Hiring technical talent: An exercise in clarity, patience, and preparation

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Hey there manager! So you just got your headcount approved and have a hiring goal. You want to ensure the candidate is successful when they join your organization, and that you can attract and retain the BEST talent. But how do you assess if the person shares your company values and has the level of technical acumen you need for the role? Where do you even begin?

Before you think about the manager screen, ensure your job posting and recruiting team understands your career level benchmarks. Your talent partners won’t be experts in engineering, and that’s OK! The interview loop should be robust enough to test those initial screenings—this is just step one. The same career rubric you use to assess your existing talent during your internal performance cycle should align with how you consider potential talent. Ensuring your talent team understands your levels and can generally speak to them makes for a better candidate experience and helps streamline the pipeline. 

Next, review your job postings to tell a “factual” story of the skills and values important to your organization. Don’t oversell or be overly specific. Too often you see a laundry list of “requirements.” Or worse, someone is “sold” a job that isn’t what they expected after they start, and you lose a lot of energy and money that you can’t get back. Consider whittling down the job description to the essentials, and keeping it wide open with no hard limits. 

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