Hiring technical staff is difficult for a reason that has little to do with the shortage everyone talks about. It is difficult because the people making the hiring decision often cannot evaluate the work directly, and the people who can evaluate it are usually too busy building things to sit in interviews.
That gap produces predictable mistakes. Here is how to avoid the most expensive ones.
Write the job description around problems, not tools
The most common flaw in IT job postings is a list of technologies with no indication of what the person will actually do. A posting that names a dozen frameworks tells a candidate nothing about whether the work is interesting, and it screens out capable people who have solved the same problems with different tools.
Describe the problem instead. “You will own our internal reporting platform, currently used by about forty people, and take it from manual exports to something self-serve” tells a candidate far more than a list of requirements. Strong technical people choose roles based on the problems, not the stack.
Then separate your requirements honestly. Which skills must someone already have on day one, and which could a capable person pick up in a month? Most postings mark everything as essential, which shrinks your candidate pool for no benefit.
Assess skills in a way that reflects the actual job
Technical assessment tends to swing between two failures: whiteboard puzzles that measure interview preparation rather than capability, and unpaid take-home projects so long that good candidates decline them.
A more useful approach is to have candidates work through a realistic, small problem alongside one of your engineers — reviewing a piece of existing code, debugging a scenario drawn from your actual systems, or talking through how they would approach a change you genuinely need to make. You learn how they think, how they handle uncertainty, and whether you would want to work with them.
Whatever format you choose, keep it proportionate. If an assessment takes more than a couple of hours of a candidate’s unpaid time, expect your strongest applicants — who typically have other options — to walk away.
Decide what you actually need before you decide seniority
Businesses frequently advertise for a senior engineer when what they need is someone to maintain and gradually improve a stable system. They then struggle to hire, and the person who eventually accepts leaves within a year because the work does not match the title.
Be honest about the balance between building new capability and keeping existing systems running. Both are legitimate, and both attract different people. A candidate who wants greenfield work will be unhappy inheriting a decade-old codebase, however well you sell it in the interview.
Understand what you are competing on
If you cannot pay the top of the market — and most businesses cannot — you need to know what else you are offering. Interesting problems, genuine flexibility, a short path from decision to production, real ownership of a system, or a team someone can learn from are all things technical candidates weigh seriously.
What does not work is claiming these things without substance. Technical candidates ask specific questions in interviews: how long does a change take to reach production, who decides what gets built, what does on-call actually involve. Vague answers are read, correctly, as a warning.
Consider contract cover for genuine gaps
When a project is stalled and a permanent search will take two months, contract IT professionals can keep work moving. This works particularly well for specialist needs — a migration, a security review, a period of elevated support load — where hiring permanently would leave you with capacity you cannot use afterwards.
It is worth being clear-eyed, though: contractors will not build the institutional knowledge that makes long-serving engineers valuable. Use contract support to relieve pressure, not to avoid a permanent hire you genuinely need.
Move faster than your competitors
In-demand technical candidates are often in multiple processes at once. A four-week hiring process with week-long gaps between stages will lose people who were genuinely interested. If you cannot outbid competitors, you can frequently out-organise them.
How we can help
Studenttimes Staffing Solutions places IT professionals across software development, infrastructure, data, cybersecurity, and technical support — on contract, contract-to-hire, and permanent terms. We handle the screening and coordination so your technical team spends its time only on the candidates worth their attention. See our IT staffing services or get in touch to discuss a role.