How to hire your first engineers without a technical background

The problem with hiring what you can’t evaluate

Hiring is hard enough when you understand the job. Hiring your first developer when you don’t is a particular kind of stressful, because the usual instincts you’d rely on (does this person seem competent, do they talk a good game, do their previous roles look impressive on paper) are exactly the instincts that can mislead you in technical hiring. Confident, articulate candidates aren’t always the strongest engineers. Quiet, precise ones aren’t always the weakest.

You don’t need to become technical to hire well. You need a different approach.

Get help with the technical assessment, even briefly

The single most useful thing you can do is bring in someone technical you trust, even for a couple of hours, to review CVs, sit in on a technical interview, or look at a candidate’s take-home task. This doesn’t need to be a permanent arrangement. A fractional CTO, a technical friend, or even a paid one-off consultation is usually far cheaper than a bad hire, and a bad senior technical hire is genuinely expensive to unwind.

Judge process and communication, not just output

Even without technical knowledge, you can learn a lot by asking candidates to walk you through how they think, not just what they’ve built.

• Ask them to explain a technical decision they made, in terms you can follow. Good engineers can usually translate their own work into plain English. If someone can only explain their work using jargon, that’s worth noting, not necessarily disqualifying, but worth noting.
• Ask what went wrong on a past project, and what they’d do differently. Nobody’s projects go perfectly. Candidates who can talk honestly about mistakes are usually more trustworthy than ones who claim everything they’ve touched was a success.
• Ask how they’d approach a problem specific to your business, even a simplified version of it. You’re not marking the technical answer, you’re watching how they think and whether they ask sensible clarifying questions before diving in.

Watch for red flags that don’t require technical knowledge to spot

• Vague answers that get vaguer the more specific your question gets
• Blaming every past team, manager, or company for everything that went wrong
• An unwillingness to say “I don’t know” about anything
• Promises that sound too easy, like building something in a weekend that you’ve been told elsewhere is genuinely complex

Don’t hire in a vacuum

If this is your first technical hire, resist doing it entirely alone. Even a light-touch second opinion, someone checking the job spec makes sense, sitting in on final-stage interviews, or sanity-checking an offer against market rate, dramatically reduces the odds of an expensive mismatch. It’s one of the highest-leverage places to spend a small amount of external help.

Think about what “senior” actually needs to mean here

Your first engineering hire sets the tone for everyone who joins after them, technically and culturally. It’s tempting to hire the most experienced, most expensive person you can afford, on the theory that senior means safe. Sometimes that’s right. Often, for a first hire, what matters more is someone comfortable with ambiguity, who communicates well, and can be trusted to make sound judgement calls without close supervision, because for a while, close supervision is exactly what you won’t be able to give them.

A few practical takeaways

• Get a technical second opinion on CVs and interviews, even a one-off
• Focus questions on how candidates think and communicate, not just what they’ve built
• Ask about mistakes, not just successes
• Don’t be swayed by confidence alone, or put off by quiet precision
• Sanity-check the offer and role against market rate before you make it

What happens after the offer’s accepted

The evaluation doesn’t stop the moment someone signs. The first few weeks of a new technical hire tell you a lot: do they ask sensible questions, do they flag risks before they become problems, do they communicate progress in a way you can actually follow? If you didn’t have technical help during the interview process, it’s worth arranging a light-touch check-in with someone technical around the one or two month mark, just to confirm the hire is bedding in the way it looked like they would. Catching a mismatch early is far easier to resolve than discovering it six months in, once they’re deeply embedded in decisions nobody else can easily untangle.

Hiring your first engineer without a technical background isn’t something you have to get exactly right on your own instinct. Borrowing someone else’s judgement, even briefly, both before the hire and shortly after, is a completely normal and sensible thing to do.