Designing Our Ideal Candidate Profile for Success

We take team building seriously at Sunscrapers. Our primary objective is to create high-performing teams that deliver exceptional digital products for clients worldwide.

What does building a team mean for us? We believe that successful team-building is made of these three elements:

• Finding and hiring top talent;
• Designing a work culture that cultivates talent, fueling passion and growth;
• Building environments that empower people and make it possible for them to realize their full potential and offer the best performance.

That's why knowing what traits and characteristics make great engineers is so critical for us. In this article, we wanted to share what we've learned during the last decade of sourcing, engaging, and hiring talent.

Our ideal candidate profile

We always hire professionals to perform particular roles. Hence, the basis of our hiring process lies in carefully assessing skills and experience that demonstrate their proficiency at a given job.

All other skills can be built on top of that strong foundation.

However, the experience itself is not the only critical factor.

We make our team with different experience levels in mind, looking for juniors and seniors with skills required by a particular project. Talent, mindset, and cultural fit are just as important because they're the traits that channel the professional growth of our team members.

...but soft skills are essential, too

It might be a surprise that we discuss people skills when hiring developers. It goes without saying that these skills are often ignored or neglected in our industry. But at Sunscrapers, they are essential.

• Teamwork

Our experience shows that our clients need developers who can work smoothly as a team. That's why we look for team players who simply enjoy working with others and can efficiently contribute to the group effort, putting the group's interest before their own.

There's no place for people with oversized egos or negative mindsets in our team. We refrain from hiring these personalities because such individuals create conflicts or engage in pointless political discussions, preventing the team from achieving its goals and building unique products.

• Communication

Communication is also critical to us since we often work remotely with our clients and, in our day-to-day work, deal with complex, non-trivial things. We hire developers with such skills to avoid communication pitfalls and ensure smooth collaboration with our clients.

Our formula for excellent communication is “Concise and Precise”:

• Concise saves you time and helps avoid misinterpretations;
• Precise because precision matters a lot – even the smallest decisions can significantly impact our work (for example, gathering technical debt).

But we also believe there's no such thing as too much communication. If something needs clarification, we do our best to nail down the problem and explain the subject.

• Curiosity & empathy

Finally, we also value curiosity and empathy because we want our team members to be interested in broadening their horizons and developing a full view of our client's business context and their circumstances. We value people who like to inspire themselves to take real action.

We look for people who are fully engaged in what they do to deliver outstanding, spot-on performance.

Extra factors we take into account when hiring developers

We look for passionate, driven people to become part of our team. Creating a work environment and culture that attracts them is only one side of the coin. The other is being able to tell whether a candidate has that personality type.

Over the years, we learned that the best indicator of passion. That's where we believe the difference between good and excellent performance lies.

We look for developers with a strong sense of ownership and a reasonably-sized ego. We want our engineers to strive for a deep understanding of everything they do and make conscious decisions about what to do next (and how to get where they want). They should be able to put themselves in our client's shoes and offer their best performance to others.

When hiring engineers, we especially look at the following activities:

• Being involved in the community
• Contributing to open source
• Running a blog
• Organizing workshops
• Speaking at events

Why are these things important to us? During the last ten years, we learned that if someone lacks this drive, they won't be able to motivate anyone on the team. These things tell a lot about an individual's mindset and ambition – the two elements that are crucial in our hiring process.

Key takeaway

Our ideal candidate profile changes as we apply new insights. In fact, we update it regularly to make sure that we find the best talent for our team.

Our will work culture helps us to articulate values that instantly show potential candidates what to expect from working with us.

The feedback we get from our team members and clients shows that we took the right direction for building our team. That feedback motivates us to push forward in sourcing talent and developing our ideal candidate profile.

Read more about our company culture on our company blog and check out the articles about our recruiting and onboarding process:

• What Does the Recruiting Process Look Like at Sunscrapers?
• What Does the Onboarding Process Look Like at Sunscrapers?

Contact us if you have any questions!