The ever-growing tech world calls for skilled and experienced specialists to carry out several duties and responsibilities within an organization. A technical lead, for instance, is a resourceful personnel within an organization. However, finding a suitable technical lead who will offer their extensive tech skills and soft skills at the same time can be a complex process. In this guide, we describe who a technical lead is, why you need to hire such a specialist and the process of hiring the best technical lead to complete your tech team.

Who is a technical lead?

Technical leads are specialists who take charge of all aspects of technical projects within an organization, especially in relation to computer software. These specialists lead and manage all the teams involved in developing a project, from developers to QA testing teams, ensuring the project is delivered in a timely and of high standards within the set budget. They work alongside senior managers to ensure all the processes are in place.

With this said technical lead specialists must have a comprehensive understanding of web or software development processes and have leadership skills to manage the bigger team. They collaborate with stakeholders and other team members to streamline the project’s progress from idea generation to the deployment stage. Finally, technical leads can work in diverse industries but specialize in IT-tailored businesses.

What are the duties and responsibilities of a technical lead?

Technical leads play a wide range of roles, from technical aspects to leadership aspects in an organization. Below are simplified duties and responsibilities of technical leads:

• Overseeing the scope of the project in all stages: planning, development stage, and post-deployment stage.
• Managing project launching processes and new releases
• Analyzing project requirements and setting up delivery timelines plus the budget
• Reviewing and ensuring the code remains of high quality.
• Identifying issues with the project’s scope and ensuring the team completes the entire project with the allocated budget.
• Accelerating project development and completion by identifying issues that slow down the progress and resolving such issues.
• Working closely with other team members, including product managers, account managers, system engineers, DevOps engineers, and developers, among other specialists handling the project.
• To assess possible risks and mitigate them in a timely manner
• Finding solutions to emerging issues when the project is on. They also offer alternative approaches when some strategies fail.
• Interacting with clients in a professional manner
• Leading, motivating, and supporting the bigger team members.
• Monitoring project’s progress, ensuring all the processes align with agile approaches.

Why you need to hire a technical lead

Hiring a professional technical lead will help your company in one way or the other. Below are some of the top reasons why hiring a technical lead is a viable idea for your company:

• To streamline workflow

Technical leads are in charge of the project development process from the beginning g to the end. This implies they have a better understanding of the processes and tasks to prioritize to achieve the set objectives. They have the skills and knowledge to understand the most important tasks as they assign such tasks to suitable. This, in turn, creates a smooth and streamlined workflow environment, which enhances the timely completion of the project.

• To train & retain employees

A technical lead specialist plays a big role in supporting and motivating the current employees or team members. In most cases, companies lose good developers who strive to seek better opportunities by not embracing their contribution to the growth of a company. In this case, a company remains stagnant or starts to decline due to a lack of skilled manpower. However, with a technical lead, it becomes easy for such specialists to identify the potentiality of developers or any other team members and create a motivating environment through training, which shows potential growth for the teams, thus retaining valuable developers and other teams for long.

• To enhance productivity

Technical lead specialists offer tech guidance and share knowledge & skills to produce the best quality in the end. After all, they are in charge of all the development projects within an organization, and should anything go wrong, they are accountable. That is why technical specialist do their best to ensure the team follows the right measures, use the right tools & technologies, and embraces specific project best practices to deliver the best results in the end.

• To guide the team in the right direction

It is common for a team within an organization to follow the wrong direction or focus on irrelevant tasks that would waste more time and resources in the end. To fill this gap, that is where technical specialists come in.

They perform a market analysis and evaluate the big picture of the project along with the core business objectives. With these insights, technical specialists can come up with measures and solutions that they share with the teams, ensuring all the teams are moving in the right direction and handling the right tasks at the right time using appropriate tools and resources.

• Business-centric Focus

Technical lead specialists are in charge of most of the technical aspects of the business dealings. As an entrepreneur, having a technical lead specialist relieves you of some common and technical tasks, allowing you to have adequate time to focus on other core business needs and functionalities.

