Three weeks ago, the new senior hire joined the team, and things are not looking good. They need daily guidance on their work and constant reviews to ensure their code lives up to their résumé. With so many errors and lack of leadership, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Don't go through another disappointment. You deserve to receive truly senior talent quickly, backed by the guarantee of a real solution for your present and future. Our vetting process takes care of that so you can focus on leading and managing. Here’s how we do it.
3 Ways to Validate Technical Seniority
Sometimes this gets overlooked, so it’s important to remember: technical seniority is not measured only by years of experience and theoretical knowledge, but also by autonomy, problem-solving, and the positive influence the talent has on their immediate environment.
A true senior not only knows how to code but knows how to do it sustainably and scalably within the scope of the project. Here’s how we guarantee it.
Application of Technical Tests
The main purpose of a technical test is to evaluate the development process, not so much the result.
In these instances, the candidate’s ability to handle code architecture, implement unit or integration tests, and ensure readability and future maintainability of the solution is reviewed.
To simulate real-world time and resource constraints, we assign a realistic timeframe (4–6 hours) to develop a specific functionality, always related to a real challenge in your product.
This allows us to analyze how the candidate manages value delivery. Additionally, it is a way to observe the talent’s performance in a real situation to anticipate their future performance.
Project Portfolio Review
An authentic senior leaves their mark on the projects they drive. Whether as the main architect of the solution or a key figure in consolidating the business vision, a senior’s contribution represents a true before-and-after in solution development.
This stage aims to understand the candidate’s technical leadership. When reviewing portfolios and trajectories, the main focus is understanding the complexity and depth of their participation. For us, it is crucial to understand:
- What problem did the project solve?
- What was the candidate’s specific contribution?
- How did the talent develop the solution?
These and other questions help measure the impact and value the candidate delivered in previous environments, allowing us to evaluate their possible contribution to your own projects after joining.
Scenario-Based Interviews
The clearest indicator of a candidate’s technical leadership is their ability to explain a solution and articulate a coherent strategy under pressure. This is what we aim to observe in scenario-focused interviews.
This is a phase that tests systemic thinking instead of syntax memory, leaving behind the operational profile to focus on the candidate as a technical leader and manager of emerging circumstances.
Our interviews are based on common engineering dilemmas within a senior team, considering two common cases:
- High-level debugging (we have an intermittent production bug—how do you approach the investigation?).
- Systems design (we need to triple the traffic of service X—how would you redesign the database and architecture?).
This stage also offers insights into technical debt management, including questions about what priority a necessary refactor would receive compared to urgent product development requests.
Our Method for Evaluating Cultural Seniority
More than one CTO has experienced this: a talent excels technically but struggles to collaborate or fails to assimilate the company's culture and vision. That’s when they understand that technical leadership is not enough without cultural seniority behind it.
Ironically, a senior who is not a good collaborator, mentor, or conflict manager hinders the speed and morale of their colleagues. That is why measuring soft skills becomes highly relevant in high-performance teams. Here’s how we validate them.
Collaborative Evaluations Between Candidates
A recent dynamic we’ve integrated into vetting is collaborative evaluation between talents. The goal is to explore their teamwork skills, joint problem-solving, and alignment of abilities toward specific objectives.
We implement a paired programming challenge. We group talents to work together on a problem with a strict time limit. The problem always requires genuine collaboration, whether sharing and merging code or making joint design decisions.
The purpose is to observe skills in action, paying special attention to:
- Confirming that the candidate listens actively.
- Whether they offer help without taking over the keyboard.
- Their openness to feedback from their partner.
A true senior always acts to foster the success of others, not just their own.
Work Background Verification
This goes far beyond a simple contact with Human Resources. The idea is for that former collaborator or manager to share important insights about the talent’s real performance and not limit themselves to saying they were “good at their tasks.”
As in interviews, the quality of the information depends closely on the type of questions. Therefore, our focus is on inquiries that reveal the candidate’s impact and influence, such as:
- What was the biggest conflict they had to manage and how did they handle it?
- How did they react when someone on their team made a serious mistake?
- How did the people under their mentorship grow?
- What type of leader were they during their tenure?
Workplace Scenario Simulations
Two soft skills that define cultural seniority are emotional intelligence and leadership vision. One involves managing and resolving conflicts that harm work dynamics; the other ensures those dynamics align with a common goal.
At Crazy Imagine Software, we integrate simulations based on real dilemmas to measure decision-making under pressure and talent management. This gives us a strong understanding of each person’s leadership philosophy and long-term vision.
Here’s an example:
Development needs two more days to refactor a critical piece of code, reduce technical debt, and guarantee long-term stability.
However, Sales is about to close a deal with a client who requires a demonstration of a minor new feature that is ready but not integrated with the proposed refactor.
Delaying the demo by two days puts at risk the closing of this deal, which represents 20% of projected quarterly revenue.
Presenting a scenario like this during vetting allows us to understand:
- The ability to balance long-term needs with immediate pressures.
- The type of leadership vision, whether transactional (closing the deal) or strategic (product sustainability).
