Gregor Ojstersek explains how to hire engineers by first building a high-performing team environment, then writing a detailed job brief that captures the business need. When interviewing, prioritize soft skills like clear communication and motivation to learn over pure technical expertise, unless you need a niche specialist.
No great software is developed and maintained without great people. And to take it further, only great teams develop great software. Therefore, everyone contributes their best efforts and works together to achieve goals as a team. This is what engineering is. In this video, we will go step by step on how to ensure you hire the right people for your engineering team. So you can't hire great people if you don't already have a great environment in place. You may get great people on board, but they will not nearly be close to their potential if you don't place them in the position to be successful. If you're an engineering leader, you need to do everything you can to do that. Here are some great ways to achieve that: assign clear ownership and responsibility, empower people and teams so they can make decisions themselves, expose business problems to engineers instead of assigning tasks, always look for ways to offer growth opportunities to your team, focus on coaching and mentoring as one of the most important things, create a great onboarding process, ensure developer experience is great—tooling, equipment, guidelines, alignment between teams—make sure to always keep on improving the overall environment. It's especially important to listen for feedback. Now, the next thing that is important when you are hiring is defining the needs for a certain role. Before you even start the hiring process, it's really important to fully understand what you are looking for. This is where creating a detailed job brief is very important. If you don't have it yet, you can use my Notion template. This is exactly the template that I use for hiring great engineers, and you can get it by becoming a paid subscriber to my Engineering Leadership newsletter. Link to the newsletter is in the description. It's very important to fill in all of the details, including the business need for the role. That's crucial because you don't want to fill in the role just for the sake of filling it. If it makes sense for the business, it makes sense for you as well. Now that we have a great environment and we fully understand what needs we have for a certain role, it's important to understand what traits to focus on. During my career, I had a pleasure to interview more than 300 engineers. Throughout my experience, I came across an important finding that always stood out with engineers that were successful in the role after they joined the team. They were all great engineers, but what made them great was not just their technical expertise but their soft skills. When I'm interviewing a new engineer, I value soft skills more than actual technical expertise. Unless I'm hiring for a strict expert in a particular technology, I normally look for engineers that can reasonably articulate things and can demonstrate drive, motivation for learning, as well as being a good team player. The reason for this is, as I mentioned before, great teams build great software, not individuals. I'm a big believer in hiring people that can make others around them better, not just focus on their individual contribution. If everyone makes everyone around them better, we are all exponentially growing. There is no better environment to be in when everyone is always there to help and support you. So how to spot these traits in an interview? This can either be a technical interview, behavioral, or hiring manager interview. In any of these interviews, there are specific signs of how you can spot these traits in candidates. The first sign is that an engineer can reasonably articulate things. They're not pretending to be an expert in something that they are not. They're not afraid to say that they don't know something if they don't know. They're not trying to wing answers and hope that they are right. They have a full overview of the scope of the current or past projects, the responsibilities, the roles, what business need the project is solving, etc. They're not just focused on what they have been doing, but focused also on the success of the whole team. I can spot this best when talking about a past project they have worked on. To get all the information needed, I ask a lot of sub-questions. The next one is that they demonstrate motivation and drive for learning. The question I like to ask is, what new have you learned in the past 6 months? I like to look at the way the candidate is answering and also observe their nonverbal communication. If they sound very excited, they provide details, they're smiling, or they use their hands a lot when answering. These are all signs that they love what they're doing and learning new things is something they like to do. And last and not least, they're a team player. Again, both verbal and nonverbal communication are very important here. When the candidate is speaking about helping others, onboarding, focusing on team goals, sharing knowledge, etc., I mainly look for excitement. If the way they speak about it reminds you of, "I didn't want to help others, but I needed to," it's probably not the right fit. Also, it's important that the candidate provides examples of how they contributed to the success of a project, not only provide examples of their work. This can be asked as a standalone question or when talking about a specific project they were a part of in the past. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on what should teams look for in new engineers. Make sure to share them in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great Engineering Leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.
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