Discover the most important qualities to look for when hiring a software developer in 2026. See practical ways to filter out underqualified software developers in your hiring pool and make better hiring decisions.
Hiring a genuine software developer in the AI era means going beyond resumes and polished projects.
Vet technical skills through proof of work, fundamentals questions, and cheat-proof evaluations (paid tasks, live coding, or pairing).
Watch for soft skills like communication, willingness to learn, and how candidates handle feedback and pressure.
Junior developers can still be great hires if you dig into what they're currently learning and building.
Stay alert to red flags like undisclosed AI/copilot use, and avoid common recruiter mistakes such as unpaid marathon assignments, slow decisions, missed schedules, and vague pay.
Tools like TestTrick can help streamline and verify the process at scale.
Finding a software developer who is as good as what they claim on their resume now is like searching for a needle in a pile of clothes. You can conduct multiple interviews with several “promising” candidates and end up rethinking your entire selection process because their conversation says something different from their resumes. Days of screening, testing and feedback could go by without you finding a good talent for your company, and this could put your competency into question.
So, how do you sift through the sea of AI-generated resumes and projects to get a real software developer that is authentic, genuine and skilful at building something really valuable? The secret is knowing what exact traits to look out for, the right questions to ask and the best approach to take all through the process.
In this article, I’ll be showing you the key things to observe when hiring a software developer even if you’re non-technical. You’ll also discover what mistakes to avoid so you don’t end up filtering out the best ones in a bid to avoid the bad ones.
Technical Skills
Programming Language Stack: Depending on the role you’re screening the candidates for, you want to make sure you hire the person with the right combination of skills. For example, a mobile developer should have Kotlin, Java, Swift, Flutter, and React Native in their skill stack and a Cloud Engineer should know AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Lambda and Cloud Run.
Don’t just stop at asking them to list the programming languages they know; also look out for proficiency. Rather than asking, “Can you use Python?” ask, “What have you built with Python?” This way you streamline your list to contain people who have real work to show and remove people who claim to know.
Use role-specific fundamental screening questions to check if they know the basics: No matter their skill level, a competent developer should be able to clearly explain the basics of their software skills without using technical terms or jargon. For example, for a backend developer, ask them questions like:
What's the difference between an API and a database?
What happens when a user clicks "Log In" on a website?
What's the difference between GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests?
Tailor each question to the exact role you’re evaluating the candidate for and see how they respond.
Past Projects/Proof of Work: Evaluate their resumes/past employers and see what they’ve built in the past. If it’s open-sourced like a GitHub file, see what language they used and ask them how they approach the task during the live interview. If they’re able to demonstrate their approach to the task, thinking process, challenges faced, and cross-team collaborations, that’s a clear sign they know what they’re doing. If they miss most or all of the above, you might as well consider that a red flag.
Skill Evaluation: It’s easy for anyone to cook up a resume with AI, blast some projects off ChatGPT, claim it to be theirs and show up in an interview with full confidence like they never cheated. But you don’t want to get scammed by these so-called developers. So, what you need is a reliable assessment method that demonstrates their ability beyond what a 2-page doc says.
Should you use a take-home task, live coding or pairing to evaluate candidates?
That depends on your organisation and the purpose of the role.
A live-coding test helps you see in real-time how the candidates tackle a task and function under pressure. However, the caveat is that even the most competent developers can fail with a live coding assessment simply because of pressure. So you might end up filtering out great talent because you couldn’t get them to work with full focus. Also, many AI coding copilots are out there right now, and several of them work in stealth mode, making them difficult to detect unless you’ve been in the game for a long time.
On the other hand, pairing or collaborative coding demonstrates their communication skills, how they take feedback and how they think out loud. It is the best form to use if the role involves a lot of collaboration and cross-communication among teams. However, it will involve skill from your end and an ability to co-ordinate each pair professionally.
Another cheat-proof way of selecting competent software developers is to assign basic paid tasks. Ask them to do something like data validation or API integration and make it clear that they’d explain how they approached it in a live interview. This discourages low-effort AI-generated submissions without banning AI outright.
Soft Skills
Communication Skills: You know communication skills are important for any role. Especially for a software developer role that will involve following briefs to the letter, asking questions where they are not clarified and incorporating feedback readily without taking it personally.
But how do you test communication skills in a 1-hour interview with someone you don’t know? Well, there are subtle signs that show great communication skills in an interview and can help you select the next best team player for your company:
They don’t go on rambling when asked questions. They pause to ask if you’re following and stay on their train of thought.
They do not only talk about their strengths, successes, and wins. They also subtly input where they’ve made mistakes, failed or encountered a challenge.
They show keen attention when you’re speaking and don’t interrupt.
When corrected, they accept it and don't try to insist they’re right without proof.
Willingness to Learn: Software development is a technical-heavy role and one that requires a lot of iterations even with senior developers. You need a team member who won’t be a pain point to the team but can take feedback as readily as they take their favourite coffee brand. Situational judgment tests work better here at helping you identify talents with this skill.
Situation handling: This is where you find out how someone actually thinks and not what they've rehearsed. Throw a made-up scenario at them like, "a client changes the requirements two days before launch" or "you find a bug in production on a Friday night." Then watch how they walk through it.
Do they jump to blame (the client, the last developer, the PM) or do they get straight to what they'd do next?
Do they ask clarifying questions before answering, or just guess and hope it sounds right?
