When I first stepped into the role of building engineering teams, I quickly realized that evaluating technical skills was just the tip of the iceberg. The journey of building a strong team begins long before we conduct our first interview and continues well after an offer letter is signed. Through years of experience, successes, and yes, some memorable learning moments, I've come to appreciate the intricate dance of finding and nurturing great engineering talent. Let me share this journey with you, whether you're just starting as an engineering manager or looking to refine your existing process.

Building a great team is like putting together a championship roster. Just like in sports, you need to scout for potential, test for the right skills, and ultimately field a cohesive unit that is better than the sum of its parts. In the business world, interviewing is your primary tool for making that happen. Let's break down what a good interview process looks like from start to finish.

Before you start sourcing and screening applicants, it's critical to align on why this hire is needed in the first place and what success in the role looks like. Skipping this foundational step is like building a house without a blueprint - you might end up with a structure, but chances are it won't match your vision or needs.

Identify the Business Need

Every new hire should be tied to a clear business objective. What gap are you looking to fill? What capabilities are you seeking to add or augment? How will this role drive key priorities forward? Crystallizing the "why" behind the headcount does a few important things:

1. It ensures organizational alignment. Getting buy-in from leadership and cross-functional partners on the need for the role sets you up to collaborate effectively throughout the hiring process. You can point back to the business case for the headcount to resolve any competing priorities or tradeoffs that arise.

2. It enables you to craft a compelling job description. When you know the "why", you can paint an exciting picture of the opportunity for candidates. Instead of a generic list of requirements, you can highlight the specific impact they'll have and initiatives they'll drive. The role transforms from an opening to a mission.

3. It focuses your search. With clear success criteria for the role, you know what skills and experience to prioritize in your ideal candidate profile. You can zero in on the competencies and traits that truly matter, not just cast a wide net. This helps you hone in on the right talent pools and sourcing channels from the start.

As an example, let's continue with our Product Manager hiring scenario. Imagine your business has just launched a new product line and needs to quickly establish product-market fit. Your "why" might look like:

We need a senior PM to lead our new XYZ product launch and iteration. This person will work cross-functionally to validate early hypotheses, define the MVP feature set, and drive rapid execution. Key priorities will include conducting extensive user research, defining and tracking success metrics, and building strong partnerships with Engineering, Design, and Go-To-Market teams. This PM will play a critical role in proving out a major new growth opportunity for the business.

Having this level of clarity on the role will guide every aspect of your talent search, from the JD you post to the interview loops you design to how you close the candidate.

Define Your Ideal Candidate

With the business need crystallized, you can start outlining the core skills, experience, and traits of your ideal hire. Think of this as your "hiring blueprint" - it defines the template you're looking to match candidates against.

Consider the role from multiple angles:

1. Functional Expertise: What hard skills are absolute must-haves to succeed in the role? Be as specific as possible. "Experienced in tech domain" is vague; "experience shipping full-stack features in an agile environment" is concrete.

2. Competencies: What underlying abilities and behaviors do you need this person to demonstrate? Things like analytical rigor, user empathy, influencing without authority, adapt to change, and bias for action. These often make the difference between a good hire and a great one.

3. Experience Level: How much experience and scope of responsibility are you looking for? Do you need a proven track record or are you open to potential? What scale and complexity should they have operated at before?

4. Culture Add: How will this person complement and elevate your existing team culture? What perspectives or working styles are you looking to bring in? How do they need to collaborate cross-functionally? Will they need to be a strong leader or a great collaborator? Do they collaborate well with others?

Using our PM example, a snapshot of your ideal candidate might include:

Functional Expertise	Competencies	Experience Level	Culture Add
Shipped 0->1 products	Strategic thinking	5-7 years in product	Collaborative & low-ego
Full-stack execution	User obsession	Operated at >$100M scale	Comfort with ambiguity
Rapid experimentation	Compelling communication	Managed multi-quarter roadmaps	Bias for action & speed

Every trait you include should map directly back to your definition of success for the role. Adding "nice to haves" like fancy pedigrees or niche technical skills risks biasing your search and narrowing your viable talent pool. Stick to the must-haves.

In an ideal world, you'd have a profile for every role you're hiring for. But in the real world, you'll need to make some tradeoffs. That's why it's important to have a clear understanding of the role and the business need. The candidate might be strong in some areas but not others. You might have a time constraint and need to hire quickly and deliver value. So you take a pragmatic approach and hire for the most important criteria first.

Often times, you find ideal profiles of the candidates you are looking for and share it with the recruiting team so they understand the profiles and the skills and can start sourcing for you better. This is a great way to start the interview process. You also spend some time initially with the recruiter in sourcing and screening candidates to fine tune the filters and sourcing strategy.

