How should we recruit in a devops, cloud and 'hackathon' world?

In the last month my team has been hiring full stack Java developers to build out our mobile, consumer and B2B offerings. We used a tried and tested process that has worked many times before: list the skills needed for the role, the previous experience we think would have built up those skills, write a good opening paragraph promoting the role, and post!

Which is when things ground to a halt. 

We are using a new approach to delivery: devops, our developers are customer facing and regularly attend customer hackathons, and we already have an extensive hybrid cloud architecture. In layman terms: we require developers to be good not only at building code but also at understanding how it runs, how to deploy it, and even how to talk about it to our customers.

So the list of skills got longer and longer and more diverse.

And the list of applicants that could tick the boxes got shorter and shorter.

Which meant our recruiters were filtering out more and more applicants, and those that got through put our hiring managers in a quandary of either not filling the role or hiring someone without all the requisite skills.

Something had to give.

Taking learnings from our partnership with Pivotal Labs, we re-adjusted the job specification. Removed half the required skills and started to look at indicators of the type of person we wanted:

·        Good IT development skills in general

·        Empathetic

·        Curious, keen and able to learn new skills

·        ‘Intellectually humble’: prepared to learn from others

·        Passionate and Energetic

How did we see these softer skills? First through recruiting for attitude: passion and energy comes across even over a phone interview - as can empathy: a developer who listens to questions and responds showing they have listened is a good start.

Curiosity and a keenness to develop new skills can be seen by the developers’ experience: have they built in different technologies in their career? Also what do they do in their spare time? Someone who ‘plays’ with new technologies is someone who wants to keep learning and is self-motivated to do so.

Once we had people with passion, empathy and curiosity shortlisted, we asked them to do a day’s pair programming with one of our developers. Here they built code side by side with someone and demonstrated not just technical prowess but also mental agility in learning new technology and a work ethic in getting a job done. Above all they could be evaluated for their empathy: how did they interact and learn? Did they teach us something?

The best recruits have an “open to learn” attitude, coupled with a confidence in their own ability to deliver, they are able to learn from others, and can contribute and articulate their ideas. They have skills hard to write down on paper but which were far more important to our success.

We are still in the early days of our change in recruitment approach, and it seems to be working out well. But it highlights a question: whether advancing technology is changing who the ideal engineer needs to be, or is it reminding us that even in technology ‘soft’ skills are very important and can’t be found in a checklist.