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 a [...]
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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 learnYou 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 ContentsIntroduction --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 Shadowing Classes and Workshops Documents and Guides Coaching Practice Interviews --Tracking and Profiling Interviewers --Standing Interview Teams and Dynamic Teams Scheduling Dynamic Teams Meta-Schedule Example --Interview Structure Pre-interview Qualifiers: Barriers to Entry Assignments --Phone Screens Missing Context Problem Complexity Problematic Questions Coding Anti-patterns and Pitfalls Phone Screen Structure --On Site Interviews Length of Interview Day Number and Length of Interview Sessions Hand-off Models Lunch interviews Interviewers Between and After Sessions --Remote Interviews --Recap and Decision The Decider Recap Meeting --Record Keeping Chapter 6 Interview Questions --Set the Goal --Different Scenarios --Provoke Performance --Questions Plan --Question Complexity & Measurement --Question Form Competency Presentation Expected Form of Solution Solutions Evaluation criteria --Focus on Capability --Question Types Chains Open-ended Behavioral / Competency --Technical Questions Knowledge Coding Design Fit Estimation Kobayashi Maru --Calibration Calibrating a Question Ask Lists and No-Ask Lists --Good Questions Examples of Good Questions --Bad Questions Techniques Deliberate Distraction Others --Single Question Deconstructions --Evaluating Answers --Sources of Error Familiarity Not Recognizing Correct Answers Not Appreciating Creative Solutions Misstatement of Questions Over Focus on Pet Answers Missing the Big Picture Misinterpretation of Answers Chapter 7 Hiring Decisions --Evaluation Decision Models Evaluating in Batches Evaluating Individually --Evaluating Overall Performance Missing the Point: Some People You Don't Want to Hire --Sources of Error Bad Day Bad Interviewers Personable Candidates The Skill of Being Hired Bouillabaisse effect --Tough Calls --Dealbreakers: Don't Hire These People Slams Former Employer Severely Irritates Anyone Lies or Deceives --What's In It For Them?Providing Feedback --Anti-patterns and Pitfalls Hiring Yourself Hiring Too High Hiring Too Low Compromise Chapter 8 Offers --Buy-in --Selling, Sell Sheets Honesty Adapting to the Market Sell Calls Extra Miles --What's Important to Candidates --Losing and Rescuing Candidates Chapter 9 A Great Start --Pre-start --Start Onboarding Plan Integration Plan --Impact of Onboarding --Keeping New Employees --Dealing with Failure: Bad Hires Wrap Up Appendix --Records and Templates --Candidate Flow --Examples Example Day-of-Briefing Email Example Interview Transcript Example Candidate Guide Example Phone Screen Transcript Example Feedback for This Interview