
Technical Hiring Guide: Learn to 'speak geek' in four steps By Kate Matsudaira Recruiting for technical roles can feel like being in a strange place and not speaking the language; the acronyms and jargon can make it challenging to navigate a candidate’s qualifications beyond matching buzzwords on their resume to a job description. This Technical Hiring Guide explains different tech roles and how they relate to one another in plain English. Before we get into specifics, let’s take a top-down approach to the roles. Download a printable PDF of this article. Step 1: Understand Technical Departments First, it helps to understand the departments within a company, as different divisions have different goals and responsibilities. Most technical hires fall into one of two camps: Building Software or Operations and Support. Building Software encompasses all the roles related to creating software. "Software" could mean desktop applications, mobile apps, websites, and other tools. Basically, the output or result from "writing code." Operations and Support represents the logistics needed to keep things running. "Things" could be software, hardware, or processes in a business or organization. A great example is IT or tech support teams – their primary job is to keep things running smoothly, rather than writing code or building software. One big difference between these two categories is that Building Software often (though not always) generates products, features, or revenue, while Operations and Support is generally a cost center to a business. Both groups are essential, so it is important to know how their different goals fit into the overall organization. Step 2: Know the Team & Tools Once you understand the technical areas of the business, the next step is to gain a deeper understanding of the team and the open position. Get a solid handle on the technologies in use and the desired skillset of any new hire. Since job descriptions don’t always paint the whole picture, dig deeper into what the hiring manager is actually looking for in a new hire by asking key questions:
- What is their technology stack?
- What skills are their team missing?
- What technologies or tools will this new hire use on the job?
- Will the person be able to learn any of these on the job, or do they need to come with a mastery of one or several of those skills?
- If a candidate doesn’t have all the requisite skills, what other technologies or comparable skills might still make them qualified? If so, what are they?
- What are the skillsets and backgrounds of the current team?
- What are the skills, experiences, and traits of your most successful team members?
- Software Engineer
- Back-End Engineer
- Middle-Tier Engineer
- Front-End Engineer
- Web Developer
- Database Administrator (DBA)
- DevOps Engineer
- System Administrator
- Network Administrator
- Data Scientist
- Quality Assurance Engineer
- Software Engineer in Test
- Technical Lead
- Could you put them in front of customers?
- Do they explain things well enough to talk to a CEO?
- Are they curious and have a strong desire to understand how things work?
- Have they ever been on-call before and would you rely on them?