How I hire software developers

Every day, it seems, I see tweets where developers share bad experiences with an interviewing process, especially of big tech companies. Candidates feel intimidated and are asked questions that are totally irrelevant or obscure and hard. I have been hiring software developers for two decades, both interns, juniors and seniors. Of course we always hire as a team and typically involve at least three people from the company. This is how we hire.

Team contribution and potential

Summarized this is what I look for. How can the candidate enrich the team and what is their potential for contribution on a technical and social level?

You want to build a team and hire candidates that can contribute. What does this mean? I have always hired internationally and are looking for candidates with different backgrounds that can bring something new to the table. You do not want a team where everyone went to the same school in the same city. Diversity contributes to the culture.

To hire for potential is important. You will typically not find a candidate that has worked on exactly what you are building and on the same architecture. You are innovating, right? 

I look for how the candidate, with proper guidance and support, can contribute to the engineering team. Candidates should ask many questions. That is how we learn. There are so many different specialities: resilient architectures, frontend performance, devops & CI/CD, data modelling, API design etc. I always look for people who can bring something new to the table. A different angle, special interest or experience - so we as a team can learn and grow.

Give real world assignment

This one I think is important. You can discuss tree traversal algorithms all day, but what do you really learn from that? Is that algorithm something you need for your engineering? If so, I would guess it is already in place.

I believe in concrete real world assignments that the developers can take home and solve at their own pace with the full support of the Internet. That is how we work in the real world. I honestly do not think the case assignment needs to be very complex either. A one to two hour task at the most, as we just want to see how the candidate approaches a real world task that can frame further discussions.

Once the candidate has completed the assignment they are invited back. Now they are prepared for the conversation which will be around the case application.

What we look for

Now for the discussion of the case assignment. Spoiler; we give the same assignment to junior and senior developers. To be honest it is only when we see the solution and have a discussion that we identify if they are on a junior or senior level. And this is not about age.

Simply put we ask questions around:

• Did they solve exactly what we asked for?
• Did they deliver a single code file as a Zip file or a Git repo?
• Does their code include tests, even if we did not ask for it?
• How would they deploy this code in production?
• What if they had to scale the application out?

For frontend developers I would be looking into real understanding of HTTP, server vs client (API vs frontend, SSR vs SPA). I usually say: “I look for developers that understand the Internet”. A bit jokingly but still very true. A frontend developer that has the potential to go chasing milliseconds. That is one developer profile I look for.

Our interview process in Crystallize

We conduct most interviews online and have at least three people involved from the company site including: manager, head of engineering and HR manager. The process we have for recruitment in Crystallize, and the New Normal Group in general, is as follows: 

• Cultural contribution and matching skills
• Home case assignment: real world case
• Case assignment review
• Practical details and salary

If you want to test our process yourself you can apply to a frontend developer or backend developer position.