How to build a competitive process for recruiting engineers

Sarah Nahm is the CEO of Lever, a startup company based in San Francisco, California. The company specializes in developing software designed to help enterprises find candidates for the required positions, conduct interviews with them and hire the best talents.

First step: Let the hiring of talented engineers be your top priority.

Good engineers can work almost anywhere. If they are actively looking for a new job, then in just a week they will receive a lot of offers.
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If you are not the company that any employee dreams about, then you will need to work hard so that they want to become part of your team. But what does this mean in the talent market, where high salaries and extra bonuses have become common?

To find out, I asked three experienced lead engineers to share their best experience hiring first-class engineers.

Make hiring employees a top priority

Finding the best people is not an easy task, requiring considerable joint efforts by recruiters, recruiters, and their teams. However, the likelihood that non-professional recruiters can make a significant contribution to this process is initially small. However, all employees need to communicate the company's need for talented engineers.

“The first thing you need to do (for a competitive hiring process) is to tell all your managers that hiring employees is a top priority,” said Gordon Kass, vice president of engineering at Lumosity.

To say that employment is a priority is one thing, but getting your employees to take it seriously is another thing. Cass reviews recruiting metrics (number of resumes viewed, number of telephone conversations with candidates, number of interviews conducted, etc.) with his team on a weekly basis, so they have a complete picture of the process, as well as metrics for achieving quarterly goals of its hiring managers. If you focus on the recruitment process and evaluate managers for their progress in this field, this will serve as a motivation for employees to solve difficult problems associated with recruiting and build an effective process.

Careful attention to the experience of the candidate

Add the experience of the candidate to the list of things that you should consider to select the best candidates. “You have to literally focus on the candidate’s experience in order to be competitive,” says Art Gillespie, director of engineering at Udacity.

Just as Cass emphasizes the importance of hiring employees and making him a top priority, Gillespie spells out his team’s expectations, including the following: never be late for an interview, do everything you can to ensure that candidates don’t feel constrained and send a personal email thanks to the candidates who come for the interview. Gillespie also asks candidates to share their impressions after the interview - this helps him ensure that he and his team are constantly improving.

Act fast

As soon as an engineer enters the labor market, he can accept the offer of another company even before you have the opportunity to provide your own. “You have to manage things really fast, otherwise you will lose candidates,” says Cass. All your actions should be effective - especially when it comes to engineers who are in huge demand.

In order to be confident in the speed of his team’s work, Cass tells them to interview no later than one and a half days after receiving a resume from the candidate, and even requires his engineers to have free time in the work schedule for the interview. According to Cass, the schedule for one person’s day should in no way be a barrier to the recruiting process.

Speed ​​and personal communication are also decisive steps after the interview in the recruitment process in Lumosity. Cass emphasizes the importance of quick feedback and arranges meetings of the teams that conducted the interviews during the day after the meeting with the candidate. Speed ​​is one of the most obvious key factors for successful recruiting. Taking this into account can significantly improve the recruitment process in the company.

Consider candidates as living people.

One of the most unmistakable ways to spoil acquaintance with a technical candidate is to consider him as an asset, and not as a living person - this is the opinion of Derek Brown, director of product development at Addepar.

For example, if a recruiter communicates with a candidate who only got a new job a couple of months ago, then according to Derek, the recruiter should build a conversation with such a person completely differently than someone who has worked in this position for several years. He calls this approach recruitment with a people-oriented approach, and weaves it into the whole process, including the positioning of the company, the role and professional experience of the candidates.

“If you cannot find the connection between their daily work and the problem you are trying to solve and the people for whom you work, then you are much less likely to get a candidate who will accept your proposal,” says Brown. The following idea is central to his philosophy: you cannot ignite candidates for a desire to work in your company if you don’t treat them as people in the first place and take enough time to figure out what motivates them, and what they like.

It turns out that the most effective methods of recruiting engineers are not very different from the best practices of staff recruitment in general. In order to get professionals, common sense and coordinated work are needed. Carry your ideas to the team, create an effective professional process and do not forget to treat the candidates as the unique personalities they are.