Hiring your Founding Software Engineering Team: 4 Key Insights from our Software Recruiters

In today’s blog post we will be discussing some key tips on how to hire your first few Software Engineers, and what to look out for when hiring for your SaaS start-up.

You are likely to think about hiring your software engineers in the early stages of your software start-up. As you are building your team you need to hire the founding engineering team. It is essential that you hire the right software engineers, as hiring the wrong people could make or break your start-up’s success.

According to Forbes, the trust cost of a bad hire is at least 30% of the new hire’s annual salary, if not significantly more. If you are paying a software engineer an annual salary 80,000 to 120,000 (depending on their seniority), you are looking at a potential loss of 24,000 to 36,000 alone, not including productivity, training and other costs.

According to Harvard Business Review 80% of turnover is due to bad hiring decisions and poor hiring practices. It is a very important time to make sure that you hire the right people, hiring the wrong person could make or break your start-up’s success.

4 Tips from a Software Recruiter's to Ensure You Hire the Right Software Engineers for Your start-up

Software Engineer Writing Code, photo by Wix.com

1.Define your exact needs clearly, before you start interviewing:

Take the time to decide the tech stack, level of experience and type of work the person will be doing. Do they need to be working on full-stack development, front-end development, back-end development? Here are some initial questions to ask yourself and determine before you start interviewing software engineer candidates.

• Do you need someone who has start-up experience, or someone who comes from a large technology company?

• Do you need someone who is a defined expert in a specific area or more of a generalist profile?

• Do you want someone more junior and hands-on or a more Senior Software Engineer/Principle Engineer to solve problems?

• What skills are you missing currently in your team?

• Based on what you have determined, decide the technical interviews process and what that will involved (for example, data structures & algorithms, system design interviews, front-end or back-end coding interviews) 

2.Write a compelling job description:

If you want to attract the best people, and importantly, the right software engineers to join your software start-up you should have a very compelling job description.

Why do you ask? The best software engineers need to be very interested in the problem you are trying to solve, and the top 1% of them are highly selective when looking for their next challenge.

We will cover the best way to write job descriptions in another blog post but for now here are some key points to remember:

1. Highlight the “why” - what is the challenge that the software engineer will be solving. Usually they love finding solutions to problems, so make this clear about your start-up’s mission and why the challenge is important. 

2. Impact: Talk about the impact of the work, on the industry, on the company or something else. For example, you are building a data intelligence platform that analyses risk? Why is this important? What are the technical challenges here? Do you need secure APIs or a data infrastructure layer?

3. Growth: What does growth look like? In other words, what can the software engineers expert do at your start-up? What is the growth trajectory for them if they were to join? Ultimately, in order to ensure you have a high employee retention, you have to ensure there is a match between the software engineer’s interests

3. Use targeted platforms 

The key to finding the best software engineering talent is to build your network with talent and find people where they are. After all, you have to know your audience and understand where they spend time in order to get them interested in your start-up and the opportunity to work there. Some good places to check out would be GitHub, Stack Overflow, Angel-Iist or niche start-up communities. 

4. Ensure you screen for culture fit and problem solving

The realities of working as a software engineer in a start-up or scale-up are very different from working in a large technology company. Ensure you are clear with the candidates about the nature of the role and the challenges you expect them to face. Specifically, ensure that you use the software engineering interview process to test for how they fit into your company culture. Make sure to also dig further on their problem solving abilities and resourcefulness; you need people that are not only good from a technical point of view, but can be resilient and resourceful in a start-up environment. Another important consideration is to look for their ability to thrive in an ambiguous and fast-paced start-up environment, ensure that you test these in the behavioural interviews.

Having built software engineering teams at large technology companies like META and Hubspot and dozens of start-up clients our software recruiters have extensive expertise to ensure your start-up hires the best people for your team.

We offer tailored recruitment solutions that align with your budget and hiring goals. Whether you're scaling a technical  team from scratch or filling critical roles, we help you avoid the costly mistakes of poor hiring decisions.Feel free to contact us at Optimyze1 or book a call.