4 Traits to look for when interviewing Technical Staff

Originally posted 28th July 2019

Hiring… you never know 100% if you’re going to get the correct fit. However, we fine tune our hiring process as well as the questions we use to give us the best indications that the potential candidate would be a good fit for the team.

While I don’t have a set regimen of questions nor do I endorse a specific process or method, I do have a few traits I look for when hiring technical positions. I tend to change up the questioning, but I’ve found looking for the following traits greatly reduces the risk of an ‘incorrect fit’.

Here’s the 4 main traits I look for when hiring for technical positions:

Technical Competence

This is an obvious one, the candidate should be able to demonstrate technical competence appropriate for the role. This may be a coding test, design questions, or general technical questions.

The exact method I’d use will vary based on the specifics of the role I’m hiring for.

Team Player

The potential candidate should be a good team player. This is usually probed using a number of behavioural and situational questions.

You want to ensure that when the candidate is added to the team, they can quickly adjust and work with their new team members in various situations.

Under this area, I look for a few things:

• Understanding how they resolve conflicts with teammates to maintain a good level of team synergy.
• Understanding if they tend to take a team approach to getting work done versus attempting to do everything themselves. Given a situation, will they choose to assist a blocked team member to get them going or take on the work themselves?
• Their ability and willingness to grow junior team members
• Leadership skills

Communication

Depending on the seniority of the role, this may be of more emphasis. However, on any team, a decent level of effective communication with teammates would be needed to keep productivity up.

There’s a few points I look out for under this area:

• Oral Communication capabilities when explaining different technical blocks or issues
• Written communication when reporting to fellow teammates
• Their choice of different communication methods based on the situation

Always Learning / Passionate about technology

For me, this is a big one. I’ve personally had a lot of success with engineers that may not have a lot of technical experience yet, but demonstrate some technical competence married with a passion for tech and a willingness to always be learning.

In this area I usually probe into their hobbies and how it’s connected with tech. I also try to find out if they stay up to date with developments in the tech world as well as thoughts on new stacks and frameworks. Body language as well as how deep they delve into the conversation can help in gauging their passion.

Conclusion

There are potentially other traits that will be of significance based on the role, however I feel these are 4 general traits that allow you to gauge a better team fit when interviewing for technical roles.

Got any additional traits you think deserves a call out? Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments!