Overview
Hiring professional talent is a much different process than entry-level and mid-level talent. These individuals have between 5-8 years of professional experience. Professional or Senior level talent is often a more passive candidate. In many cases, they are sourced through a referral internally. Additionally, many senior-level individuals are already employed and you will find that there are fewer candidates.
The below visual shows a typical, senior-level hiring process flow. In the following sections, we will go over key differences in hiring this level of talent.
Phase 1: Plan
When planning to hire senior-level talent, the process will need to be more collaborative. It’s important that you get everyone on the same page about what the process will look like.
Decide as a team:
- What experience level are you looking for? Sr. Manager, Lead, Director, VP, etc.
- Do they need to have strong domain experience and knowledge?
- What ideal personality traits would be a good culture fit for the team
- Will this be a panel-style interview?
- What is the review process for making a decision?
Many times a senior-level candidate will never receive a test. This will need to be decided upfront and may vary from candidate to candidate and from role to role.
Phase 2: Screen
Whereas early-talent and mid-level candidates will be given a multiple-choice or real-world project, as mentioned above Senior-level talent will not. Typically, the best practice during the screening phase will simply be a phone discussion with the hiring manager. Since they are most likely sourced or referred there may need to be less upfront validation. Experience speaks for itself. This is also a great opportunity for the hiring manager to SELL your company and team to the candidate.
Use this time with the candidate to talk about:
- The candidate’s experience.
- What are some projects that they were excited to work on?
- What made the project successful?
- What kind of projects would they like to work on in the future?
- Innovative projects that the company is working on.
- How will this role impact that project?
This screening is a chance for you to get a feel for the candidate and their interest. If there is a mutual interest, now is a good time to let them know that they will be invited to a virtual onsite interview. Set the expectations with them of what they can expect for the in-person interview.
Before the interview, get the interview panel together again to re-align on the in-person interview.
Phase 3: Interview
The interview phase will typically include a few interviewers. The beginning of the interview is usually the best time to ask behavioral questions to identify if the candidate is a good culture fit for the company. These questions should have been identified in the Plan phase of the hiring process.
The next half of the interview is more technical in nature. For a Senior-level role, you will want to avoid multiple-choice questions. The goal here is to have them showcase their problem-solving skills and their ability to build or fix a real-world application.
Have them showcase this by using a Whiteboard Interview question type, or have them work up an architectural Diagram within the interview.
Watch this short video to see how HackerRank Interview functionality can help.
Phase 4: Rank
When it comes to making a final decision on a candidate, the process will rely mostly on the importance of feedback from the interviewers and the consensus from the entire hiring team. The information that was entered into the scorecards can be used to make a final hiring decision.
Check out how to review this information within the HackerRank Developer Skills Platform.