Speaking to a developer can be daunting for a recruiter. This is especially true for a junior recruiter, but self-confidence is not a surrogate for detailed knowledge even when you are talking about a veteran recruiter.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of recruiters who kid themselves into giving themselves more credit than they deserve for being \u201ctechnical\u201d, but there are ways you can size up if a veteran candidate \u201cgets it\u201d or if they are a hack.<\/p>\n
Recruiters are not engineers, but there is no reason you can\u2019t cultivate your own gut-level sense of confidence to know if your candidate is really sharp or full of it. The key is understanding how to extract evidence of their competence \u2014 or lack thereof \u2014 without getting into the weeds.<\/p>\n
The following are some questions you can ask to figure out which side of the fence your candidate with the strong resume stands.<\/p>\n
1. You are building an e-commerce site from scratch. Walk me through all of the questions you will ask before you start writing code.<\/strong><\/p>\n The key to this question, ironically, is to have them stay away from technical details. You want to hear them go into excruciating details as it relates to understanding the business requirements. In fact, if they even come close to describing the technical stack, you are talking to a complete hack. This is not an exhaustive list, but it gives you some ideas:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The point here is that a truly experienced developer or Architect is going to insist on understanding the boring business details in excruciating detail. The more granular and probing into the details, the more it becomes clear that they have done this type of things many, many times before. If someone begins talking about the programming language, the application servers and the database establishes the fact that is it Amateur Hour.<\/p>\n 2. Describe the most complex system you ever designed. What made it so complex? What challenges did you hit that you didn\u2019t anticipate and what would you have done differently?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 3. If you consider the 5 following activities within the software development life cycle: Gathering requirements, Analysis, Design, Development and Testing, what percentage of time would you spend in each area?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is no hard set percentage for each one, but you are trying to learn if they approach building something like a seasoned professional or a corner-cutting hack. The true professional will show themselves by assigning a huge percentage of their time in the analysis and design, with a seemingly small percentage in the development.<\/p>\n They will also leave a decent chunk at the end for testing, because the battle-tested veteran knows that unexpected problems happen, no matter how smoothly things seem to be going. Hackers are people who code by the seat of their pants in a trial-and-error fashion, and usually create more problems than they fix. Don\u2019t confuse years\u2019 of experience with expertise, because doing it badly for 10 years is doing it badly, period.<\/p>\n There is no single percentage or formula for answering that question \u201ccorrectly\u201d, but here is a guideline to know your candidate knows the score:<\/p>\n Gathering requirements: 10\u201315%<\/p>\n Analysis: 15\u201320%<\/p>\n Design: 30\u201340%<\/p>\n Development: 10\u201320%<\/p>\n Test\/Debug: 15\u201320%<\/p>\n The key is to get an understanding of what side of the fence they are standing on, not understanding the gory detail of their work. Recruiters are not engineers, but you don\u2019t need to be one to determine if a software engineer approaches their job like a professional or a hack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Speaking to a developer can be daunting for a recruiter. This is especially true for a junior recruiter, but self-confidence is not a surrogate for detailed knowledge even when you are talking about a veteran recruiter. There are plenty of recruiters who kid themselves into giving themselves more credit than they deserve for being \u201ctechnical\u201d, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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