Collaborative Technical Hiring: People Ops + Engineering Teams

Collaborative technical hiring is a trend that is increasingly important for big brands like Apple and Netflix.

It encourages people operations to work with other departments to source and hire talent as a team. We invited two heads of people operations to our office in Warsaw to discuss how they collaborate with their engineering teams on hitting technical hiring goals.

Common technical hiring challenges that companies face often begin with having a poorly designed recruitment process. Engineering teams should work closely with technical hiring teams to shadow people who are experienced at holding tech interviews. There should be some sort of onboarding and training process, so engineering teams and hiring teams can align on roles, responsibilities, and how they can best cooperate with one another in the recruitment process.

“We don’t throw them [software engineers] into deep water—instead we have stages of shadowing. First, after they’ve undergone technical recruiter training, they have the opportunity to shadow a couple of interviews, observing a more experienced technical recruiter.” – Małgorzata Pietraszewska, Head of People, 10Clouds

Software engineers are feedback machines. For some software engineers, feedback is the most important part of any kind of recruitment process and largely contributes to candidate experience as a whole. Stress the importance for every person involved in the recruitment process to give high quality, constructive recruitment feedback for a positive candidate experience.

Define strategic cooperation. Software engineers and recruiters should want to actively participate in collaborative technical hiring. The synergy between software engineers and recruiters will make for an improved candidate experience.

“No one in the organization should be forced to recruit if they don’t feel like it.” – Patrycja Szostakowska, People and Operations Manager, Codility

Create a partnership. Software engineers are responsible for scaling, teaching, and coaching recruiters when it comes to tech talent. Engage software engineers and help them understand the recruitment process.

Organize workshop-style interviews for senior developers. Experienced senior software engineers prefer to be tested in a work-like environment, and this gives your team the chance to coach and learn from candidates. Show them that there are benefits to interviewing people and leave your applicants with a great candidate experience.

Make the recruitment process as short as possible. Tech candidates can get other offers extremely fast—time is valuable to both candidates and your internal team.

“As a developer, I love interviews that happen [consecutively] one after the other.” – Kuba Kucharski, Developer Evangelist, Codility

Collaboration is the glue behind successful teams. In order to achieve your technical hiring goals, bring engineering teams and people operations together in the recruitment process to ensure a seamless and positive candidate experience.