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The $100 MBA

MBA2720 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Find & Hire A Senior Tech Person?

14 min episode · 2 min read

Episode

14 min

Read time

2 min

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Price sorting strategy: Sort Upwork candidates by price high to low to find senior developers from Fortune 500 companies who complete in ten hours what others take sixty hours to finish, saving thousands despite higher hourly rates.
  • Communication evaluation: Interview five to ten candidates to assess both technical skills and communication abilities, looking for people who listen, ask clarifying questions, repeat back requirements, and explain technical trade offs without condescension.
  • Project context framework: Provide engineers with complete business context including your audience, metrics, goals, feature purpose, timeline, and one to two nonnegotiables to enable them to make correct prioritization decisions and deliver optimal results.

What It Covers

Omar Zdenholm shares his proven strategy for hiring senior technical talent through Upwork, explaining why expensive developers save money and how to avoid costly hiring mistakes.

Key Questions Answered

  • Price sorting strategy: Sort Upwork candidates by price high to low to find senior developers from Fortune 500 companies who complete in ten hours what others take sixty hours to finish, saving thousands despite higher hourly rates.
  • Communication evaluation: Interview five to ten candidates to assess both technical skills and communication abilities, looking for people who listen, ask clarifying questions, repeat back requirements, and explain technical trade offs without condescension.
  • Project context framework: Provide engineers with complete business context including your audience, metrics, goals, feature purpose, timeline, and one to two nonnegotiables to enable them to make correct prioritization decisions and deliver optimal results.

Notable Moment

Omar reveals he made one hiring mistake that cost his company nearly half a million dollars, emphasizing that wrong technical hires create invisible damage until it becomes too late to fix.

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