How We Hire The Right Talent

Get the right people for every start-up, every company is vital. We need people to get on track easily, communicate well and deliver.

We think that people is the heart of every product, if the developers are all-in with the product idea, they automatically will deliver better, they will start communicating in a good way, all the process will go smoothly.

That’s why we take this process seriously, and we try to find the right talent for given position. We go under the words: “Right talent, right experience and right technology”. We don’t take from granted on the “Right talent and experience“, we improve and invest in hiring process whenever needed.

We have been evolving our hire process during those years, it’s impossible to say we were doing great since the beginning. It’s simply not true.

We had some bad experiences getting talent, people that just didn’t fit in company culture, or project demands. But we learned, and now It’s my job to share some of our “must” tools when do the hiring process.

Create a self-explanatory job description.

Every good process starts from a good sediments, that’s why it’s important to make the job position clear, be good with the words on what your company or product needs.

It’s important to mention not only the technologies requested, or years of experience. That doesn’t work anymore. Be clear on the challenges that position will have, what the person have to do and what will be some tasks to deliver in the near future. Make clear the expectations and what you are requesting for the person.

Talk about the team that is currently developing the product. It’s always important to people start getting close to their future teammates.

It’s important to always put the cards on the table, notice to the candidate the benefits but also the budget the project has. You don’t want to spend a whole hiring process with people that at the end will reject the offer because the payment is not enough or they don’t like the benefits.

Request cover letter.

This is getting more and more popular these days. And we take it! Why? It’s simply, the resumés doesn’t work anymore. Yes, they give us some guidance, but they are not to personal, a cover letter will demand the candidate to start writing a letter directed to the company, presenting himself and why he/she is the best fit for the project.

In 4Geeks we have teams working remotely and in the office, we go with both approaches by the way, we have to make sure people can communicate in written mode perfectly, and from our point of view, a cover letter is the way to go.

Send a real life test.

Fixed test for a given technology doesn’t work. I don’t want to test people’s ability with a basic CRUD done in RAILS. I want the person to write some real code, create a module that solves a real situation problem.

I will explain a little bit with an example: We have a product called Mall4G (It’s an e-commerce platform in LATAM) and we need to expand the team. I was looking for REACT developers, instead of sending them a test just to test their REACT abilities, I was more interesting on see the problem solving, so, the test was basically create a checkout view, with all card information and make it in single page and doing some validations.

The result, I got different solutions, for a problem, we may face in the real project.

Interview the candidate, but with the right people.

Yes, you have to interview the candidate, get a 1on1, meet the real person, live or in video call. It doesn’t really matter. The importance here is to get the right person or team to interview.

It could be their future team mates, it could be you, it could be a hiring specialist, just make sure the interviewer is the right person, He/She knows all about the project, the requirements, but more important the soft skills needed for that position.

Invite the candidate to meet the team (if possible).

I like to to this when we have the time to fill out a position. We select the best three candidates, and invite them to work for the project a week or a day (payed obviously). That way, you can reduce the chances of hiring the wrong person, you can see the candidate in action, interacting with your team and with their team mates. It just works for everybody.

It’s doesn’t happen all the time, due, candidate impediments or project urgencies. But if you have the time, it worth the wait.

Hiring the right people is a long term process, but we put our effort on improving it and make the smartest decisions for all of our clients. There are thousand of ways to do this process, we go with that one, and it have worked for us and our partners. They love their teams I can assure that.