Your guide to hiring software engineers

Finding the right for your team is a daunting process. Get it wrong, and you’ll waste months of your team’s time without result — in many cases, failing to produce even a working prototype.

We’ve compiled guidance from 12 experienced engineering leaders on how to design a hiring process that brings in the best developer talent:

  • Narrow your candidate search by specialty or experience level

  • Draw up an interview process and grading rubric

  • Ask effective questions on technical interviews

  • Assess engineers’ communication and soft skills

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Table of Contents

  • Part 1: Identify your hiring criteria

    • Front-end, back-end, or “full stack”?
    • Specialist or generalist?
    • Individual contributor or future leader?
    • Deal breakers?
    • What senior technical leaders think is important (and what’s just fluff)

  • Part 2: How to design a hiring process

    • Form your interview committee
    • Outline your interview process
    • Create a timeline and question bank
    • Emphasize what makes your company and team stand out
    • Make an evaluation rubric

  • Part 3: Running effective candidate interviews

    • Techniques for gauging technical expertise
    • Asking open-ended technical questions
    • Running a paired debugging session
    • Technical interview don’ts
    • How to assess communication & soft skills
    • Rating their level of interest
    • Considerations for hiring management-track engineers
    • Soft skill interview don’ts
See Guide
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We manually vet and match developers for a living.

Seriously. Our team of interviewers handpicks candidates based on technical expertise, communication skills, and English fluency.

Resumé 
review
100%

Resumé 
review

Every candidate passes a thorough LinkedIn and resume check—we accept senior developers with proven experience only.

Soft skills screening
7%

Soft skills screening

A little over 10% of all screened profiles undergo a live interview. We test English fluency, communication skills, and validate if CV is true-to-life.

Technical interview
3%

Technical interview

Only 3% reach the tech interview with the best senior developers from our community. All interviews are quality controlled to ensure high standards.

Listing on Lemon.io
1%

Listing on Lemon.io

1.2%—literally best of the best—are listed on the platform with all their skills, experience, and achievements validated and well-organised.

Thousands of businesses have built their engineering teams through Lemon.io.

“My recruitment experience with Lemon has been exceptionally pleasant and constructive—one of a kind for me. What stood out was the thorough follow-up after every step of the process, including the technical discussions. The feedback provided was both fair and helpful.”

Alex Tudor

Senior Front-end Developer at IAG Loyalty

“The whole process was pleasant and enjoyable, every interviewer was very friendly, the technical interview was fun, the interview questions were challenging and meaningful, and the dev challenge was also great. The books that were recommended for me to keep learning were on point, the tech interviewer did a great job when recommending them.”

David Salmeron

Senior Software Engineer at MasterDoc

“I can’t say enough positive things about Lemon…everything was amazing, well-designed and geared towards making it an easy and seamless process to get my product built. Lemon is the way it should be…matching the highest quality developers out there with entrepreneurs that want to build products in the world.”

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Michele Serro

Entrepreneur

“Lemon.io have been awesome to work with: fast, professional and they’ve clearly nurtured a pool of super talented engineers. They’re going to keep being my default recruiter/contractor agency into the future!”

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Brent Maxwell

Entrepreneur

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Learn how to design a hiring process that brings in the best developer talent — again and again.