At least once a week, I meet a manager or founder who wants to scale their engineering organization, which is a natural step in the growth of any organization. Most people think of hiring as an art, luck, or output of brand. I'd argue it is none of these. Like all things related to company building, it is the result of good metrics, good people, good research, constant process iterations, and lots of hard work.

I can share what I learned building an amazing engineering organization at Demandbase, where I was CTO and SVP of Engineering for almost four years. I spent a third of my time focusing on creating the engineering organization, mostly from scratch. I will break this topic in a series of posts starting with the two most important aspects of engineering recruitment: qualification criteria and the role of interviews. I will follow up with subsequent posts on how to source candidates, pitch your company to engineers, screen them over the phone, check references, and close the deal. I consider qualification criteria the most important consideration when making a hire and interviews the best way to validate the experience of a candidate.