“People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
Jim Collins
At Damia, we run tech recruitment processes for our clients every day. Some are Permanent Recruitment mandates. Some are Embedded Recruitment placements. What the good ones have in common is not luck, it is structure. A well-run tech recruitment process is a series of small decisions made deliberately, one after another, from kick-off through hiring to the analysis after.
This is how I run mine. If you are newer to tech recruitment, or you have been doing it for years but want to sharpen the way you work, take what is useful and leave the rest.
The three phases:
- Kick-off. Explore the role and establish common goals.
- Hiring process. Build your strategy and execute.
- Data analysis. Learn what worked and carry the lessons forward.
01. Kick-off: explore and establish common goals
Atlassian describes a project kick-off as “the first meeting with the project team and the client of the project. This meeting is the time to establish common goals and the purpose of the project. Starting a project without a kick-off meeting is like setting off on a trip without any concrete plan.”
The same is true for recruitment. The more time you invest in preparing, the less you spend firefighting later.
You will not always have ideal conditions. Sometimes you only have one stakeholder. Sometimes they cannot give you much information. Sometimes they cannot support the process end to end. All of it is fine. What matters is that everyone knows what you are hiring for, why, and how.
Three things to nail down in the kick-off phase:
Identify the stakeholders. Who is involved in this hire, and who has decision authority?
Connect on ideas and goals. What does success look like? What is the business need behind the hire?
Review the process. How many interview stages? Who is involved in each? How will you communicate along the way?
Once you are in the room, the checklist gets more specific:
- Introduce yourself if it is a new stakeholder
- Define the role and the reason for the hire
- Define the persona
- Define the interview structure, how many stages and what each stage exists to test
- Set expectations for communication (pipeline reviews, sync or async status updates)
- Frame hiring as a team effort. The team has a need, you have a solution, you work on it together
You need to be approachable and assertive at the same time. Do not shy away from “why”. The more you understand about the role, the more useful you can be to the team. Keep your notes organised, ideally in a shared doc the hiring team can access. If you cannot make the notes perfect, make them imperfect and share them anyway.
The goal is to understand the role so well that you could explain it clearly to someone who has never worked in tech.
Key questions to ask during kick-off
Your list will get more personal over time, but these are the ones I would not skip:
- Why are we hiring this person?
- What will their day-to-day actually look like?
- Is anyone on the team already doing something similar? If yes, ask to speak with them. There is no better shortcut to understanding a role than the people already in it.
- What will onboarding look like?
- What is most interesting about this role?
- What are the frustrating parts of this role, honestly?
- What improvements are you already working on?
- What do you expect from this person?
- What would the perfect candidate look like?
- Now, realistically, what does the candidate actually need to be?
Push into the “why” behind every requirement. If you do not know what tool W is, ask what it is for. If skill Y is called out as critical, ask why. This is where you move from generalist recruiter to someone who can genuinely represent a role to a strong candidate.
Building the relationship
The kick-off is not just a briefing. It is the first step in building trust with your hiring team. Not everyone will care, and that is fine. Keep showing up. Keep the team informed. Share the good and the bad honestly. Adjust the way you communicate as you learn how they work.
02. The hiring process: your path to execution
Kick-off done. Now the work begins.
The four opening moves:
- Write the job ad and share it with the team. Bonus: ask the hiring team to co-write a short piece about the day-to-day and the team culture. Who better to sell the role than the people already living it?
- Prepare your templates upfront. Sourcing messages, rejection emails, next-step emails, offer approvals. Anything you will send more than twice, write once.
- Define your strategy. Sourcing? Database search? Referrals? All three?
- Fire up your keywords and search targets.
Strategy: what actually works
Take your persona from the kick-off and ask what will get you in front of that candidate. There is no universal answer. Sometimes your own database is enough. Sometimes referrals fill the pipeline. Most of the time, in a tech market this competitive, sourcing has to be part of the plan.
Whatever you start with, adjust as you learn.
For a Senior Backend Engineer role, the persona might look like this:
Soft skills. Comfortable speaking with people across the organisation, from teammates to C-level to critical clients. Enjoys mentoring, because the team is growing fast and will keep hiring behind them.
