Hiring the right person for the position you have available at your company is a challenge for any manager. This is especially true when adding to your tech team: You need to find someone with that delicate balance of tech skills and interpersonal skills who will mesh well with your IT department. Candidates also need to have a breadth of interests, as well as the confidence to ask the right questions.
Below, 11 members of Forbes Technology Council share the traits they look for when making key hires to their tech team, in order to help decide who to make an offer to. Here is what they said:
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1. Eagerness And Ability To Learn
The key for individual performance is eagerness and the ability to pick up new knowledge. The key to team performance is effective communication and a positive attitude. Hence, we are always looking for an ideal balance between those two sides in our candidates. – Johannes Stiehler, VirtualWorks Group AS
2. Resiliency
I look for resiliency. Because of our fast-changing environment, resiliency is the most critical characteristic required for success. – Henna Karna, XL Catlin
3. Communication And Articulation
Communication and, in particular, articulation are fundamental skills. Most struggles in a team setting come down to people being unable to articulate their position well enough for others to make the critical assessments required to evaluate the overall situation. In an interview, the ability to articulate a complex position is a critical factor in determining who gets the position. – Michael Hurwitz, Cumulus Energy Storage
4. Ability To Ask Tough Questions
What I typically look for in new hires is the ability to learn and ask tough and often unpopular questions. The world tomorrow can be very different from today. – Winnie Cheng, Io-Tahoe LLC
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5. Curiosity
When debugging an issue, curiosity means asking “why” a few more times than the next person. When innovating, it means a broader range of interests to draw from. Curiosity within technology is great, but I’m really looking for curiosity in the most general sense. Curious people are natural learners and, this may be selfish, but I just like being around them. – Christopher Petersen, Scientist.com
6. Passion
What differentiates good candidates from great candidates is passion – passion to learn and passion to create great products. If you have the drive to excel and you take pride in your work, you will make sure that the project is a success. – Aakash Sareen, Copper Mobile, Inc
7. A Coachable Attitude
While hiring an individual contributor to the tech team, I look for a coachable attitude. There are many talented engineers that specialize in one technology, however by looking for engineers with a coachable attitude, you can create a path for a future manager. – Jamasen Rodriguez, Kylie.ai
8. Empathy
One of the more important character traits is empathy. We can always find people with the right experience, backgrounds, and education. The challenge has been how to lead a team during tough times and help them in these situations. – Tony Colon, Salesforce.
9. T-Shaped Skill Set
The most vital metric we use to assess new talent is the presence of a T-shaped skillset. Deep expertise in a specific technology or language is an obvious qualification, but equally important is a breadth of tangential knowledge. Without this cross-bar of understanding, relevant context is lost and team communication breaks down. – Benjamin Haynes, RANGER
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10. Low Ego
Skill, aptitude and drive clearly rank towards the top of the list when hiring talent. Above all else though, we strive to find and hire people that have low egos. It’s been my experience that this trait is indicative of those who consistently demonstrate high degrees of customer centricity and individual accountability. – Mike Roberts, VillageMD
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