When you are hiring a Team Lead or a Tech Lead, you are not just assessing their technical skills but also their behaviour and cultural fit. These questions will help you get the best candidate.

• When a software engineer moves into a Team Lead or Tech Lead role, they need to improve their soft skills as well as their hard skills.
• Soft skills are how they interact with their colleagues, for example their communication skills, their judgement, and their ability to establish trust.
• Hard skills are coding, databases, infrastructure etc., typically by the time a software engineer has become a TL, they have already built excellent hard skills.
• It’s an assessment of their soft skills that we will focus on today.
• What I like to do as a hiring manager is to have a one hour interview dedicated to 20 behavioural assessment questions, I then score each answer from 1-5 which gives a maximum total score of 100.
• It is then up to you how strict you want to be on the hiring score threshold, but I would typically not hire a new TL if they did not score in the 80-90 range at least.
• My questions are categorised, and include notes on what is being assessed.
• Let’s look at some examples:

Category	Question	Assesses	Score
Conflict Resolution	"Tell me about a time you had to mediate a significant disagreement within your engineering team. What was the conflict, what steps did you take, and what was the outcome?"	Assesses: Conflict management, emotional intelligence, fairness	1-5
Performance Management	"Describe your approach to managing an engineer who is consistently underperforming. What steps do you take, and when do you decide on a more serious course of action?"	Assesses: Coaching skills, accountability, difficult conversations	1-5
Team Growth and Skills	"How do you identify skill gaps within your team, and what initiatives have you implemented to help your engineers grow and learn new technologies?"	Assesses: Mentorship, development planning, proactive leadership	1-5
Delegation	"How do you decide what tasks to delegate versus what to keep for yourself, and how do you ensure the delegated tasks are completed successfully?"	Assesses: Trust, workload management, ability to empower others	1-5
Technical Strategy	"Describe the most significant technical decision you've championed for a project or product. How did you involve your team in the decision, and what criteria did you use to measure its success?"	Assesses: Technical judgement, collaborative decision-making, strategic thinking	1-5
Prioritization	"How do you handle a situation where your team has conflicting priorities or demands from multiple stakeholders (e.g., Product, Sales, Ops)? Walk me through your prioritization process."	Assesses: Communication, ability to say 'no,' project management	1-5
Vision Communication	"How do you ensure every member of your team understands the 'why' behind the technical work they are doing and how it contributes to the company's mission?"	Assesses: Communication skills, inspirational leadership, connection to business outcomes	1-5
Stakeholder Management	"Give me an example of when you had to deliver bad news (e.g., a project delay, scope reduction) to a non-technical executive or stakeholder. How did you frame the problem and what was your proposed path forward?"	Assesses: Transparency, risk management, communication with different audiences	1-5
Recruiting	"What is your approach to hiring and onboarding new engineers? What qualities do you prioritize in a new team member?"	Assesses: Understanding of team culture, ability to scale the team effectively	1-5
Feedback Culture	"How do you foster a team environment where engineers feel safe to raise concerns about technical debt, process inefficiencies, or even mistakes they've made?"	Assesses: Psychological safety, continuous improvement, humility	1-5
Process Improvement	"What is one process or practice you implemented on a previous team that significantly improved their efficiency or code quality? Why did you implement it, and how did you measure its impact?"	Assesses: Initiative, metrics-driven approach, understanding of engineering best practices	1-5
Leading by Example	"How much coding/hands-on technical work do you believe a team lead should do, and how do you balance that with your management responsibilities?"	Assesses: Role definition, understanding of shifting priorities, technical relevance	1-5
Handling Technical Debt	"How do you manage the tension between building new features quickly and addressing technical debt? What systems or meetings have you put in place to ensure debt is prioritized and tackled?"	Assesses: Long-term vision, discipline, trade-off analysis	1-5
Incident Response	"Describe your process for leading the team through a critical production incident (P1). What is your role during the incident, and what happens after the incident is resolved?"	Assesses: Crisis leadership, composure, post-mortem culture, learning from failure	1-5
Defining 'Done'	"How do you define and enforce standards for code quality, testing, and deployment within your team? How do you handle pushback on these standards?"	Assesses: Attention to detail, commitment to quality, setting expectations	1-5
Fostering Autonomy	"How do you balance providing direction and giving your engineers autonomy? Can you give an example of a project where you successfully empowered an engineer to take ownership?"	Assesses: Trust, ability to coach rather than micromanage, empowering others	1-5
Burnout Prevention	"What are the early warning signs of burnout or disengagement on an engineering team, and what proactive steps do you take to address them?"	Assesses: Empathy, awareness of team health, prioritization of sustainable work pace	1-5
Key Metrics	"Beyond features shipped, what are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you use to measure the health and effectiveness of your engineering team? Why did you choose those metrics?"	Assesses: Metrics knowledge, focus on outcomes over output, data literacy	1-5
Budget/Resource Management	"Describe a time you had to make a compelling argument to leadership for additional resources (e.g., headcount, tooling budget). What data did you use to support your case?"	Assesses: Business acumen, persuasive communication, resource planning	1-5
Feedback Loops	"How do you establish and maintain a tight feedback loop between your engineering team, the Product team, and the end-users?"	Assesses: Collaboration structure, customer focus, iterative development understanding	1-5
		Total:	100

• I will include the full list in my notes for this episode.
• In my opinion, soft skills are more important than hard skills for a manager of people, which includes TLs.
• It doesn’t matter if a TL is an excellent coder if their poor communication skills confuse you, or their poor interpersonal skills drive their team crazy.
• You need to be extra careful hiring anyone into a people leadership role.

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Title music is "Apparent Solution" by Brendon Moeller, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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