Interview tips to identify the right person for your tech project

Nothing is more frustrating for your HR team than investing a lot of time and resources into recruiting and sending LinkedIn messages, only to discover that none of the interviewed candidates possess the skills and profile you are looking for.

In this article, we will share a few interview tips for hiring IT professionals for your company. These simple yet effective tech hiring strategies may help you identify and select the right candidates for your projects, right from the start.

But first, let’s cover the core strategies.

Specify requirements and expectations

Before looking for potential candidates, the best way to reduce possible errors in the recruiting process is to set specific job requirements and expectations. 

This process should include an in-depth analysis of your projects and company goals, involving stakeholders (clients, project managers, team leaders) to create a list of requirements about the person you’re looking to hire.

Start by specifying the technical skills, experience level, tool stack, and certifications required for the role. For example, when hiring programmers, identify if you’re looking for an expert on a specific language or technology or if you’re hiring full-stack developers who can adjust to several projects.

When sending a LinkedIn message or calling a candidate, it's important to ensure that all information is transparent and conveys the requirements. Specifically when it comes to English proficiency, be sure to specify the required level, such as "fluent level required."

Then, move on with the expectations your project stakeholders have of the new person joining the team. You should discuss everything with your team to better clarify the job responsibilities and expected outcomes of the role.

Create technical assessments 

Another great strategy when hiring and sourcing software developers and IT professionals is to outline technical assessments and technical interview questions. 

If you’re not a tech person, you should involve your senior developers and most experienced IT professionals in this part of the process. They will better understand the technical skills and knowledge necessary for the role and project.

For example, in a developer hiring process, you can outline a few coding challenges so that they can implement coding tests or tasks relevant to the job role and the daily work they’ll be doing.

In addition to coding challenges, it’s good to give your candidates a few problem-solving tasks so that you can understand how they solve real-world problems they might encounter in the role.

This part of the process is essential in screening the right tech professionals.

Set core values & culture fit requirements

Even though technical skills, knowledge, experience, and expertise are all important aspects of the IT recruitment process, you cannot forget about the culture fit. 

You can have the most talented professional who has a great performance and delivers great results, but on the other hand, if this person cannot accept feedback, work with others, and communicate properly, it may create a bad environment inside the project, and the project might even fail.

Before jumping to the recruitment process and the interviews, make sure you understand your team’s dynamics so that you can find a candidate that aligns with your team’s culture and work style. 

In addition, you should define and specify your company’s core values to ensure that the new person can align with your mission and vision long-term.

Conduct technical and behavioral interviews

So you’ve gone through a few resumes and identified a few candidates to interview 

based on the initial requirements for the job. 

Now, when it comes to the interviews, make sure you’re not just focusing on the technical aspects but also behavioral ones as they will dictate if the person is fitting or not.

These are a few things that you need to carefully look into during the interviews:

• Ask about past projects, successes, and failures to understand how the candidate handles stressful situations, how they communicate, their teamwork, and their ability to solve conflicts.
• Discuss previous projects in detail and ask in-depth technical questions about their role to understand their contributions and expertise in a specific programming language, tool, technology, etc.
• Create hypothetical scenarios and questions related to the project/challenge to test their logical thinking and evaluate how they approach problems.
• Present practical tasks so the candidate can demonstrate various skills and make sure to look into their portfolio and GitHub to see the quality and range of their work.
• Ask how they stay updated with new technologies and look for evidence that they are constantly looking to learn and willing to adapt to new tools and technologies available in the market.
• Create a collaborative task or discussion with other team members so you can get a sense if the candidate is compatible and if there’s a team fit.

To conclude

As well-prepared as a recruiting process can be, we never know the outcome long-term. But, through these simple tech hiring strategies, there will be less room for error as you’ll be able to properly evaluate your candidates through a set of requirements that not only encompasses technical expertise but also culture fit.

If you’re struggling to find IT professionals to join your team, feel free to connect with our nearshore consulting team, as we’ll help you throughout the process and help you find the right humans for your projects.