What I look for when hiring

When I was in Runtime Revolution’s hiring process, so I got to interview a lot of candidates that wanted to join Runtime’s development team.

When I prepare for an interview I always have two simple questions come to mind:

• What do I want to know about the person?
• How do I get it from them?

Cultural fit is a must

The internet is full of tactics that say what you should look for. For me, the first and most important thing to look for is cultural fit. In the end of the interview, I want to be able to answer several questions that sum up to one. How will this person behave when working with other people? Will he be able to listen? Will he speak his / her mind? Will he help solve problems, or become a blocker to problem solving? In sum will my colleagues enjoy working with this person ? If there’s no culture fit, there’s little or no chance that the person is right for the company. For us, it doesn’t make sense to have the smartest person on the planet in the team, if he isn’t able to share and work with others.

Checking for skill

The second goal is to check if the person is fit for the position. Let’s assume that we’re hiring a full stack developer ( and we are, you can apply here ). We’ve defined 3 general levels for that specific position:

• Team Leader is able to lead a project, has concerns such as managing client and team expectations, advises the client in the best direction and leads one or more colleagues. He’s expected to be a very experienced developer.
• Senior Developer is a person who has strong technical abilities and will be able to solve a hard problem by himself / herself, or iterate and learn until he comes up with the best possible solution.
• Junior Developer is someone starting the journey in software development. He probably has computer science or engineering training and the basic knowledge on how the web works, and will be able to evolve into more complex problems soon.

So now I’ve explained what we look for when doing interviews. The next step is to tell how do we try to answer all of the questions above.

Interview style

I personally don’t like to interview people just by doing a sequence of questions. For me, this model doesn’t address the biggest and major concern for us, culture fit. So I prefer a more conversational interview style, try to put the person at ease, lighten the mood and remove some of the stress a situation like this involves.

We start by telling a bit of Runtime’s story, when it all started and how it evolved during the last decade. We explain our mindset and how we work. In this step we try to add some jokes ( not always successful ), sharing some personal notes not related to the company. I believe if this becomes a talk that we would have with someone that we encounter in the middle of a conference it will serve our purpose better. My goal is exactly this, have a conversation between people who have similar interest, in this case creating software.

We understand that the person might not be so at ease as we would prefer, and in those cases, we lead the conversation. We ask about interesting projects that they did lately. Build a scraper to help on a tedious task? Build an app to help cook dinner? We don’t care about the goal, we want to talk about how he did it, what did he use to do it, and why pattern X was used instead of Y.

Exchanging ideas / opinions helps us understand how this person reacts to daily situations. We might confront him that what he did is wrong and see the reaction. We might share some other opinion ( better or worse ) and see how he responds. Check if he’s able to accept criticism or defend his / her solutions.

All these interactions help me understand the major and minor goals of the interview, what experience this person has, and if it’s someone I and colleagues will want to work with.

These general guidelines don’t depend on the experience of the person I’m interviewing. We will go into more complex topics if he has the ability to do so, but I can assess it during the conversation and adapt accordingly.

Sometimes you just can’t tell

For me, the success rate for interviews with this model is something like 90% ( in a rough estimate of 50 interviews ). In 90% of the interviews, I’m able to understand if the person is a match or not. In the other 10% of the cases, I won’t be able to decide. In those 10%, some of the difficulties that I’ve come across are:

• They just don’t talk or develop their stories, so I’m not able to see how they interact. Could be nerves, could be their personality.
• We can’t establish common ground from where to develop the conversation. This sometimes happens with people that spent the previous years doing only software maintenance, without adding any new features.

In these cases, even though we may be loosing someone great, I have to err on the side of caution, and not move the process any further. It’s not the best outcome, but it’s better than the alternative.

For now, I’m not going into much detail about the technical part of the interview, that’s something that needs a whole post on it’s own.

If you have any comments or feedback on this subject I’d love to hear from you!

Nowadays I’m working in my own company trying to bring some products ( like https://isdown.app ) to life. Besides product development, I love to build and scale engineering teams. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me on Twitter or LinkedIn or just leave a comment.

Also, check out Runtime Revolution. It’s an awesome product development agency with a proven track record helping clients scaling their engineering teams with an offshore team.