Hiring and Sourcing

Hiring and sourcing refer to the process of identifying, attracting, and selecting candidates to fill open positions on an engineering team. This is a key responsibility for engineering managers, as the quality and effectiveness of the team can be significantly impacted by the talent and skills of its members. Hiring is an important part of most managers day-to-day jobs. Most engineering teams must hire a few people yearly to scale or backfill any attritions. Managers are involved in the hiring process at almost all recruiting stages.

What do you look for in great engineers?

This is the most common interview question asked about hiring. There are many qualities of great engineers. Some of those are below:

• Team players: This is one of the most important qualities of great engineers. They win for the team rather than being overly focused on personal wins. If they are senior engineers, they need to have good leadership skills. They should be able to mentor juniors and lead teams effectively.

• Strong technical skills: They should be strong in designing, coding, and debugging. It is preferred to go for generalists. Unless there is an urgent business need that requires a specialist (language/framework), opt for people with strong problem-solving skills. Languages and frameworks can be picked up quickly if the individual has a strong grasp of fundamentals.

• Collaboration and communication skills: They should be able to explain their ideas effectively. They need to be able to coach others and collaborate with other teams.

• Growth mindset: They should have a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. This means they are coachable, want to face challenges, and have a strong desire to learn and grow.

• Promote simplicity: They try to make everything as simple as possible, whether design, code, or processes. This makes things easy to maintain and develop.

• Result-oriented: They keep the business deliverables in mind and try to deliver them effectively. They are not concerned with being needlessly technical. If something can be accomplished with something simple, they do not hesitate to implement it. Essentially, they use the right tools for the right job.

Diversity in teams makes teams perform better. ...