The dilemma of the person with willingness but lack of experience
When you are hiring, do you have to find the candidate that matches all points on the position script? or something else?
This fancy name for today’s issue comes from my talk at DevOpsDays Madrid 2023, with my dear friend Inma Jiménez García.
When I was hiring engineers at full speed, during the Hyper-growth phase of the company, sometimes I had a candidate who brought to me what I ended up calling:
The dilemma of the person with willingness but lack of experience
This is what we will talk about today and what is my recommendation when this happens to you.
🤯What is this about?
Let’s put the scene. You are hiring for a Senior Software Engineer position, you already interviewed a couple of candidates who are senior but just a Maybe, not a clear Yes. Now, the next candidate, it’s far to be a Senior Software Engineer.
Basically, your scenario is this: You look for the right side of the picture and your next candidate is the left side of the picture.
Today, what you have in front of you is (left side of the picture above):
Not a Senior Software Engineer (today).
Not the person who will unblock a tricky problem in production (today).
Not the person who knows how to implement an application following the best software architecture patterns (today).
Neither the person that comes with experience on things like event-driven, or specific tools like Kafka, Kubernetes, or AWS (today).
Instead, what you have in front of you is:
A young person.
A person with A LOT of hunger to learn, very clever, and huge potential.
A person who is passionate about the work to be done.
A person who is a perfect fit for your company's core values.
A person with knowledge about how to code.
Now, remember, you have 2 other candidates, more senior, but which are a Maybe, not a clear Yes, nor Strong Yes.
In a situation like this, you ask yourself:
Is this young person the profile we need?
Should I hire this junior profile? or go back to some of the senior-but-maybe possibilities?
Should I actually look for the perfect person? or just “take what I get”?
Or maybe just restart the whole process and wish for luck?
What would you do in this scenario? This is a question that I had to ask myself several times.
🧩How to solve the riddle?
I will tell you what I did and why. I applied what I call:
The Mirror Technique
Which means:
You have to be sure that the person in front of you fits the company culture.
The person must be aligned with the vision, at the Engineering level, of the company roadmap.
You see a huge potential.
Potential is the magic word here. The Mirror Technique is no more than looking for a person that mimics the best and more company-aligned software engineers you have in your company, but in a “younger version”.
✨Takeaways
A part of the fact I made up “The dilemma of the person with willingness but lack of experience” and “The Mirror Technique” mottos, because I had to put some names to the situations I had to apply, it’s important you keep in mind the following takeaways when you are hiring.
Hire for potential, when you find it, even if the position is a senior role.
The candidate must be a cultural fit.
In a short period of time, do you see the candidate becoming an impactful engineer in your organization?
If the answer to all those questions is Yes, my experience tells go for it.
For the latest point, about the projection of a junior profile to a senior position, I would recommend reading this essay from
Hope you enjoyed this issue today and I would love to hear from your experiences hiring software engineers as well; write in the comments and I will read it!
Some articles and podcast episodes about hiring that might be of interest to you as well.👇🏻
![[SPANISH] Acquiring talent: Software Engineers - With Inma Jiménez](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbccebabc-4a51-4990-b639-630db6365c70_2048x2048.png)
