How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers

12/17/2012 · No Responses

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 learn
You 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 Contents
Chapter 1. Talent Management
Chapter 2. Candidate Lifecycle
Chapter 3. Finding Candidates
Chapter 4. Resumes
Chapter 5. Interviews
Chapter 6. Interview Questions
Chapter 7. Hiring Decisions
Chapter 8. Offers
Chapter 9. A Great Start