Technical hires who fail early usually fail for one of four reasons, and only one of them is skill. All four can be checked before the offer.
Four common reasons
- The skill was assumed. The CV listed the right tools and nobody watched the person use them.
- The job changed. The candidate was hired to build new features and spends the first months fixing old code or handling support tickets.
- The working style did not match. Someone used to detailed specifications joins a team where requirements arrive as a two-line message, or the reverse.
- Nobody planned the first weeks. There is no system access, no documentation and no named person to ask. The new hire loses confidence and the manager loses patience.
What to check before the offer
Test the skill on your own kind of work. A short exercise taken from a real problem in your codebase or your infrastructure shows more than an abstract puzzle. Have the candidate talk through their choices afterwards.
Describe the job as it is today. Tell the candidate how the work divides between new development, maintenance, client calls and on-call duty. If the honest description puts them off, you have saved both sides several difficult months.
Ask how they have worked before: how tasks reached them, how often their code was reviewed, how large the team was. Someone moving from a large IT services project to a small SaaS product team, or the other way, will find the daily routine very different. Many people make that move well, but they should know in advance what will change.
Take one reference from a person who worked beside the candidate, such as a team lead or a peer, and ask what the candidate needed help with. The HR department of a past employer will usually confirm only dates and designation.
What to prepare before day one
A good hire can still fail in an unprepared team. Before the joining date, arrange system access, choose one person the new hire can ask anything, and pick a first task small enough to finish in the first week or two. Agree with the hire what you expect by the end of month one and month three, and review it on those dates. A problem raised in week four can be fixed. The same problem raised in month five usually ends in a resignation or a termination.
For the role you are hiring now, write one honest paragraph on what the first ninety days will involve, and send it to every shortlisted candidate before the final round.