For instance, with a technical lead specialist, you can use the extra time to expand your business in other regions or devise plans on how to accelerate business growth without having to worry about the tech side of your business.

How to know you need to hire a technical lead in your company

So, what are the indications that it is high time you hired a technical lead specialist? Below are clear indications that you need a technical lead professional within your team:

• When facing scaling challenges– the moment you realize that your team isn’t flexible enough to include some features, use some tools, and implement some functionalities in a project seamlessly, then it is a clear indication that you need a technical lead professional to fill the gap.

With a technical lead, they will introduce measures and a culture that accommodates infrastructure changes where needed for easy scalability.

• Declining Software Quality – when there is inconsistency or decline in the quality of the software, then it is a clear indication that you need a technical lead to streamline the work processes to maintain high-quality software standards.

You will discover declining software quality when you experience continuous and unending maintenance issues along with many bugs.

• Poor coordination among your teams – You will realize unstable collaboration and coordination between teams when you experience persistent delays in project delivery. In such a case, it is clear that you need a technical specialist in place to streamline workflows and assign tasks accordingly to ensure timely project delivery of high standards.
• When you want to expand your business – When you have plans to grow your business to the next level, it means you will be overwhelmed with tasks. Handling the pressure of setting up the business, maybe in a new location, and handling internal operations can be daunting. In this case, you can hire a technical lead to take charge of most of the internal activities as you focus on other business requirements.

How to hire a technical lead: step-by-step process

Finally, you’ve done an analysis and discovered you need a technical lead specialist in your organization. How do you ensure you get the right technical lead for your business needs? Follow the steps below, and you will land a specialist who will take your company to the next level.

• Define the type of candidate you need

Before any step, you need to evaluate the skill gap in your company. Or rather define the type of specialist you need within your company. This step includes defining the technical skills and educational background of the candidate you need.

Once you finish the technical aspect of your ideal candidate, you now need to define the soft skills you are looking for in a technical lead specialist. While you will include these details in the job description, this step is crucial as it simplifies the next steps. It will help you know the best place or platform to source the right candidate.

Above all, evaluate your current team’s capability, then define a specialist who will blend and complement your team perfectly. Make sure you prioritize the skills and talents missing in your existing team.

Once you have a detailed overview of the ideal candidate you need to hire, you can now move to the nest step.

• Draft a comprehensive job description

With a clear picture of your ideal technical lead specialist, you can now draft a detailed job post indicating what services you need and who you need. It might sound easy to copy and paste a predefined technical lead job description. However, drafting your own job description will include details highlighting the nature and dynamics of your company operations, thus attracting the right candidate. Don’t forget to include your hiring process strategy and your company’s culture to simplify the process of filtering out other applicants in the later stages. In your job description, add the following:

• Highlight the core skills –When searching for a technical lead specialist, your ultimate focus should be on the technology aspect, educational background, experience, and skills. So, detail all the core skills you are looking for in a technical lead. Think of the daily activities this specialist will be performing, then relate it with their potentiality to deliver.

Ofcourse, like the previous steps, this step will discourage applicants who don’t have specific skills and experience from applying, thus attracting qualified candidates, which in turn simplifies your work even more.

• Include your budget for the salary – This is yet another key step you should never miss. The tech field is highly competitive, and this has contributed to a shortage of specialized talents. If you fail to include your salary rate range, you may keep off potential candidates who will go looking for other lucrative opportunities.

However, when including your salary rate, do a market analysis and ensure you state a viable rate. You don’t need to go too low, and neither should you state an exaggerated rate. Set a reasonable range that will attract the right candidate, leaving room for negotiation.

• Review the job description with help from a professional

Depending on who drafted the job description, get another professional to review the description and rectify areas where necessary. You can get another person in the technical field to review the job description and polish it, ensuring it is error-free and hooked nicely to attract the right candidate.

