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Updated August 24, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring, a book by Osman (Ozzie) Osman and over 45 other contributors. It is the most authoritative resource on growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, over 800 links and references, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
This Guide covers all stages of the hiring and recruiting process for software engineering and software engineering management roles.
Hiring is the process of finding and building alignment between the needs and values of professionals and organizations. Recruiting is the process of attracting professionals that an organization might consider hiring.
This Guide covers the end-to-end hiring process of full-time software engineers including everything from sourcing candidates to interviewing to extending and closing offers.
We do not cover post-hire tasks, such as on-boarding or general engineering management. We do not offer technical preparation guidance for candidates wishing to prepare for the interviews. A few other topics we have not covered yet, but may cover in future updates include:
Hiring hardware engineers, product managers, project managers, and other technical roles that are not software engineering roles. That said, many of the principles and ideas will apply to these roles.
Contract roles and engineering contracting firms.
Direction on talent acquisitions, or “acqui-hires,” where a company is bought by another primarily for the purpose of acquiring its staff.
This Guide includes material of interest to anyone involved in the hiring process, including hiring managers, founders, interviewers, recruiters, engineers, and candidates. As a hiring manager, you might find this Guide useful if:
You work at a startup. You might be a founder or one of the earlier engineers or engineering leaders. You may have been a part of the recruiting process at other companies, but have never had to design and build out a process yourself and are not sure where to start.
You work at a larger company. You likely have a more developed recruiting process, and want to understand how to best be effective within that process and how to improve that process—why your company recruits the way it does.