Four kinds of seniority, and which one you are hiring for

I often have to hire developers for senior positions, and I used to be very surprised after failed interviews. After all, we carefully select candidates by CV who already have significant relevant experience in a senior position. So how did their previous employers hire them, and why do they still work with them?

Then I realised that there are different kinds of seniority, and different organisations, contexts and teams need them to different degrees. I’ve identified these kinds for myself:

1. Technological seniority. The candidate understands the fundamental technological principles very well, learns quickly and can get to grips with any technology new to them, knows their main technical stack in great depth and constantly follows how it evolves. These people usually love working in their industry and do it “by calling”. This is the kind of seniority I usually look for in product teams.

2. Corporate seniority. The candidate has experience with different kinds of management, processes and team structures, can play by established corporate rules without burning out, and can do the work required of them independently at an acceptable level of quality. This kind of maturity is in high demand in outsourcing companies. People like this can form the backbone of a team on any project for any client.

3. Applied seniority. The candidate can do typical tasks quickly and with reasonable quality in the technology stack they’ve worked with for a long time. They dig deep and sideways exactly as far as they need to solve typical business tasks. Moving to another stack can be very painful for them, so they try to apply their familiar stack everywhere, regardless of context. People like this often work in IT because it pays well, and for them seniority means career and salary growth.

4. Domain seniority. The candidate has worked in one business domain for a long time, knows it very well and knows how business problems should be solved in it. At the same time, their technology stack is often rather outdated or niche. That isn’t where their main strength lies, after all. People like this are in high demand in enterprise organisations with a complex business domain.

As you can see, these are completely different kinds of seniority, and all of them are needed and important in a particular context. So for effective hiring you need to define exactly which mix of seniority matters to you, and how you’ll assess it at the pre-screen and in the main interview.

For example, take hiring for a product feature team working in Scrum in a fintech domain. For me, the ideal set is strong technological seniority with a bit of corporate seniority. If there’s also a bit of domain seniority on top, that’s a huge plus.

If I were hiring for an outsourcing company, I would focus on a mix of applied and corporate seniority. Technological and domain seniority would carry the risk of losing the employee when moving between projects.