# The Art of Hiring Good Engineers

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Rachel Lee · Oct 4, 2017

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Building and scaling engineering teams requires adapting recruitment strategies across different organizational sizes, from initial hires to hundreds of engineers. Teams often begin with small groups of battle-tested engineers before designing formal hiring pipelines. The recruitment approach outlines four key steps: sourcing top-tier talent from platforms like GitHub and LinkedIn, assessing technical fit through tailored screens or assignments, evaluating cross-functional and culture fit via group interviews, and optimizing the process. This optimization includes routing candidates strategically to strict bar-raiser interviewers to prevent burnout and expedite decisions.

## Context

Tech leads and teams in niche fields need efficient and useful hiring processes to build and scale engineering teams from scratch without burning out existing staff or lowering standards.

## Approach / What changed

A four-step hiring framework consisting of sourcing candidates from open-source and professional networks, evaluating technical competence via targeted tests or screens, assessing culture fit across product and design teams, and optimizing candidate routing with designated bar-raisers.

## Takeaways

- Targeting only the top 2% to 5% of engineers may require processing roughly 500 profiles to hire 5 to 10 people.
- Assigning strict bar-raiser interviewers only to super strong profiles helps prevent interviewer burnout while maintaining pipeline speed.
- Initial technical pre-screening rounds commonly take 1 to 2 hours of a candidate's time, with phone screens ranging from 20 minutes to 1.5 hours.

**Tags:** [Hiring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/hiring)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/the-art-of-hiring-good-engineers)