How to Hire Developers for Your In-House Team
A practical guide to hiring and onboarding great software developers for your in-house team, shared by a seasoned engineer with 20+ years of experience.
Complications in the Software Job Market
Let me introduce myself. I am a software engineer with more than twenty years of experience. I started my career as an assistant professor at a university, where I worked for three and a half years. Then I was an ERP developer for five years. After that I switched to custom web development, where I have worked ever since. Next month will mark sixteen years in that field.
Over that time, I have interviewed and hired many software developers—some awesome, others not so much.
Just a few years ago, hiring developers was extremely difficult. The tech industry was overhyped. Everyone was a developer with high salary expectations. You could publish a job and get a whole lot of applications from people who have just graduated. They had no real-life experience—but still expected you to pay them and treat them as seasoned engineers.
Today, the picture is different. The job market for software engineers has dropped to the point where junior developers are thrown out of the equation and there is a common belief that AI will replace them soon (it will not). Experienced developers now expect more modest salaries.
This shift creates a great opportunity: you can hire skilled developers for your in-house team at reasonable rates.
Nevertheless, the process of choosing a suitable person is still quite difficult.
Even after an offer is made and accepted, I often cannot be sure whether I have made the right decision.
Why is Hiring a Developer So Difficult?
The biggest challenge when you hire software developers is that you do not know if they are good or not. Or how good they are. Are they good enough to fill a specific position?
If a developer looks good enough and I decide that they can join my team, the client may still think otherwise. Clients can have their own judgement. They may judge based on the way the developer talks rather than on the developer’s technical skills. It is hard to predict what is important to the client and what is not.
But the client’s opinion is not the main problem. The main problem is that even my own opinion— based on a comprehensive assessment of the person done during two or three interviews—does not guarantee that the developer will cope with the project.
Most of our projects are long-term and have complex requirements. So, we put an effort in keeping the cognitive and cyclomatic complexity low. At the same time, we maintain a high level of communication with clients.
A new developer can have technical skills, suitable experience, and common sense. This is what you can assess during an interview. But you know that jumping into a fast flowing river where an established team has been swimming for a few years is just another level of complexity. A newcomer can drown.
Nobody expects that, right? When we hire someone, everybody is happy and excited.
Everyone is optimistic at the start:
“Everyone, meet Matt! He’s an awesome developer and a great guy. He’s joining us tomorrow.”
Nobody expects Matt to cause a production issue a few months later—but that can happen because of impersonal reasons.
That’s why a thorough developer hiring process is critical.
How to Prepare a Test Assignment for a Software Engineer?
Let’s take one step back to the point in time where we have posted a job and started reviewing CVs. How do we find the right person?
Filtering Candidates Before the Test Stage
Today the market is flooded with developers looking for a job, which gives us opportunities.
The opportunities come in the form of 150-200 resumes. How do we process them?
We have a multi-level process. It starts with reviewing the resumes. Many are irrelevant— people apply for a job without reading the job description (AI helps them a lot).
After filtering out the irrelevant candidates, we have, say, only 50 of them. At this point, our sweet HR manager, Veronika, conducts 15-minute calls with them. This is quite intense work. When that’s done, we have 10 candidates who proceed to the technical test assignment.
Creating Practical Test Assignments
We keep our test assignment concise. We respect our candidates’ time and do not think that they should spend several days proving their skills. In an ideal world, candidates and interviewers would spend 0 minutes to find their matches. They would just read resumes and job postings and see each other immediately.
But we do not live in an ideal world, so candidates have to spend from 30 minutes to 4 hours depending on their experience with the specifics.
Preparing that kind of concise assignment is not easy because we still want to hit the target areas and understand how the candidate will cope with the project. This is where my background as an assistant professor comes in handy.
In the past, I would invent a lot of those tricky small assignments that were supposed to test out all students’ understanding of the subject, but within a small amount of time. Students weren’t exactly fond of me.
I have matured since then, so I do not aim at catching candidates out. But I want to know their level of understanding of a specific subject. Additionally, I want to see their coding style.
The assignment can be an algorithm so that I can see usage of data structures and if-else statements. Or a short code snippet with tests. Or a mini-project consisting of 2 pages.
It should cover the areas that the candidates will have to deal with in case they join the project. At the same time, we do not expect the candidates to go too deep.
The goal is to understand the candidate’s starting skill level and technical mindset before you move forward.
How to Interview a Software Engineer?
When we are satisfied with a test assignment, we schedule a video interview—typically one hour long.
It is worth mentioning that we always aim at having all our employees in the same office. This way, the candidates should they become our employees would have to be present in our space.
But for the first conversation, a video call is just fine. We understand that the candidates may want to participate in several interviews per day, so an online interview is a good choice.
The key is to establish a friendly atmosphere at the call. Most candidates are nervous, some of them are very nervous. That is natural, but that is not helpful.
A nervous candidate can become defensive or even angry. On the contrary, a relaxed candidate becomes an interesting talking partner who easily shares information which helps us to make a better decision.
We keep interview panels small: usually our HR manager and two engineers. One focuses on platform-specific questions, the other asks about code quality, data structures, tests, and high-level engineering stuff.
