What I have learned from interviewing more than 500+ Developers?

I have interviewed more than 500+ candidates for various Southeast Asia startups over the last 3 years and hired more than 50+ engineers.

Our company used to help tech companies to scale their teams. Initially, I was into client account management, and later because of technical expertise.

I started helping hiring managers in interviews so that they can save their time and put in the right candidates for clients. Over time I have rediscovered and designed the processes for various startups based on their needs.

Startup Hiring is a bit aggressive because they raise huge funds in a short period and most of it is used to just build their teams as they have to deliver their milestones as promised.

For startups, Scale is the key to their success, and bringing that scale requires a lot of people into the company.

I would like to share some insights into what I have learned over the years and why I think processes are quite outdated and why we aren’t able to build diverse, quality, and cohesive teams, and why we aren’t recognizing interviewing as a critical business activity.

It always starts with the client and I have always believed they are right in terms of what they are looking for. But in reality, they don’t know what they want, they just assume a candidate with better technical skills will fit in the role. They are just searching for candidates with skills but ideally, there are so many variables associated with it and often their technical skills aren’t used.

They wanted people very badly and they don’t dedicate the necessary time that is required to understand who are we letting into the company or they listen to their peers and just follow it.

In a recent story of Justin Kane founder of atrium mentioned how he built teams so fast and couldn’t bring team cohesiveness and culture which was one of the primary reasons for the failure of the atrium.

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