When should the dev team get involved in the hiring process?

My wife is a chef. When she applies for a job, she goes to the restaurant for what’s called a staging. A staging is a practice shift, where you make some dishes with the other chefs you’ll be working with, and you’re evaluated by the su chef or executive chef. Is the restaurant owner in charge of hiring chefs? No. Are the investors involved in hiring? No. Is the hostess involved in hiring? No. The chef in charge of the kitchen hires kitchen staff.

Can you imagine how dysfunctional a restaurant kitchen would be if the waiters hired the chefs? Or if the manager who has no cooking experience managed the kitchen?

An engineer should be in charge of your engineering team, and they should be in charge of hiring the people working under them.

Which process would you rather be put through? Talk to dev manager and team earlier or filtered (and likely lost) in recruitings inbox? Would you rather be contacted by a recruiter? Or contacted by a dev on a team you might work for?

We certainly do both, but the best candidates come from being engaged in our tech communities and sharing our team and roles organically, rather than filtering through lots of resumes after a recruiter spams a bunch of people.

It varies at different stages of your company. You should measure where time is wasted and optimize.

If you're doing A) and you get a ton of clearly unqualified candidates, you want your dev team leads to do the initial assessment and the recruiter(s) to learn from that.

If, viceversa, you're doing B) and your dev team leads are spending most of their time recruiting, then you need to smooth into A).

As a good rule of thumb, during hiring season, the dev team leads should spend around 30% of their time on recruiting, not more than that. Less is always good, of course, but it shouldn't come at the price of wasting more time during longer interview cycles.

We do it using paid try outs - mastered by Automattic.

It works this way: 1. Basic screening 2. Small take home assignment 3. Code review and 1-1 interview 4. Paid try-out for 3/4 weeks

This works very well for hiring Junior level developers. We have found gems using this technique.

Need a service to do it for you - try OutTeam. - https://outteam.nurturelabs.co/

"The recruiter writes the job ad"

Don't let the recruiter write the job description. Let the team/devs write the job description and then recruiter can fine tune it for presentation and delivery. Yes, this adds friction and in larger companies, may not even be possible but in smaller mid-size companies, recruiters should not be writing job descriptions.

I thought it was always done the first way, where recruiter is a preliminary filter that provides the dev team with a list of candidates.

I feel like involving the dev team at the early stages would cut into engineering productivity