The introduction of new technologies and increased complexity of software has increased the demand for DevOps developers. They play a crucial role in any organization as they are responsible to dig into the software code and provide automation of all software development life cycle frames.

Today, every company needs a DevOps developer and there is no shortage of talent as well. However, the problem lies with the recruiter and hiring managers who have little or no technical knowledge. They are worried about how to assess a developer’s skills, how to conduct a pre-employment assessment, how to interview them, etc.

If you are the one struggling to hire a DevOps developer for your organization, then don’t worry. In this post, we will explore some of the best tips to hire a DevOps engineer and streamline the recruiting process.

Understand Your Company’s Requirement

Before initiating the hiring process, recruiters and hiring managers need to understand their company’s requirements and why they want to hire a DevOps developer.

A DevOps developer is someone who:

• Knows the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• Has good experience in using different automation testing tools for developing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Can manage the entire DevOps team

If your organization is looking for someone who is great at testing development tools and ensures security, then you must look to hire a developer with hands-on experience in several programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Bash, etc.

Recruiting Sites Are Not Enough

Leveraging social media platforms such as LinkedIn is the best recruiting approach. Research states that more than 40 million people searched for jobs on LinkedIn each week in Q4 2020. It’s a great opportunity for you to create a business page on LinkedIn and start posting your requirements.

Apart from LinkedIn, you can search for DevOps developers on several online platforms, such as GitHub, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, etc. These are the platforms where developers showcase their technical as well as problem-solving skills. As a recruiter, you can view work samples on their profile to assess a developer’s technical skills.

Screening

Conducting a technical skills screening test is important prior to a face-to-face interview. This test will help you assess both technical as well as soft skills of a candidate.

In a technical screening test, you can ask a developer to write a code or give a real-life scenario to solve the problem. You will also get to know about the experience and interest of the candidate and how passionate he or she is in their respective field.

With technical screening designed for DevOps engineers, you will get to know about the following skills of the candidate:

• A knowledge of tools and technologies
• Configuration management
• Cloud Services
• Orchestration
• Team-management skills
• Creative skills

Interview

After a candidate passes the screening test, now it’s time to ask valuable questions in the interview. Remember, you are not only hiring a DevOps developer for a technical role. Along with technical skills, a developer must possess some soft skills too.

With that said, here are some of the technical questions to ask a DevOps developer:

• How have you helped your previous organization to build greater security awareness?
• Can you tell us about a process that was a real challenge for you to automate?
• What have you learned working closely with agencies?
• Tell us about a few scripts you’ve developed that have been crucial to your DevOps success.
• How do you assess success, in the context of yourself and the DevOps team as a whole?
• Tell us about your favorite DevOps tools.

By asking such technical questions, you will get a deep knowledge about how passionate a candidate is in his or her chosen field. Along with that, you can also easily assess the soft skills of a candidate.

When your organization utilizes a DevOps methodology, it means change is coming, and engineers are caught in the middle. Every development strategy requires an additional set of skills distinct to its environment.

Here is the list of the essentials skills of a DevOps developer.

Good Knowledge Of The DevOps Tool Chain

A DevOps developer you hire must have hands-on experience in handling complex tools that aim to support software delivery purposes.

A DevOps developer must know about the following types of tools:

• Version control
• Network protocols
• Containers
• Monitoring and analytics
• Testing and cloud quality tools
• Deployment automation
• Configuration management
• Infrastructure Orchestration

Specific Programming Skills With Mature Coding Standards

Though programming skills are a must for any developer, DevOps engineers maintain a unique set of coding responsibilities. A great DevOps engineer must have experience in multiple languages such as Java, Ruby, Python, Bash, JavaScript, and others.

A DevOps engineer must be comfortable in writing and debugging issues in languages such as those, as well as in OS environments.

Technical Support And Maintenance Skills

DevOps developers are not only bound to write codes, but they are also responsible to support and maintain a process that includes IT operations. To do this successfully, a developer must be familiar with fundamental tools that the entire DevOps team uses.

Additionally, a DevOps developer should know how to ensure the production system’s uptime and availability. It means that a developer must have the ability to:

• Monitor the products in real-time
• Get proper alerts when something is wrong
• Help solve problems via online support or technical troubleshooting

Syncing With QA Teams

A great DevOps engineer must be in sync with QA teams all the time. All testing activities must be known and visible to DevOps engineers to ensure the organization meets its desired goals.

The DevOps engineer should:

• Understand the testing activities
• Know about testing throughout the CI/CD cycle
• Understand frameworks that are led by QA teams

Recruiting a technical team for non-tech recruiters isn’t going to get easier any time soon. However, as a recruiter, it is important to onboard the right talent with the skills which will serve your company’s requirement.

With the tips mentioned above, you will be successful to hire the right talent for your organization. Your project will only become more superior with well-qualified DevOps on your side.