How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team

Description

Want a great software development team? Look no further. How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team is a field guide and instruction manual for finding and hiring excellent engineers that fit your team, drive your success, and provide you with a competitive advantage. Focusing on proven methods, the book guides you through creating and tailoring a hiring process specific to your needs. You’ll learn to establish, implement, evaluate, and fine-tune a successful hiring process from beginning to end. Some studies show that really good programmers can be as much as 5 or even 10 times more productive than the rest. How do you find these rock star developers? Patrick McCuller, an experienced engineering and hiring manager, has made answering that question part of his life's work, and the result is this book. It covers sourcing talent, preparing for interviews, developing questions and exercises that reveal talent (or the lack thereof), handling common and uncommon situations, and onboarding your new hires.   How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers will make your hiring much more effective, providing a long-term edge for your projects. It will: Teach you everything you need to know to find and evaluate great software developers. Explain why and how you should consider candidates as customers, which makes offers easy to negotiate and close. Give you the methods to create and engineer an optimized process for your business from job description to onboarding and the hundreds of details in between. Provide analytical tools and metrics to help you improve the quality of your hires. This book will prove invaluable to new managers. But McCuller’s deep thinking on the subject will also help veteran managers who understand the essential importance of finding just the right person to move projects forward. Put into practice, the hiring process this book prescribes will not just improve the success rate of your projects—it’ll make your work life easier and lot more fun. What you’ll learnYou will learn to: Find and attract excellent developers that fit your needs. Evaluate candidates effectively by resume, phone screen, and interview. Create revealing technical interview questions and how to best evaluate answers. Organize and optimize interviews and interview teams. Work effectively with recruiters, sourcers, and the rest of the hiring bestiary. Chart and track the hiring process so you can understand, customize, and improve it. Understand the legal issues in hiring. Who this book is for This book is for technical managers who need to hire productive software engineers, from absolute beginners looking for a place to start to veterans looking for ways to optimize and hire more effectively. The audience includes software development managers, directors, CTOs, and entrepreneurs. Table of ContentsIntroduction --Who Should Read This Book --How to Use This Book If You’re Pressed for Time --Content Overview  Analytic vs. Intuitive Styles  Legal Issues in Hiring The Competitive Advantage --Central Ideas  An Engineering Approach  Candidates as Customers Chapter 1 Talent Management --Team Planning  Specialists and Generalists  Talent Portfolio --Defining and Choosing Roles --Market Research --Can You Hire? Chapter 2 Candidate Lifecycle --Candidate As Customer  Building a Great Customer Experience --Lifecycle --Pipeline: Moving Candidates  Documenting the Process --Roles  Sourcer  Scheduler  Recruiter  Hiring Manager --Reverse Engineering  Recruiting Workflow  Diagrams  Candidate’s Perspective  Hiring Manager’s Perspective  Funnels, Filters, and Choke Points  Avoiding Resume Deluge --Changing the Process  Change and Fairness --Establish Goals  Hiring Rate  Completion Date  Skill-level targets  Calendar Time to Hire  Predictability  Cost  Time  Capital Expenditure  Optimization --Sources of Information --Debugging the Process  Enlist Your Engineers Chapter 3 Finding Candidates --The Market  Sizing Your Market  Opening up Your Market  Ageism  Sexism  Racism and Nationalism --Job Descriptions  Purpose  Investment  Evolution and Multiple Descriptions  Considerations  Alternatives to Job Descriptions  Sell Sheet  Anti-patterns and Pitfalls  Diagramming --Referrals --Getting the Word Out --Career Portals --Job Boards, Mailing lists, Ads  Job Boards  Networks: Contacts  Specialized and Regional lists  Regional Associations  Targeted General Advertisement  Sponsored Contests (TopCoder, etc.)  Conferences  Stunts --Professionals: Internal --Professionals: Recruiting --Advertising Agencies --Working with Recruiters --Recruiter Brief  --Establishing and Maintaining Relationships --External Recruiters / Headhunters  --Anti-patterns and Pitfalls --Internal Recruiters --Contract to Hire --Doing it Yourself  Your Network  Being a Sourcer  Spontaneous Opportunities --The Long-Term Plan  Hiring Honeypot  Talent Attracts Talent  Incompetence Repels Talent Do Something Interesting Chapter 4 Resumes --Resumes --Reading a Resume  Irrelevant Information  Troublesome Information  Errors and Confusion --Evaluating a Resume --Developing Evaluation Skill  Red, Yellow, and Green Flags  Minimize Bias  Final Decision  Anti-patterns and Pitfalls --References --Searching the Internet --Verification --Evaluation Horror Story Chapter 5 Interviews --Measurement and Error --Candidate as Customer  Candidate Guides  Example Guide  Horror Story --Setting up Interviews  Travel Arrangements  Physical Environment: Rooms  Accessibility --The Interview Team --Roles  Coordinator  Greeter  Hiring Manager  Interviewer --Qualifying Interviewers  The Dunning-Kruger Effect  Language  Field of Expertise --Disqualifying Interviewers --Training Interviewers  ...