004. Hiring

Building a strong technical team starts with who you hire.

The biggest hiring mistake that many technology leaders make is putting software development skills first.

In reality, technical skills are a highly overrated part of a strong candidate's good qualities. When looking for a quality hire, tech skills are not the best indicator of long term success at your company, regardless of seniority level.

Leaders often make the error of heavily weighting technical skills because they don't know what else to look for in a candidate. In this edition, I'll show you what to look for — and how to find it by stealing my go-to interview questions.

Why Tech Skills Matter Less Than You Think

In what remains a couple of the worst and best interviews of my career, I interviewed two candidates who perfectly illustrated this point. Both were applying for a software engineer position.