How to Hire a Team Lead Without Breaking the Bank: Insights from Uklon and ITExpert Specialists

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Effective team leads are the “glue” that binds a team together. They coach, motivate, and support team members to achieve company goals. However, according to Gallup research, 82% of companies fail to select candidates with essential leadership skills. Glue that can’t connect the right pieces isn’t what you need, is it?

We’ve consulted with industry experts to uncover the key skills to look for when hiring a Team Lead, the essential questions to pose during interviews, and how to foster a transparent and trusting dialogue with potential candidates. Here are top tips to ensure that every Team Lead you extend a job offer to eagerly joins your company!

A big thank you to our expert contributors:

• Vadym Pospelov, VP of Engineering at Uklon. Vadym brings over 11 years of IT experience, with more than half of that time spent in managerial roles. He’s been deeply involved in the hiring process, conducting 100+ interviews for a wide range of positions, including QA specialists, engineers specializing in PHP, NodeJs, Go, Angular, React, iOS, .Net, and Android, as well as managerial roles such as team leads, project managers, and Unit Heads.

• Maryna Kosich, Recruitment Team Lead at ITExpert. Maryna boasts 4+ years of experience in the recruitment of IT specialists for Senior and Lead positions. She’s built a team of recruiters from scratch and effectively reviews their work, ensuring successful hires across various roles.

What is a team lead in IT?

In essence, a team lead is a specialist who leads a team. While this specialist might not typically write code or design architecture (though he can do that), his primary responsibilities include:

• Communicating with clients or the company’s business units.
• Evaluating tasks, setting deadlines for each stage, and breaking projects into sprints.
• Distributing the workload among team members.
• Ensuring tasks are completed on time.
• Assessing the work of developers and providing recommendations.
• Coordinating the finished work with the clients.

The team leader shoulders full responsibility for the project. If deadlines are missed, it’s on them. When clients request new features, the team lead steps in to help plan them. This specialist is also tasked with team building, onboarding new members, as well as maintaining motivation and a positive work environment.

Being a team lead is a role, not a profession. You can’t just take a 6-month course and become one. Even if someone has spent a decade as a Data Scientist, it doesn’t automatically make them a good leader for a Data Science team. The only way to become a team lead is through gaining experience and developing the professional competencies required for the role.

The team leader portrait: essential skills and winning mindset

The role of a team lead sits at the crossroads of development and management, demanding a blend of advanced hard and soft skills. Here are the key attributes businesses look for in a perfect match team lead.

1. Creating and maintaining a positive work environment

Team culture and communication within it play an important role in achieving the company’s success. IT Team Lead’s task is to stimulate employees, maintain their motivation, and take on the role of a mentor.

“Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.” 
Steve Job

Mastering conflict management skills is crucial for team leads. Research from coaching company BetterUp reveals that 26% of employees view workplace conflicts as a common occurrence, and the IT field is no exception. Avoiding conflicts can hinder productivity, as fear and constant evasion by team leaders can lead to stagnation. Furthermore, conflicts can be constructive, shedding light on issues and sparking fresh ideas within the team.

2. Team forming and onboarding

Before taking the reins of a team, it must first be assembled, and the team leader plays a pivotal role in this process. They are actively involved in people-related activities such as recruitment, onboarding, training, and providing feedback. The skill of offering feedback is particularly valuable as it enables the leader to pinpoint issues and areas for growth, not only in code reviews but across various aspects. It presents an opportunity for sharing experiences, learning from mistakes, accelerating personal skill development, and efficiently addressing conflicts.

💡 Interesting to know: multiple research shows that feedback not only helps employees to deliver a project at a high level, but it also gives them confidence and helps build trust within the team.

After the HR team conducts initial screenings of candidates, the team lead takes the reins, meticulously reviewing resumes and handpicking individuals for interview consideration. They actively participate in the interview process, assessing candidates for both technical prowess and cultural alignment. Once a candidate accepts an offer, the team lead, alongside the HR manager, spearheads the onboarding process. They introduce the new team member to the group, delve into project specifics and technical intricacies, and oversee the effectiveness of their integration.

3. High level of responsibility

The IT Team Lead should possess expertise in the stack utilized by the team. While they don’t necessarily need to be the team’s top performer, they should be capable of stepping in for any team member in case of emergencies, ensuring project continuity. Additionally, they bear the responsibility of upholding codebase integrity, elucidating to the team the enduring advantages of high-quality code. This entails advocating for and implementing clean code principles, while also assisting team members in grasping best practices.

4. Knowledge sharing

In the realm of team dynamics, there exists a concept known as the “bus factor.” When a team member departs, valuable information and accumulated knowledge may vanish along with them. It falls upon the team leader to mitigate this risk and establish an efficient system for knowledge exchange.

5. Emotional competence and strong soft skills

Research reveals a direct correlation between business profitability and the emotional competence of leaders. This cluster of soft skills manifests in the capacity for self-reflection and finding an optimal balance between empathy and self-expression. Notably, research underscores that leaders of the most successful companies often exhibit a heightened level of emotional competence.