We pay attention to several aspects, including:
- Education — specific universities and specializations tell us a lot about candidates.
- General knowledge of software and specific skills.
- Attitude to coding.
- Communication skills.
That last one—communication—is crucial. A big part of our work is human interaction, not just coding. That’s why we treat the ability to communicate as a professional skill.
I value communication skills higher than education.
If the first interview goes well, we invite candidates to our office, where we will show them around and have another friendly conversation.
How Developer Interviews Have Changed Over the Years
I remember how my wife and I were interviewed for the first position in a company now called Krononsoft. I took a 1-month preparation course and came to the office four times. My wife Alice (she started as a C++ developer) had a 2-hour phone interview with one of the company founders, and then went through a 4-hour interrogation at the office. She was interviewed by 3 people including both founders. They wanted to know everything about memory leaks catching, differences between inheritance and encapsulation, and all the other tricky C++ stuff.
Eventually, she was hired—labeled “the girl who gave correct answers to all our incorrect questions.”
Those days were different. Who cared about a friendly atmosphere back then? You had to have fighting skills among everything else.
Today, the market is different. I used to be prompted by our HRs multiple times before I stopped choking candidates out and started helping them to get relaxed and impressed.
How to Help a New Developer Adapt in a Team?
Let’s imagine you have hired a good developer. Can you mark the job as done?
Can you celebrate the new hire with your team, then go and have a rest?
Our experience says no.
Even after we provided a test assignment, collected a number of solutions to it, selected candidates for interviews, talked to them in video calls and at the office, and finally chose one out of a hundred, we would still have doubts whether the new engineer would fit in.
We have only assessed the candidate’s ability to work their way through the challenges. But that does not provide any kind of assurance that the engineer will do the job.
If there is a project that is not easy for us, and the team has been working on it for a few years, why should it be easy for a newcomer?
Developer Integration Essentials
A new engineer should explore the project, understand the code decomposition and data structures, learn the business logic and the history, and digest values of the team.
That’s right, values are not secondary stuff. They form the project just like the data model does.
Nowadays, when everybody is amused by “vibe coding,” people forget that coding can be very different.
Coding, like poetry, comes in many styles. It can be fast and expressive. It can be solid and thorough. It can be tied in a big crazy knot. Or it can be split into many separate parts with intentionally repeated lines.
It is not just style (although style is important). Rather, it is an attitude and discipline:
- Proper code decomposition.
- Adherence to the single-responsibility principle.
- Covering code by automated tests.
- Delivering the results to the customer in a way where the customer understands the progress made—which is critically important.
We can’t expect that new developers will share the same attitude towards coding and working in a team from day one. During the interviews, it is only possible to see if they are somehow close to it.
But when they join the team, they should have time to adapt. The team should put an effort in accommodating them, otherwise they will not stay for long.
Our experience shows that the approximate time for accommodation is from 2 to 6 months. That’s why active developer onboarding and mentorship are essential.
What to Pay Attention to When Hiring a Developer?
There are many talented software developers out there. You can have them in your team. But there are many more people you will need to filter out before you find the right person.
Filtering out wrong people and picking the right people is a complicated process. Let’s imagine you want to find a partner. Is it simple? There are many men and women that look good and seem to be functional, but it is not a secret that not all marriages last forever.
Why? If you ask a divorced couple that question, they will tell you that “it did not work out”. Who knew? There were so many reasons.
Fortunately, hiring developers is somewhat easier. You do not hire people to be happy together forever. But you want them to be a valuable part of the team for a long time. You want them to do a good job.
It means, you have to go all the way through that complicated and exhausting selection process. When done well, both sides will remember it positively.
Once new developers join, do not leave them alone. Support them, help them, let them taste and adhere to the common values.
Enjoy communication with them and let them enjoy communication with you.
If you have found great engineers, do your best to keep them.
Let’s remember how hard it was to find all the right engineers and make them a team.
The right people have great value.
FAQs about How to Hire a Software Developer
How can I evaluate a developer’s technical skills before hiring?
The most effective way is through a focused coding test or project-based assignment. It should reflect real tasks from your project and take no more than a few hours. This approach helps you see how candidates write, structure, and reason about code — not just whether they can solve theoretical puzzles.
What should I look for during a software engineer interview?
Look beyond technical answers. Pay attention to problem-solving methods, communication clarity, and attitude toward collaboration. Ask questions that reveal how candidates think, handle feedback, and approach challenges. A well-run interview should show whether the person will strengthen your team dynamic as well as your codebase.
How long does it take for a new developer to adapt to the team?
On average, onboarding and full adaptation take two to six months. During this period, provide mentorship, documentation, and gradual exposure to complex tasks. The more supportive your onboarding process, the faster the developer becomes productive and aligned with your team’s values.
What are the most important qualities of a great software developer?
Strong technical foundations are essential, but the best developers also show curiosity, ownership, communication skills, and a growth mindset. They write maintainable code, understand business goals, and contribute positively to team culture — all critical for building a strong development team in-house.
Vadim Kondratiev, team lead and customer liaison at Krononsoft, specializes in guiding complex software initiatives and aligning technology with business growth.