Hard skills. A backend generalist who thinks systemically, sees the big picture, is comfortable with multiple approaches, and understands second-order effects. Solid Java experience is a must.
Notice how these are frames, not checklists. They tell you who to look for and how to talk to them.
On sourcing: how to make it work for you
I am not going to pretend I love sourcing. Given the choice, I would spend my time in interviews, meeting people, or lurking in the team’s Slack channel. But sourcing is often what fills the pipeline, so I have made peace with it.
If sourcing is not working for you, it might be because you are running someone else’s playbook. Here is what works for me:
I block time for it. Sourcing goes in the calendar as its own block. No multitasking, no sending messages to five random profiles because I have twenty minutes free. Real time, real focus.
I switch platforms when LinkedIn goes stale. GitHub, Stack Overflow, Slack communities, Octohunt. Different platforms surface different profiles.
I do not chase volume, I chase results. Reading five profiles carefully beats scanning fifty. A pipeline of ten well-fitted candidates beats a pipeline of a hundred that are not. Empathy over blast.
Automation and tools
Automation tools are useful when you have volume you cannot handle manually, and they can get expensive fast. If you want a lighter touch, LinkedIn’s quick-selection features and a good set of template messages will get you a long way. Whatever route you take, keep something human in every message you send. Candidates can tell.
Keywords and search targets
Track every keyword and every search you run. It saves your future self a lot of time, and it gives you real data to share back with the hiring team.
Three ways to structure a search:
By company. Ask the hiring team for company referrals. Look at where existing team members worked before. Search similar businesses, known talent hubs, and companies known for the quality of their engineering teams.
By comparison. Study your hiring team’s LinkedIn profiles. What keywords, technologies and titles appear? Recycle them. When you find a strong candidate, use “see similar profiles” to the maximum.
By stack. The most common approach, with a few tricks worth remembering. Start ultra-specific and search for your ideal candidate first. Treat the nice-to-haves as part of the search. Broaden as you go. Do not start searching a technology you do not understand. Either ask the hiring team or spend twenty minutes on Google before you touch LinkedIn.
Interviews: protect the candidate experience
Your first interviews are scheduled. A new phase begins.
Every company runs interviews differently, and the recruiter often does not choose the structure. But that is not a reason to stop advocating for the candidate experience, or for your own.
Two habits make the difference:
- Alongside selling the project and the company, explain the interview process clearly. Every stage. Every timeline.
- Stay present through the process. Check in on the candidate. The team is loving them, but are they loving the team? Does the project still make sense to them? Are there hesitations they have not voiced?
Your interviewing style will evolve as you get more senior. What should not change is your commitment to both sides. On the business side, do not waste anyone’s time by pushing badly-fitted candidates. On the candidate side, be transparent, be empathetic, and manage expectations properly.
The offer
You found the candidate. The team wants to make an offer. Take a moment to acknowledge the win, you earned it. Then get into the details, because offer regulations vary by company and by country.
You may or may not run the offer conversation yourself. Either way, stay invested in the outcome. This is where processes often fall apart, and it is where care pays off most.
03. Data analysis: closing the loop
The best way to improve is to understand what happened.
Using data properly increases your quality of hire and sets you up for the next process. You cannot fix what you did not measure. You cannot grow what you have not examined.
Data helps you find the real cause of a problem, plan future searches with real reference points, present outcomes to stakeholders, and change minds when needed.
There are many metrics you could track, but do not get lost in the framework. Start with the ones that make sense for your process. An Excel file or a shared doc is more than enough. Simplicity and real answers beat elegant frameworks that never get used.
Two useful angles to think in:
Metrics for the business. Data-driven recruitment. Show the client what worked, what did not, and why the next process will run tighter.
Proof of success. Data is your best storytelling tool. Use it to defend your process, and to earn the resources for the next one.
Speed will get you there faster. Strategy will take you further.
If you want to talk to a Damia recruiter about a specific hire, get in touch. To see how we run Embedded Recruitment inside our clients’ teams, read more here.
