Hiring and Interviewing Engineers

Hiring Is the Highest-Leverage Activity

The people you hire shape your team's culture, velocity, and technical quality for years. A great hire elevates everyone around them; a poor hire creates drag that compounds over time. As a Tech Lead, you play a critical role in the hiring process: defining what the team needs, designing interviews that accurately assess candidates, and making fair evaluation decisions.

Most engineering hiring processes are deeply flawed. They rely on algorithms puzzles that do not predict job performance, they are biased toward candidates who look and sound like the interviewers, and they optimize for rejecting false positives (hiring someone who should not be hired) at the expense of accepting true positives (rejecting excellent candidates). Building a better process requires deliberate design.

Defining the Role

Before opening a role, clearly define what you need. A vague job description attracts vague candidates.

## Role Definition Checklist

### Must-Have Skills
- 3+ years building production web applications
- Strong TypeScript and React experience
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred)
- Can design and implement REST APIs independently

### Nice-to-Have Skills
- Experience with GraphQL
- Familiarity with AWS or GCP
- Experience with microservices architecture

### Behaviors and Traits
- Communicates clearly in writing and verbally
- Proactively identifies and addresses problems
- Collaborates well in code reviews and design discussions
- Shows curiosity and a desire to learn

### What This Person Will Do in 90 Days
- Ship 2-3 features to the order management system
- Participate in on-call rotation
- Contribute to the database migration project
- Pair with the team and establish working relationships

Designing the Interview Process

Better Technical Interviews

Use Real-World Problems

Instead of algorithm puzzles, give candidates problems similar to what they would actually work on. If your team builds APIs, ask them to design and implement a small API. If your team works with data, give them a data processing task. This is more predictive and more respectful of the candidate's time.

Evaluate Problem-Solving Process

The process matters more than the solution. Great candidates:

• Ask clarifying questions before diving in
• Think out loud so you can follow their reasoning
• Consider edge cases and error handling
• Make trade-off decisions and explain them
• Write clean, readable code (not just code that works)
• Test their solution or describe how they would test it

Use Structured Scorecards

Every interviewer should evaluate against predefined criteria using a consistent scorecard. This reduces the influence of gut feelings and makes comparison across candidates fairer.

interface InterviewScorecard {
  candidateName: string;
  interviewer: string;
  date: string;
  criteria: {
    technicalSkills: Score;     // 1-4
    problemSolving: Score;      // 1-4
    codeQuality: Score;         // 1-4
    communication: Score;       // 1-4
    systemDesign: Score;        // 1-4 (if applicable)
    collaboration: Score;       // 1-4
  };
  strengths: string;  // Specific examples observed
  concerns: string;   // Specific examples observed
  overallRecommendation: "Strong Hire" | "Hire" | "No Hire" | "Strong No Hire";
  justification: string;
}

type Score = 1 | 2 | 3 | 4;
// 1 = Below expectations
// 2 = Meets some expectations
// 3 = Meets expectations
// 4 = Exceeds expectations

Reducing Bias