How to Assess a DevOps Engineer? Complete Guide
For the past few years, DevOps has been helping companies scale their development efficiency and curate quality software solutions. Today, DevOps is the priority market demand, and the associated output aligns with the users’ expectations. Due to this proficiency of DevOps, a lot of companies are now inclining towards adopting this engineering methodology that ensures faster & productive deliveries.
If you are a business owner looking forward to hiring a DevOps engineer for building your software products, you won’t need anything beyond this guide. In this article, you will learn about how you can assess potential DevOps engineers prior to onboarding the right fit for your company. From initial screening and candidate assessments to scheduling a video interview and onboarding process, this article will cover every aspect of hiring a DevOps engineer.
What Technical Skills to Look for While Assessing a DevOps Engineer?
When hiring a DevOps expert, you ought to assess them for the necessary industry skills and ensure they are experienced enough to meet the associated commitments. Here are some of the skills that you must look for while assessing your DevOps candidates:
1. System Administration
It is the specific skillset that enables DevOps engineers to work and manage multi-user IT environments and optimize the associated performance and processes. Your DevOps professional or team will be responsible for creating & maintaining applications, infrastructure, or file servers.
2. Virtualization
Virtualization is one of the integral parts of DevOps, and the process takes place within the cloud. Your DevOps engineer must be skilled to work across diverse fields such as Google Cloud, GitHub, and AWS. In this case, you need to look for a candidate with specialized skills in network virtualization and server virtualization.
3. Coding
When you decide to bring together development and operations, it is important for your engineer to have appropriate coding skills. A DevOps engineer can work effectively with both teams when he/she has coding expertise in diverse or preferred languages. Code migration, bug detection, and software building proficiency are required technical skills you must assess in a DevOps engineer.
4. Network and Storage Management
Your DevOps team will be responsible for configuring, managing, and maintaining the computer networks. Therefore, it is important that you assess this skill in your potential candidate. From installation, configuration, and troubleshooting to monitoring and ongoing support of business networks or systems, your DevOps engineers must be proficient in handling all of those service aspects.
5. Testing and Diagnostics
An ideal candidate applying for a DevOps engineer role must have proficiency in using both automation tools and manual processes for testing. When assessing this skill, make sure to determine why a candidate prefers using automation or manual testing methods in their approach. From diagnostics to preventive maintenance, your DevOps professional must have strong system testing skills in hand.
6. Automation
The entire approach of DevOps is meant to streamline the overall work process, and automation becomes an integral part in making that happen. Evaluate your candidates based on the relevant experience they have in working with diverse automation tools. From knowing which tools to use for dedicated tasks to testing automation performance or architecture, a DevOps engineer is meant to be proficient in all of those processes.
7. Security
A DevOps expert must have expertise in deploying malware or anti-virus programs with the intent to maintain the performance of IT systems. Not just that, but you must assess them on their understanding of various risk assessment methodologies and the tools they are supposed to use for mitigating them. Your candidates should also show expertise in concepts like recovery, backup, cloud software security, and others.
Don’t Forget to Assess the Important Interpersonal & Soft Skills in DevOps Engineers!
When you decide to hire a DevOps engineer to be part of your software development team, it is not just the technical skills that matter! Instead, you ought to assess their collaboration, communication, and teamwork efficiency to ensure they are a perfect fit to be part of your organization. Keeping that in mind, here are some of the interpersonal skills you must test in your potential DevOps engineers:
1. Collaboration
Your DevOps professionals must work in harmony and sync with other team members, including developers, the ops team, and other involved stakeholders. He/she must listen to others while being active in sharing their own ideas. A healthy contribution to the team discussions is also an important trait to look for when you seek a smooth workflow.
2. Good Communication
Irrespective of whether you prefer a remote or in-person work setup for your DevOps engineers, seamless communication is paramount to establishing a streamlined workflow. A DevOps professional with good communication skills will be able to determine any potential issues or hindrances they find within the system and share them with the entire team, without much complexity or barriers. This way, a collaborative solution can be proposed within a short span of time.
3. Leadership Quality
A DevOps engineer is expected to have good leadership skills in order to prioritize the team’s suggestions or opinions with utmost humility and empathy. It is the sole quality that leads a professional to ensure productive work execution. Resolving conflicts or problems and exchanging feedback are a few traits of a good leader that you must test in your candidates.
4. Adaptability
When dealing with DevOps, your engineers must be ready for the ever-changing and evolving methodologies. They must be adaptable enough to the new things that come their way, which will help them scale their expertise and be flexible to implement ideal solutions. So, make sure you hire a DevOps developer with better adaptability!
How Can Ducknowl Help You Assess a DevOps Engineer?
Ducknowl offers you a comprehensive suite of tools, enabling you to assess DevOps candidates seamlessly. Here is the list of tools we offer and how you can use them to shortlist, assess, and hire a DevOps engineer for your organization:
1. Automated Resume Screening
Use our smart resume screening tool to filter out the best candidates from a pool of hundreds of applicants. Based on your predefined shortlisting criteria, this tool will screen candidates’ resumes in the blink of an eye. This way, you will only be moving forward with applicants who have relevant experience and qualifications. You can add the following relevant keywords to sort the resume:
- AWS experience
- Microservices
- .NET Core
- Azure DevOps
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions, etc.
2. Skill Assessment
We offer a series of skill assessments in order to evaluate the technical, personality, cognitive, and soft skills of candidates. We have pre-defined assessments specific to evaluating DevOps engineers, but we are also providing you the flexibility of creating custom tests. We have proxy prevention and an experience level finder in our test.
This way, you will be able to restrict candidates from cheating, and you will get an accurate insight into their genuine DevOps skills. In addition to that, the experience level finder will help you enhance the recruitment process through objective matching of questions to candidates’ experience as showcased.
Every aspect of assessing and recruiting DevOps engineers can be availed under one roof. Ducknowl’s comprehensive suite of recruitment software solutions will help you save 50% of recruitment time over traditional methods. Request a demo today!
Conclusion
As a fact, hiring a DevOps engineer is truly a daunting task, as it demands your recruitment team assess the candidates’ technical prowess while ensuring they fit the company’s culture. This guide will help you filter the best candidates from a pool of hundreds of applicants. Use Ducknowl’s smart recruitment tools to assess your DevOps candidates on the technical and interpersonal skills specified above.
No more sticking to the traditional and inefficient hiring methods, especially for a crucial role like a DevOps engineer. Find the right candidate capable of contributing excellence, innovation, and productivity.
