How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team

How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team

by Patrick McCuller
Released November 2012
Publisher(s): Apress
ISBN: 9781430249177

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Book description

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

    1. Title
    2. Dedication
    3. Contents
    4. Foreword
    5. About the Author
    6. Acknowledgments
    7. Chapter 1: Introduction
      1. Who Should Read This Book
      2. How to Use This Book If You’re Pressed for Time
      3. Content Overview
      4. Legal Disclaimer
      5. Analytic versus Intuitive Styles
      6. The Competitive Advantage
      7. Central Ideas
    8. Chapter 2: Talent Management
      1. Team Planning
      2. Specialists and Generalists
      3. Capability: Set Your Sights High
      4. . . . and Not Low
      5. Absolute Performance
      6. Net Capabilities: Using a Talent Portfolio
      7. Natural Team Life Cycle and Personality Types
      8. Balance
      9. Team Flow
      10. Building a New Team
      11. Expanding an Existing Team
      12. Can You Hire?
      13. Budget
      14. Compensation
    9. Chapter 3: Candidate Pipeline
      1. Life Cycle and Pipeline
      2. Manage Change
      3. Fairness
    10. Chapter 4: Finding Candidates
      1. The Market
      2. Defining the Target
      3. Sourcing
      4. Referrals
      5. Working with Recruiters
      6. Internal Recruiters
      7. Contract to Hire
      8. Doing It Yourself
      9. Opening up Your Market
      10. The Long-Term Plan
    11. Chapter 5: Résumés
      1. Reading a Résumé
      2. Evaluating a Résumé
      3. Time Investment
      4. Developing Evaluation Skill
      5. Feedback Loop
    12. Chapter 6: Interviews
      1. Measuring People
      2. Revisiting Candidate as Customer
      3. Interview Teams
      4. Interview Structure
      5. Record Keeping
    13. Chapter 7: Interview Questions
      1. Probing a Black Box
      2. Crafting or Choosing Questions
      3. Question Plans
      4. Question Types
      5. Capabilities
      6. Question Elements
      7. How to Design a Question
      8. Sample Questions
      9. Poor Questions
      10. Asking
      11. Evaluating Answers
    14. Chapter 8: Hiring Decisions
      1. The Goal
      2. Decision Time
      3. Accounting for Margin of Error
      4. Rationality
      5. When to Hire
      6. Deal Breakers: People Not to Hire
      7. Tough Calls: Hiring Stories
      8. Jacob
      9. Christina
      10. Sources of Error
      11. Horns Effect
      12. Hiring at the Right Level
      13. Compromise
      14. Providing Feedback
      15. Record Keeping
    15. Chapter 9: Offers
      1. What People Want
      2. What to Offer
      3. Selling
      4. Negotiation
    16. Chapter 10: A Great Start
      1. Prestart
      2. Relocation
      3. Start
      4. Productivity Impact
      5. Communications Impact
      6. Briefing Your Team
      7. Check-In
      8. Antipatterns and Pitfalls
    17. Appendix A: Sample Question Plan and Interviewer Book
    18. Appendix B: Sample Candidate Guide
    19. Appendix C: Sample Phone Screen Transcript
      1. Sample Feedback for This Interview
    20. Index

    Product information

    • Title: How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team
    • Author(s): Patrick McCuller
    • Release date: November 2012
    • Publisher(s): Apress
    • ISBN: 9781430249177