Translate the Profile into Evaluation Criteria

The final step of preparation is transforming the ideal candidate profile into tangible evaluation criteria. How will you actually test for each of the skills and traits you've identified?

Remember - you're not just assessing aptitude, but also interest and fit. Design questions and scenarios that give candidates a realistic preview of the role, not just generic brain teasers.

A few examples for our Product Manager:

• Have them walk through the end-to-end process of a product launch they led at their current company. Press for specifics on how they identified the opportunity, validated assumptions, and measured success. Look for signs of user-centric thinking, analytical rigor, and cross-functional collaboration.

• Give them a mock scenario where a key launch is at risk of delay and the eng team is pushing to cut scope. Have them play out how they would handle it, probing for their framework for making tradeoffs. Assess influencing skills, decisiveness, and ability to zoom out to see the bigger strategic picture.

• Ask what product they're most passionate about and why. Evaluate if they can compellingly articulate a product vision and identify opportunities others miss. Gauge culture fit in what they value and how they tell stories.

The common thread through all of these is starting with the end in mind. Align the exercises to the core abilities of the role and the key interactions they'll have. Candidates should leave with a tangible sense of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Once you have your evaluation approach defined, pressure test it with stakeholders like peers on the team, cross-functional partners, and recruiters. Align on a common rubric for what exceptional, acceptable, and concerning responses look like. Calibrating upfront sets you up for more efficient and objective debriefs later.

Investing this time in defining the "why" behind the role, the attributes of your ideal hire, and how you'll evaluate them is the most pivotal determinant of hiring success. It ensures you and your interview teams are searching for the same profile and testing for the right capabilities. And it enables you to tell a cohesive story to the candidate, creating a standout experience from first outreach to offer close.

From here, you're ready to get out on the field and start assessing talent. But always keep referring back to your hiring blueprint to keep you grounded and guide decision making at every step. It's your North Star to leading an intentional, impactful talent search.

Execution: Put Candidates Through the Paces

With your game plan in hand, it's time to get out on the field and start assessing talent. The best interviews are like well-designed workouts — they push candidates to demonstrate their skills while fostering trust and understanding.

To do that well, embrace a few key principles:

1. Control the Tempo: You're the coach, so take charge of the conversation. Good time management ensures you cover everything you need to make a sound hiring decision. Don't let tangents throw you off track.

2. Go Deep, Not Just Wide: It's easy for savvy candidates to stay superficial and just say what you want to hear. Your job is to dig beneath the surface to truly understand how they think and operate. Probe into the "why" behind their decisions and actions to get a real feel for their judgment and problem-solving skills.

3. Sell, Don't Just Evaluate: Remember, elite talent has options. So while you're assessing them, recognize that they're assessing you right back. Give them a taste of the impact they'll have, the team they'll join, and the growth they'll experience. The best interviews feel like exciting conversations, not job interrogations. Be candid about the role and the company and the impact they'll have.

4. End With Enthusiasm: Last impressions matter just as much as first ones. Conclude with specific, positive feedback about what impressed you. Reinforce your interest and leave them feeling great about the potential fit. Even if they don't get the offer, they'll come away with a positive experience.

As an example, here's how you might structure a PM interview loop:

• Recruiter Screen (30 min): High-level assessment of background and interest. Ensure they understand the role and have a chance to ask initial questions.

• Take-home Assignment (1-2 hrs): Have them scope out a potential new feature. Look for their ability to analyze data, prioritize, and communicate their proposal.

• Product Deep Dive (1 hr): Dig into a specific initiative they led. Probe into their decision-making process, key tradeoffs, and lessons learned. Gauge user empathy, analytical skills, and stakeholder management.

• Cross-functional Collaboration (1 hr): Have them walk through a complex project involving eng, design, and other key partners. Evaluate their communication skills, influencing ability, and knack for driving alignment.

• Values and Motivations (1 hr): Go beyond just competencies to really understand their career aspirations, ideal working style, and what they uniquely bring to the table. Ensure strong culture alignment and fit.

This format enables you to test all the key attributes in your ideal candidate profile. But treat it as a starting point, not gospel. Regularly get feedback from candidates and interviewers about what's working and what's not. Hiring, like your product, should continuously evolve based on data.

One of the things that will help you is looking at the hiring funnel and the bottle necks and then trying to improve the process on a weekly or monthly basis. This will help you understand whether to coach the interviewers or the recruiter, add a process or remove a process or combine processes or tweak filter criteria to make the process more efficient. Also evaluate if we get enough data points from each interview to make a good decision.

