When most people hire for an IT team, they screen for the tech stack and stop there. Right languages, right platforms, right certifications, offer made. Then six months in they find out the person cannot explain a problem to a non-technical colleague, or goes to pieces when production breaks at 2am. The stack is the easy part to check. What actually decides whether an IT team is any good is the stuff that gets skipped. Here are the eight worth screening for.
1. The actual technical depth, checked properly
Obvious, but done badly more often than not. You need real evidence someone can do the work, not a list of buzzwords on a CV. A short, relevant technical exercise or a proper conversation with a technical interviewer beats a keyword match every time. Years of experience is a weak proxy in a field that changes this fast.
2. Communicating with non-technical people
An engineer who cannot explain a risk or a trade-off to someone in finance or operations is a liability, however good their code. Most of the friction between IT and the rest of a business is really a translation problem. Screen for someone who can make the complicated understandable.
3. Calm under pressure
Systems break, and they break at the worst time. The person you want is the one who stays methodical while the outage clock is running, not the one who panics or freezes. Ask about a real incident they handled and listen for whether they describe a process or just describe the chaos.
4. Problem-solving over memorising
The specific tools will change. The ability to break down an unfamiliar problem and work it out will not. A strong technical hire is curious and resourceful, happy to say 'I do not know yet, but here is how I would find out'. That beats someone who only knows the answers they have already memorised.
5. Security instinct as standard
And security is not one person's job any more, it is everyone's. You want people who think about it by default, who do not leave the obvious door unlocked because it was not explicitly in the ticket. In most teams this is a mindset you hire for, not a policy you enforce after the breach.
6. Working as a team, not a lone genius
Software is built by groups now. Code review, shared standards, documentation, helping the newer members. The brilliant loner who will not explain their work or collaborate is a risk dressed up as an asset, because the day they leave, so does everything only they understood.
7. Willingness to keep learning
In a field this fast, someone who stopped learning three years ago is already behind. You are not hiring for what they know today so much as for whether they will still be good in three years. Curiosity and a habit of picking up new things matters more than the current tick-list of technologies.
8. Fit for how your team actually works
A startup-minded engineer can suffocate in a heavily-governed enterprise, and a process-driven one can flounder in a chaotic scale-up. Technical skill is only half of it. The match between the person and how your particular team operates decides whether they thrive or quietly leave.
Screening for the eight together, especially the human ones alongside the technical, is where hiring gets hard, and where a rushed process lets the wrong person through. We assess for all of it before anyone reaches your shortlist, technical depth included. Our piece on the myth of the rockstar developer is worth a read on this. When you want people screened this way, here is how we work, or book a call.
