Hiring the right people

Getting the right people on board is as hard as it sounds.

Having the right people on the team is of course very important. But who are the right people and where can you find them? Not so easy.

Finding your future coworkers takes a lot of time and effort, and we are not able to cover the steps in detail.

For us it all starts with understanding what you need for your project (later product). Do you “just” need a developer who can get the application idea out fast or do you need long term co-workers who thinks and acts in the best interest of the company and your vision? Big difference.

Now, to just hire a developer to “fix things” is not really a good solution. You will most likely need an entire team of developers who continuously builds features and "fixes things” so we’ll focus in the latter case — getting someone great onboard your team.

Do the same principles apply to developers as with other staff? Yes, they do.

How to find them

Now, you are itching to just put out that add on LinkedIn and start interviewing people, and that is really not as bad of an approach as it sounds. During this process you’ll meet different kinds of people and hear about different skills. You will learn a lot.

However you are taking up the time of someone else your are not paying (yet) so the fully agile/test approach may not be ethically ok here to be honest.

My experience is that it’s better to be clear when hiring, but at the same time be able to adjust if someone shows other skills you didn’t think of. Avoiding to stuff the job ad full with buzz words is of course another thing to avoid.

When we hire developers, we try to understand the need, and then do a mix of advertisement and direct contact (aka head hunting).

Creating your job ad

Put together a job ad which you run by a developer or “tech person”, so that there’s no weird stuff in there such as “15 years of experience from X technology” if it didn’t even exist 15 years ago.

Remember that everyone else also offers free coffee, ping pong table and a cool office. Consider offering flexible working hours, generous free time off, remote work and if possible even flexible working location, such as in other countries.

Could be tricky with tax but you will tap in to a much bigger talent pool this way.

Developers are a picky bunch of people who knows they can get a job almost anywhere as their guild is in great demand. Hence many developers seek “a place where I can finally tolerate to work” or where they can work and learn new technologies.

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Learn more about typical hiring process in "The CTO Playbook", written by our CTO Robert Mejlerö, available on Apple Books and Amazon/Kindle.