Once reviewed, post the job description on the appropriate platform. This depends on your target candidate.

Pre-screening

This is the first phase of screening or filtering out unqualified applicants. This phase should be quick and take less time. In fact, the HR team or an external service provider can carry out this process successfully.

Pro tip: you can use testing services whereby you simply set up a screener according to your job requirements. The candidates who cannot complete the test are automatically disqualified. This saves you time and effort.

However, you should be careful when setting up the hoops. Instead, you might end up discouraging the most qualified candidates in the long run.

The core goal is this step is to review the applicant’s resumes as you analyze the experience level and skills to see if they align with what you need. You can then schedule a 10-minute call with the applicants and ask two or three questions to verify the potentiality of the candidates.

• Conduct a detailed phone interview

Here is the central part of hiring a professional technical lead specialist. Yow will need to assess the technical potential of the candidate and the soft skill side as well. Therefore, you will need to schedule the interview into two sessions.

As for the technical assessment interview who passed the screener start by assessing their soft skills before evaluating their technical side. By asking them about their past experiences, you will be able to determine their soft skills prowess. When handling the technical assessment, be detailed, ensuring you cover all the core elements of your business operations.

Pro tip: if you realize the applicant’s soft skills aren’t up to the required standards, you can end the interview there and avoid moving to the technical assessment. As mentioned before, a technical lead needs to have both technical skills to solve tech-related issues & create solutions where necessary and soft skills for leading, motivating, and creating a collaborative working environment among the teams.

Once an applicant passes the soft skill assessment, go ahead and assess their technical potential. In about 30 minutes, make a video call and ask the candidate technical questions in relation to the type of skills you need.

Start with simple tasks as you navigate to the complex aspects. The goal is to end up with a technical lead specialist who is well-versed in the tech world and can balance well when it comes to leadership and management skills as well.

• Give a take-home test

The next step is all about assessing the qualified candidates from the previous stages further. You will need to create a technical problem and allow the candidate to solve it as you assess their potential. You can customize the test to align with what they will be doing in your company, or you can still explore the online options.

Note: don’t give an overwhelming test that will take hours. Probably, your applicants have other activities to accomplish besides the interview, hence the need to mind about time factor.

If you don’t have a take-home test, you can simply ask the candidate to show you and explain a little bit about the code for their previous projects. Since you are looking for a technical lead, they must have adequate experience in the tech field and have done several projects. Ask them to take you through such a project they previously handled.

• Face-to-face interview

This is the final assessment stage when hiring a technical lead specialist. This is a face-to-face interview session, which entails you asking more about the technical capabilities and interpersonal capabilities of a candidate.

During this interview, you narrow your focus to your job specification and requirements, including your ideal tech stack.

At this stage, the applicant must be able to define the following:

• Code smells and anti-patterns
• Describe the major design patterns
• Create a practical architectural plan
• Highlight the best practices they use and why they chose such practices
• Define what a good code is all about.

• Choose the suitable candidate

This is the final step in hiring the best technical lead. You have finished all the assessment stages, and you only need the final candidate who will complement and blend with your existing team seamlessly. Now, determine if the candidate can identify strengths and weaknesses in the existing team and how they can assign tasks to ensure everything about the project is covered well. Look for a motion mover, someone who can lead a constructive discussion and create a viable solution without discriminating against any members of the team.

That is your ideal candidate. Choose the final qualified applicant, close the hiring session, and begin the onboarding process.

• Skills and competencies to look for in a technical lead

A technical lead specialist holds an integral part in a company. For these reasons, they must have the following skills and competencies to ensure professional service delivery:

Education – a technical lead specialist needs to have at least a degree in computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, and any other related field. The skills and knowledge from such disciplines help these specialists handle the technical aspects of their daily duties and responsibilities in a professional manner.