Having question banks and templates for each interview will help you get started and also to coach others on how to do it better. Refine these over the course of time. Give your HR partner feedback constantly on what's working and what's not. Some channels might be good and some might not be. Some interviewers might be good and some might not be. Specialized roles might need more tweaking on all of these areas.

Sometimes you can't compete with an offer from another company and you lose a candidate. You have to understand your companies strength and build a compelling story around the problems, impact and the opportunity to make a difference.

Post-Game: Set Them Up to Win

Congrats, you've found your dream player! But signing them is only the first step. To help them reach their full potential, you have to integrate them into the team and set them up to succeed.

A few key ways to ensure a strong start:

• Celebrate the Win: Don't let things go quiet between offer acceptance and start date. Have the hiring manager reach out to express excitement and start building that relationship. Ship some welcome swag to make them feel part of the team before they even walk in the door.

• Educate and Inspire: The more context you can provide pre-start, the better. Share customer research, product demos, and strategy docs to help them hit the ground running. Capture the opportunity ahead and how they'll play a key part in seizing it.

• Craft a 30-60-90 Day Plan: Tailor an onboarding program to the specific role and level. Cover everything from key partners and systems to role-specific trainings and early projects. Thoughtful onboarding dramatically accelerates time-to-productivity and boosts long-term engagement.

After a few months, circle back with your new hire for frank feedback on the interview and onboarding experience. What worked well? What could be improved? Any key pieces of context they wished they had sooner? Even the best hires have a unique vantage point you can learn from.

Detailed Onboarding Journey

The onboarding experience we create for our new team members sets the foundation for their entire journey with us. Think of it as creating a carefully crafted map that guides them through unfamiliar territory, with each document and resource serving as a landmark in their journey.

For engineering roles, we should craft our onboarding documentation like we're building layers of understanding. We start with the broader organizational context – helping our new colleague understand where their team fits in the larger picture. This includes the company's mission, our team's specific vision, and how we contribute to the organization's success. It's like giving them a bird's eye view before we zoom in to the details.

As we move deeper, we should introduce them to the team's immediate ecosystem. This means sharing information about team members, their roles, and areas of expertise. We want to paint a picture of how the team works together, including our development processes, coding standards, and the technical decisions that have shaped our current architecture. I've found that sharing architecture diagrams and system workflows early helps new engineers build mental models of our systems more quickly.

The daily operational aspects come next. We should document the practical elements that make our team tick – our communication channels, meeting rhythms, and team rituals. This includes everything from which Slack channels to join for different types of discussions to how we handle code reviews and deployments. These might seem like small details, but they're crucial for helping someone feel at home in their new environment.

Cross-team collaboration is another vital area we should cover thoroughly. Our new team member needs to understand how we work with product managers, designers, and other engineering teams. Who are our key stakeholders? What are their preferred communication styles? How do we handle feature requests and technical discussions? This knowledge helps them navigate cross-functional relationships more effectively.

One aspect I've found particularly valuable is creating clear success milestones. Rather than leaving new hires to guess what good performance looks like, we should outline specific expectations for their first few months. This might include completing certain training modules, contributing to specific projects, or taking ownership of particular components. These milestones should be challenging yet achievable, giving them a sense of progress and accomplishment.

Technical documentation is equally important. We should provide access to our team's documentation repository, including architectural decisions, coding guidelines, and operational playbooks. For infrastructure teams, this might include on-call procedures and incident response protocols. For product teams, it might focus more on feature flags and A/B testing frameworks.

Security considerations deserve special attention. We should ensure our new team members complete any required security training early in their onboarding. This includes understanding our security protocols, access management procedures, and any compliance requirements specific to our domain. It's better to build these good practices from day one rather than trying to retrofit them later.

Remember that the goal of our onboarding documentation isn't just to transfer information – it's to help our new colleague become a confident, contributing member of our team. We should encourage questions and feedback about the onboarding process itself, using their fresh perspective to improve it for future team members.

Conclusion

Keep iterating with the same rigor and discipline you bring to building your product. Because ultimately, your team is your most important creation. Their skills, their passion, their cohesion — that's what will determine whether you win or lose in the market. So hire them with intention, onboard them with purpose, and support them like the all-stars they are.

Building a strong engineering team is much like cultivating a garden – it requires patience, attention, and continuous care. When we invest time in thoughtful interviewing processes, maintain genuine engagement throughout, and provide clear paths to success, we create an environment where both individuals and teams can thrive.

The most successful engineering teams aren't built through technical evaluation alone – they grow through careful nurturing at every stage, from initial contact to full integration. When we approach team building with this mindset, we create something truly special: a team that's greater than the sum of its parts.