How to hire your first developer

When you hire your first developer, every candidate sounds good. The problem shows up later, once you're already paying them.

The problem isn't finding candidates

Most founders think hiring a good developer is a problem of finding candidates. It isn't.

The problem shows up when you have three candidates who all look good and you have to decide which one can actually do the job. A good CV, good English and five years of React don't necessarily mean that person is the right one for your product.

What getting it wrong costs

The cost of a bad developer isn't just the salary. It's what happens when, two months in, you find out they can't work autonomously:

• You lose time.
• The product slips.
• You end up doing technical management.
• And eventually you have to hire again.

That's why it pays to spend more time on the filter before hiring, not after.

The order almost nobody follows

The usual way goes like this: first you start interviewing, then you meet candidates, then you compare impressions, and only at the end do you try to decide what "a good developer" means.

We do it the other way around:

• First we define what the person has to prove.
• Then we build the process to measure it.
• Only then do we start searching.

It looks like a small difference, but it changes the hire. By the time you get to the interview you already know what you're looking for, and you stop choosing whoever you liked best.

What a CV doesn't show

People interview too much to check whether someone can code. That's only one part. Other things matter just as much:

• Can they work without someone telling them what to do every hour?
• Do they flag a problem before it turns into a disaster?
• Can they walk into a codebase they don't know and find their way?
• Do they understand the product, or only execute tasks?
• Would you leave them working directly with a client?

To answer them, you have to listen to how the person thinks and how they talk about their previous work.

Where to start

If you'd rather not do it alone, that's what we do: we find, interview and present senior developers. Book a free 20-minute call and tell us what you're building.