Coding – a technical lead must understand diverse programming languages and related tools that facilitate seamless progress within a software development team. They need to know when and how to use specific programming languages in a project development. Besides, they need coding skills to guide and make core decisions on behalf of the team members.

Software architecture – a technical lead specialist needs software architecture skills to manage the technical direction of a product under development. A technical lead organizes components within the system together with external properties and defines how they interact with one another.

Project management – A technical lead is in charge of managing the development team through the development process. As a result, they need proper project management skills and an understanding of the project development phases to take appropriate steps and measures to streamline the entire process.

The process also entails meeting specific delivery timelines and working within a specific budget. Without proper project management capabilities, it becomes hard to accomplish all these.

Systems testing – the product development teams play their part in developing the product. However, it is the duty of a technical specialist to test the system to ensure everything aligns with the business vision. They do this by designing the best test methods through comprehensive documentation and an understanding of system testing best practices. Proper system testing skills enable the technical lead to identify bottlenecks in the software and find immediate solutions to avoid more issues.

Communication –proper communication skills are vital for a technical lead specialist. These are professionals who need to guide the needs and create an accommodating working environment for all team members. Besides, they need to communicate the agendas, expectations, and regular updates and assign tasks accordingly. All these require an intelligent specialist with top-notch communication skills.

Problem-solving –Problems will always arise in a software development environment. These issues need troubleshooting and resolving them in a timely manner. A technical lead is responsible for identifying glitches within a system and finding practical solutions in all aspects, hence the need to have proper problem-solving skills.

What’s more, problem-solving skills come in handy when working with limited resources and tight deadlines. The technical lead specialist needs to figure out workable alternatives to such instances and to keep the project moving.

Analytical thinking –when complexities arise in a software development environment, a technical lead must use their analytical thinking skills to find technical solutions to resolve such complexities. They do this by analyzing different approaches, tools, and resources that can fit into a project and solve a specific complexity.

Attention to detail – technical lead specialists are in charge of ensuring high standards are maintained and that the team’s performance is anticipated. This calls for attention to detail skills and capabilities in their daily routines. They need to track daily tasks such as testing software, programming processes, and coding practices to ensure every step aligns with the set standards.

How much do technical leads earn?

The salary range of technical lead specialists varies based on several factors such as education level, experience level, the type of company, and location of the technical lead specialist.

For instance, a technical lead who has been in the industry for over ten years will earn more than a technical lead who is just starting.

In this case, the salary range of a professional technical lead can range between $150,000 to $ 250,000 per year. This rate can go even higher depending on a number of factors.

Interview questions to ask technical lead applicants during an interview

When interviewing your technical lead applicants, here is a glimpse of some questions you might consider asking during the interview assessment:

• How do you approach project management? Do you have any experience in project management?
• How do you embrace open and active communication with stakeholders and other team members?
• Describe your approach to solving technical hiccups during a project development.
• Explain your understanding of Agile and Waterfall software development methodologies.
• How do you verify code quality?
• When working under tight deadlines, how do you ensure the teams meet their objectives?
• Describe a situation when you experienced difficulty completing a project. How did you overcome the scenario?
• What do you anticipate to do to our company as a technical lead?

Conclusion

As the tech field continues to grow, the need for more specialists keeps emerging. If you were thinking of hiring a technical specialist in your company, then you are on the right track. You will be able to scale your company’s processes, you will embrace proper project management approaches, and you will invite better collaboration among the teams. All you need is a professional technical lead.

While finding such a specialist can be complex, especially since you need a person with a balance of technical skills and soft skills, this guide will help you land the best technical lead specialist for your company.

Again, if you are thinking of becoming the next big technical lead specialist, you are on the right career path. Start by developing a passion for all tech related doings, then go ahead and pursue relevant educational requirements, get the soft skills, and start gaining experience, then start exploring new opportunities as you climb the ladder higher.

Back to You!

Want to hire a technical lead? Get in touch with our software development company : Aalpha information systems!