Can they explain a trade-off, like why they'd patch now and investigate properly later, instead of giving you a textbook answer that sounds good but says nothing?
Ability to take feedback: This one shows up fast if you know what to watch for. When you (gently) push back on something in the interview, maybe question a decision they made on a past project or point out a gap in their answer, notice what happens next. Do they get defensive and start reaching for jargon to win the point, or do they actually sit with what you said?
Should You Hire Newbies?
It’s risky to hire newbies with no previous company or years of experience because potential won’t explain away inefficiency, and passion is not enough to convince executives. But is it worth it? The answer is yes, but only if you can discover the right junior in the first place. Use these key qualities to find out a potential A-star developer in the long run:
Ask what they’re currently learning: Someone who is always on the run to learn new skills, belongs to communities, and jumps on projects shows a willingness to learn and the ability to take feedback.
Check what they’ve built: Proof that they understand and have a hold of their skill stack is that they’ve built something that solves a real-world problem. It could be a dummy project or an open-source contribution. Just something practical enough that people use it.
However, it is easy to spin that up with AI. So you want to go beyond asking them what they've built to asking them what they tried, what broke, how they debugged, and what they'd change next. This demonstrates ownership, problem-solving ability, understanding of modern tools and frameworks, and the ability to complete projects independently.
Ask for their goals and motivation: Several brilliant software developers started coding when they were young. This is usually a sign of passion and interest beyond the pay itself. You want to ask them when they started coding, what got them interested in it, and why they enjoy doing it. The most enthusiastic and potentially great employees would light up when they start sharing their story.
Some Red Flags to Look Out For
Resumes, fancy projects, mock-up apps and LeetCode scores are easy to cook up now with AI. Candidates now resort to lying or exaggerating in their resumes, using fake identities or claiming another person’s project as their own to get through the door. But you can fish them out during the screening process before they cause a mishap to your reputation.These red flags are a pointer that you’re screening the wrong candidate for your software developer role.
Using coding copilots during interviews: You can detect this with some subtle signs like:
Awkward pauses when asked questions, then suddenly coming up with a brilliant answer.
Typing out perfect solutions in seconds, but when asked a follow-up question or you change the problem slightly, they completely fall apart.
Getting defensive or vague when you ask them to walk you through their own code or the logic.
Eyes darting constantly at the screen
Claiming expertise in every language
Inability to own mistakes
What You Should Avoid Doing As A Recruiter
Most recruiters tend to forget that the interview process is a two-way thing. As much as you’re interviewing the candidates to know if they are a good fit for the role, they’re also checking you out to see if they’d love to work at your company. So, even in the process of removing unfit candidates from your pool, you don’t want to push the good ones away. You want to avoid these mistakes that prevent most recruiters from acquiring great talent:
Making candidates do unpaid work that takes a whole weekend: A short, focused task tells you what you need to know. A sprawling unpaid assignment tells good candidates you don't value their time, and the ones with options will just walk away.
Taking too long to decide: Every extra week your process drags on is a week a strong candidate spends interviewing somewhere else. If you're still "getting back to the team" after two weeks, don't be surprised when they've already accepted another offer.
Missing schedules repeatedly: Good software developers know the value of their time, and if you want to show that you value real talent, you ought to, as well. It’s fine if you arrive at the interview late so long as you apologise and allow them to reschedule for a later time at their choice. But doing that repeatedly signals a red flag to them and is enough to irritate even the most resilient developers.
Being non-transparent about the pay: You can entice great people to show up in your interviews by using exaggerated compensation, but you’d be on the losing end when they realise the baseline. You don't want to waste your time and energy in an interview process only to lose out because you weren't honest about the pay.
Going with your gut and skipping the process anyway: As weird as this is, some recruiters still practise this. After all, it's still tempting to hire the person you "just liked." Instinct matters, but it shouldn't override everything you set up to actually verify the skills you need.
A More Efficient Way To Verify and Hire Exceptional Software Developers
Getting the right software developers for your company does more than help your organization grow. It boosts your portfolio and ensures you don’t repeat the same process just because you hired the wrong candidate. However, this process can be exhausting and considering how AI-reliant most people are, it’s incredibly difficult to verify and hire the right software developers for your company.This is what TestTrick was built to solve: to streamline the hiring process by reducing the time-to-hire, helping you coordinate and detect great talent, and reducing the chances of selecting candidates based on only their resumes. With TestTrick, you can manage multiple candidates, assess them on various skills with varying levels and for different industries and departments, and automatically move the more qualified ones to the next step.
Use TestTrick’s 7-day free trial today to explore all the tool’s features for your next software developer hiring process.
Frequently Asked Questions
There's no universal number, but as a rule of thumb, if you're still deliberating two to three weeks after a strong candidate's final interview, you're at real risk of losing them to another offer. Good developers, especially experienced ones, are usually fielding multiple opportunities at once, so a slow process is actively costing you your top choices.
A junior developer can work for an MVP if someone on your team can provide technical oversight and code review, and if the product isn't dependent on complex architecture decisions from day one. If there's no one available to catch mistakes or guide technical decisions, a mid-level or senior developer, even at a higher cost, usually saves money in the long run by avoiding costly rework.
Beyond competitive pay, the things that come up most often are clear ownership over meaningful work, realistic deadlines, and being included in decisions that affect their work rather than just being handed specs.