How should the selection process work for choosing a software engineer?
Having strong developers is going to guarantee a high-quality and timely completion of a project. Every team member will need to take it upon themselves to pull the weight of their work and understand their own impact and significance. Personal qualities also play a role in who to hire, and it’s important that a person will be able to effectively communicate with colleagues and clients. There have been many cases where a technically skilled programmer can not get along with the rest of the team, and he has to be let go.
Therefore, a comprehensive selection process is carried out in stages. These stages help the recruiter and the client to accurately identify a specialist who has the suitable professional and personal qualities.
Here are some useful tips for hiring a software engineer:
Selecting the best resumes
This is going to save you time and weed out the people who don’t have the appropriate knowledge, experience and personal qualities. Accordingly, after familiarising yourself with the resumes, about 50% of the applicants can be screened out. Since the hiring process is open to the client, they can personally take part in choosing the resumes of the specialists who will be contacted for the next stages.
Interviews with your participation
This is a key stage in hiring specialists, and it is important to understand how to interview developers in such a way that you can be sure if you have found someone who meets your expectations or not. Consider in more detail what to focus on during an interview with a software engineer.
Find out how passionate your applicant really is about programming
Ask the candidate what they find interesting and pay attention to their intonation and emotion when talking about their work and previous achievements. Experience shows that this is going to be a good indicator of their professionalism. It is unlikely that you will find a developer who talks enthusiastically about his work, but writes bad code.
Additionally, you can look at the candidate’s social network accounts and their pages in professional communities. This will help you understand their degree of involvement in IT.
Check their code skills
This is one of the key aspects of an interview with a developer. This is going to help you determine how well the applicant can get to the core of a problem, which problem solving approaches they use, how they interact with others, and whether they can work quickly and to a high standard.
Only a good programmer will recognise a good programmer
Software development is a job that requires specialist knowledge and skills, and cannot be carried out by just anyone. Therefore, it is a very good idea to have a tech-savvy person to help you conduct the interview. If that person is you, then even better! Hiring an outstaff developer will be even simpler.
Ask questions that are of maximum relevance to the work
Or to the skills that you are trying to evaluate. That way, you will understand faster whether or not the candidate is suitable for your vacancy.
The same questions for every candidate
The whole point of the interviews is to compare the applicants according to identical parameters. The goal is to find the person who will be most capable of working on the project in a high quality manner. Therefore, asking them different questions is illogical.
Don’t forget about personal qualities
Even a brilliant programmer will not be of much benefit to a project if they cannot get along with people and work in a team. Therefore, ask them about their previous work place, their impressions of it, how they interacted with their colleagues, whether or not they participated in corporate events. You can always teach somebody more about programming, but you can’t change a person’s personal qualities.
Use the experience of other companies
Take an interest in how other companies conduct interviews, find out what methods they use for discovering worthy candidates and adopt similar strategies.
Make decisions based on their top skill
There’s no point in trying to deduce the average level of a candidate’s knowledge or to analyze the minimum outcome. You should choose a developer on account of the skill that they have demonstrated the most during the interview. You can help them to tighten their other skills during the work process.
Of course, it’s very difficult to identify all the qualities of a programmer in just an hour and a half. And interviewing is not an easy process. To simplify it, we have a surprise for you – a list of bonus questions for an interview with a PHP developer. These questions will help you to understand whether or not a candidate is suitable for the position.
- What would you like to improve in your favorite programming language or platform?
- Do you have your own projects that you develop in your free time?
- What data structures do you know?
- Find the error in this piece of the code.
- Tell us what this code is needed for.
- Evaluate the writing style of this code.
- What are short tags and how are they used in PHP?
- What are ways of escaping from HTML? Why is it necessary?
- What is $this and self in PHP? How do you use comments in code?
