Identify Top Talents in The Tech Interview

Background

Hiring top talents for an engineering team is a crucial job for an engineering manager or a tech leader, especially for these tech companies. This is because top talents are the key assets of tech companies as well as they are the core competitiveness of tech companies. Without top talents, no matter what great achievement this company has made before, it will become a mediocre company eventually.

I interviewed more than 200 software engineer candidates in the past 10 years, and found that these top talents have some common characteristics like proactive, open minded, etc. In this article I will share my experience of how I identify these top talents in the engineering interview. Hope it will help you to build a talented engineering team for your company.

Potential makes more sense than knowledge and past experiences

I met many interviewers who care too much about the match between the candidate’s past experience and the hiring position. They asked a lot of special knowledge questions about this specialized domain, even corner knowledge. If some candidates did similar projects in other companies before, these interviewer felt more satisfied than other candidates. The other common mistake some interviewer usually make is they are prefer to hiring candidates have similar experience or knowledge with themselves. This is harmful for building a diverse and creative engineering team.

Candidates have done similar projects before is not a must-to-have requirement for nearly all software engineers jobs, what we should care more is the potential of these candidates. Because for these high potential talents, it is easy to catch up with these domain knowleges. Do they have high potential to grow as a key talent in your comany in the long term? Can they adapt to the new environment and deliver results quickly? These are more important than knowledge and experience. Think about you have hired engineers who did similar projects before, but they can’t get adapt to the new environment, it means they can’t deliver results you have expected. It would be a disaster for you and your team. You have to make a lot of efforts to manage them.

4 Common characteristics of top talents

How to identify these top talents? I summarized 4 common characteristics these top talents may have and then explain them one by one. Even if you know what these characteristics are, it doesn’t mean you can pretend you have these characteristics. Because these characteristics are reflected in these top talents’ daily behaviors.

Clear plan and goals

These top talents have clear plan and goals for their careers. When they are finding a new job, they have a clear plan about what kind of company they want to join, what kind of job they want to have for the next 3 to 5 years. This clear plan is built on they have did research for the whole industry and have their own understanding, as well as they have realized what are their personal characteristics, advantages, and unique values they can provide. Or they have such plan is because they want to experience new challenges to know their personality and advantages.

I prefer to ask candidates to share their career plan for next 3 to 5 years, and share their thoughts behind this plan. And what they have done for this perticular plan, why do they think current open position can match their paln. And I can know more about the candidates’ motivations, thoughts, efforts they have made for their plans. In this way, It is not hard to differentiate between candidates who have a clear plan and those who just want to find a job. I met a few candidates that provided fake answers in this stage. They intended to make a good impression on the interviewer, and want to have this job. But it is easy to reveal these fake answers by asking some deeper chain questions according to candidates’ answers. Sending offer to the candidate or not is the choice of the comapny, accept the offer or not is the choice of the candidate. Both sides should make the choice depending on their real requirement in their own heart.

Proactive with strong execution ability

I met many “average” engineers that just do the tasks assigned by their leaders/managers, and they are obedient. They rarely have different ideas, and they rarely think about questions like:

• The core value of their team can provide to the company;
• Which customers can benefit from the project he/she is doing; (customers can be external enterprises if the company is a toB company, customers can be other internal teams that use service provided by the platform team where the engineer at)
• What engineering debts current team/project has;
• What is going on in the whole industry, what are competitors going;
• What new tech or framework can be used to improve the team’s efficiency;
• What other tasks they can do besides these tasks assigned by their leaders/managers;
• What key projects are not on the team radar but should be;
• …

On the opposite, top talents proactively think like a BOSS, express their thoughts, take actions to collect necessary data to verify their thoughts and persuade their leaders/managers/peers to prioritize these things and then they own these projects.

But how to identify the proactiveness of candidates in the interview? I prefer to ask the following questions or similar questions to reveal the potential proactiveness the candidates have shown in their past works:

• Can you share an example of how you had different ideas with your leaders/managers and you changed their ideas, and proved your ideas were better afterwards?
• Any significant project that is proposed by you, led by you in your last company?
• What significant change you have made for your team/company after you joined?
• …

Highly self-reflective

Top talents are faster learners. They are good at learning from past projects, and learning from failures. They do introspections for each project they have done, and review which parts they did right, which parts they can make improvement, etc. I prefer to ask the following questions to reveal this characteristic for these top talents.

• What is the most challenging thing you have experienced?
• Which parts were challenging for you?
• How did you overcome these chanllenges?
• What is your lesson learned?
• Can you share the bad decision you have made?
• What will you change if you do the same project again?
• …

Open minded and continuously learn

These top talents are open minded, they are always curious about what happens around them. They are good listeners and willing to communicate with others, they can take different advice even though this advice is opposite with their initial idea. They know their own limitations or weaknesses, and they see the good in others. Meanwhile, they are continuous learners, they keep eyes on what is happening in the industry, what projects they can leverage to improve their current work. They rarely set boundaries on their responsibilities, they are willing to experience new challenges they haven’t experienced before, and they are willing to take on new responsibilities. They care more about their long term value versus their short term benefits. I usually ask the following questions to reveal candidates’ this characteristic:

• What popular project in your industry have you researched? And what useful parts have you introduced to your comanny’s project?
• Can you share two totally different projects you have experienced in a same company? What caused you to experience a totally different project?
• Can you share an example that others had totally different ideas with you, and what happened then?
• …