Building Great Engineering Teams

Building a strong business means not only having effective hiring strategies, but also hiring people who have good foundational skills with strong potential.

Having effective hiring strategies to recruit malleable junior software engineers will empower your engineering team to grow over time. When finding the right juniors to join your team, look for soft skills in conjunction with technical coding skills and make sure to have a good onboarding process in place to bring them up to speed too.

Look beyond technical skills

Technical expertise is only one component of a strong engineering team— the human characteristics are what make a great hire great. Soft skills are also considered one of the highest indicators for the capacity to grow. This means that someone with great character who doesn’t perform as well on code assessments, might very well be a better candidate than someone with excellent scores. It’s crucial to take personality traits into consideration when building engineering teams.

Let’s dive into these soft skills:

Communication – A person who can express thoughts and explain ideas or processes clearly (especially in everyday language) has an incredibly valuable skill you shouldn’t pass up.

Critical thinking – Those with the ability to apply a dynamic style of thought are able to think out-of-the-box, like coming up with simple solutions for sophisticated problems.

Listening – People who can listen and understand feedback from others possess the valuable skill of active listening. This quality usually translates to having an ability to adapt criticism or advice into positive action.

Emotional intelligence – Though this skill is hard to determine in a short time frame, there are tricks to uncovering the depth of an individual’s emotional intelligence. Good communication along with conveying a genuine sense of accountability for past mistakes are good indicators of high emotional intelligence.

Receptiveness to change – Adaptability and the willingness to change are among the most vital traits needed for personal growth. Those who express an attitude that “their way is best” (or seem to deflect feedback) are probably change-resistant, making them poor collaborators are unable to grow.

Offer training and support

Never stop training—it doesn’t have to be a daily regimen (at least in most cases), but a plan should be in place that facilitates additional learning and development. In the digital realm, everything is continually changing and evolving, which means your engineering teams must do the same.

Ongoing education allows junior developers to grow professionally with the company and increases their value and skillset. This also builds loyalty and establishes a foundation for long-term career potential. Naturally, some will leave to explore different opportunities, but that shouldn’t stop your organization from investing in the most important part of the business—the employees.

It all starts with the right code assessment

Having effective hiring strategies to improve and hire junior software engineers is a significant contributor to the success of a business. Investing in people is just as important as other strategic expenditures—after all, these are the people who will be responsible for making your other investments a success.

Every successful hire in the tech industry starts with a careful code assessment and screening process—and this is where Codility comes in. Here’s our take on how to run a code assessment and screen successfully:

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