6. Experience in a domain or similar type of company

Company and team structures vary widely, leading to differences in the responsibilities and expectations placed on team leaders.

Employers are increasingly paying attention to domain-specific experience. This is the practice of hiring specialists who already know the niche from the inside. And it has already proven its effectiveness! Such specialists go through onboarding much more easily and are more likely to offer new ideas quickly. This is especially relevant for FinTech, Banking, Healthcare, and Blockchain domains. Sometimes even for cryptocurrency exchanges, they look for IT specialists with similar experience. To find specialists with domain experience, you should use donor companies sourcing.

There’s a catch: if you’re hiring in a limited market, domain experience can significantly narrow your candidate pool. It is important to balance between requirements and the number of candidates.

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Top team leader interview questions

We’ve put together a few interview questions to help you decide which candidate is best for your company:

• Describe a situation in which you successfully managed a team during a complex project. How did you cope with challenges or failures?

• How do you prioritize and delegate tasks to ensure effective time management?

• Tell us about a time when you had to make a difficult decision that impacted your team. What factors did you take into account? How was this reported to the team?

• Could you give an example of a difficult situation you encountered during team communication — for example, providing feedback or resolving a serious conflict?

These questions will help assess the candidate’s leadership skills, ability to make decisions, manage time and communicate with employees, and approach to team development.

Top tips for hiring a great team leader

Hiring an IT professional can be a daunting journey, fraught with challenges and stress. But when it comes to Executive Search — the stakes are even higher. It demands more time crafting the perfect job description for a Team Lead vacancy, meticulous scrutiny of candidate skills, increased costs, and more than a few headaches.

We’ve amassed a treasure trove of expert advice aimed at simplifying the quest for those rare IT specialists, particularly those endowed with robust management acumen. Embrace them to hire highly effective team leads without breaking a sweat.

Face it: recruiting a team leader is a marathon, not a sprint

Bringing aboard a team lead encompasses a broader spectrum of responsibilities compared to other technical roles. This individual wields significant influence over team efficiency, culture, and workflows — serving as the beacon to which all team members aspire. Recruiting such candidates is no small feat, and a misstep in hiring poses substantial financial risks. Brace yourself for a reality check: the time-to-hire for this pivotal position will likely stretch 1.5 to 2.5 times longer than the norm, demanding heightened attention throughout the process.

That is why the number of steps for such positions and the time to search and make a decision may take longer. You need to be very careful with compromises and use all your experience and managerial instincts to reduce the risk of a mistake to a minimum. You should also involve networking in the process and ask for recommendations for the candidate from ex-employers or colleagues.

Sell the vacancy through responsibility and goals

Encountering a scarcity of candidates when hiring a Team Lead isn’t uncommon, often resulting in fewer responses and lower interest from potential candidates. To boost engagement and attract top talent, consider the following strategies from our expertise:

• Provide specific tasks: incorporate a specific task into the job description that showcases the challenges and opportunities the candidate will face. Candidates with leadership qualities are often driven by opportunities for growth and improvement, making project tasks particularly enticing.

• Highlight exciting projects: outline exciting projects or initiatives the candidate will lead, such as building a team from scratch for new feature development, transitioning a product to a new tech stack, or refining processes during team scaling. 

• Define clear technical requirements: clearly outline the technical expertise required for the role. A comprehensive job description ensures that potential candidates understand the expectations and feel confident in their ability to contribute to the project or team.

Analyze candidates’ social networks and ask ex-employers for recommendations

In addition, experts recommend keeping an eye on a candidate’s social media presence, as it can quickly unveil potential red flags: from comments and content to reactions on various posts. Vadym Pospelov recounts instances where a candidate’s CV seemed promising, but a cursory glance at their social media profiles revealed a misalignment with the company’s values. Social networks also offer valuable supplementary information that may be absent from the CV, such as participation in industry events or webinars, particularly as a speaker on relevant topics.

💡 Pro tip from Uklon: leverage mutual connections on LinkedIn to uncover shared acquaintances and solicit references or feedback on a candidate.

Open dialogue is a must

A competitive salary, exciting projects, and growth opportunities are no longer the sole factors enticing specialists to join a company. Nowadays, they also prioritize the people they’ll work with and whether they’ll feel at home in the team. From the very first message or phrase during an interview, it’s crucial to foster an environment of equality and respect.

Once the decision on whom to extend the job offer to is made, the journey for the recruiter and hiring manager is far from over. The next steps involve crafting a compelling value proposition and addressing any objections that may arise. Research from Hired emphasizes the significance of personalization in the offer process. Therefore, it’s crucial to delve into the candidate’s motivations during the interview, gaining insight into what will truly resonate with them and convince them to join your team.

When hiring a team leader becomes a Herculean task, consider an alternative option: promoting an internal specialist to a management position. This individual, already well-versed in your product, culture, and corporate values, can swiftly deliver results. Additionally, sourcing a replacement for them in the future may prove less daunting than recruiting an external lead.

ITExpert will help you effortlessly hire your team’s “glue” — a leader adept at uniting teammates with diverse characters and skills! 💫