review it
• Who will do the cultural interview? (can be a classic interview or more casual, like coffee or lunch)
• Who will attend the recruiting debrief
• Who makes the final decision
• Who will do the offer call
• Who takes care of the contracts, visa, and onboarding

IV — Create the job description

The next step is to create a job description that you will use on job listing platforms, such as LinkedIn, Xing, AngelList, etc. Here are some things worth listing, along with some tips to keep in mind:

• Description of your company, its mission, and values
• General responsibilities and key tasks
• Describe the tech stack, technical challenges, and engineering culture
• Required qualifications, like required education, previous job experience, skills
• Things that are optional but good to have, like knowledge of a specific framework or experience working on a similar product
• Keep it short, attractive, and spontaneous. No buzz words, but a concrete overview of the role
• Include some open-source projects of the company or technical articles
• Challenges the engineer will solve in their role
• Impact that the engineer will make on the company

Make sure to have a basic template that you can reuse for future tech roles.

V — Brainstorm on sourcing strategy

The last step of the kick-off meeting is to decide where and how are you going to source for potential candidates:

• Which platforms for job posting are you going to use
• List of the companies to source from
• Best platforms for sourcing
• Relevant tech communities (Slack, GitHub, Reddit, etc.)
• Templates for reach-out messages
• Referral program and incentives
• Tech events and meetups
• Partnerships with bootcamps
• Description of an ideal profile

We are going to go back to sourcing in the next part of the Technical Recruitment series, so stay tuned!

Tips

To make the whole process easier, you can use a template that we have created. It’s going to walk you through the whole process so that you won’t miss any step:

DOWNLOAD OUR KICK-OFF MEETING TEMPLATE HERE

It’s also worth setting up a weekly stand-up meeting to sync with the recruitment team. In case something doesn’t go as expected, you will give your team an opportunity to share concerns and adapt your hiring strategy accordingly.

Some data to be shared during the meeting:

• Number of contacted candidates (with a response rate and interested candidates)
• Number of screened candidates
• Number of candidates in the technical interview
• Number of candidates in the second interview
• Number of candidates in the offer stage
• Number of candidates who accepted the offer
• Bottlenecks and solutions
• Action points for the week

Last but not least, a couple more tips:

• Document the hiring process to make it clear for the rest of the team
• Keep a clear view of the hiring priorities
• Keep track of the hiring data in a report (Excel, Applicant Tracking System, Airtable, Trello, or another tool)
• Organise monthly retrospectives to shape your hiring process accordingly
• Don’t forget to define and document clear administrative steps with your HR department and/or Recruiter for the contract, visa, and the onboarding.
• Always involve the tech team

We hope that your kick-off meeting goes well!