Hiring Devs In 2026 - Part 2

What to look for in a potential technical candidate:

At the rate at which things are changing, if a candidate is not spending a good amount of time sharpening their skills and keeping up with all the new tech that is out there, then they probably shouldn’t be considered for a position as someone leading the charge for your technical infrastructure.

This is especially true if they are job hunting.

If they are just a “hands-on” person whose sole purpose is to sling code, only doing what they are told, perhaps this isn’t as true, but I would advise you to hire as few of these people as possible on your core team.

How do you vet this?

If they are creating content around a topic, that is a solid indicator that they are sharpening their skills, but few do this. Likely a fear of embarrassing themselves. If you are on the job-hunting side of things, I strongly suggest you document your professional development process.

You want to stand out as much as possible in a stack of resumes, and one of the best ways of doing that is to give the hiring party a large digital backlog of content they can binge that clearly communicates your capabilities to them.

Conversely, if you are a hiring party, you want a candidate who puts in the extra effort, not just to build the code but to clearly communicate what they did and why.

First off, this demonstrates that they can communicate, so a year or two from now, when people are asking “Why did we write this code?” you have an audit trail to your thought process.

Secondly, these types of people tend to be teachers, not just leveling up their own skills, but creating a clear path for other team members to follow and level up their skills.

If a candidate is creating content about their journey to level up their skills, I would move those to the top of my list of people to talk to.

There are still a lot of other factors to consider, but their content will help you learn a lot about how the candidate will fit into your team.