DevOps engineers are IT professionals that glue together various IT functions at a business. Hiring managers must weigh the candidates giving equal importance to soft skills as well as tech skills while recruiting DevOps engineers.
A DevOps engineer is one who can essentially perform these diverse roles:
- Application and Infrastructure Planning, Testing and Development: A DevOps engineer is expected to oversee the functions of the IT and scale them. The ability to write code in different languages, having testing skills and envisioning the integrations and additions across numerous systems are a must.
- Maintaining CI/CD Pipelines: DevOps engineers can pinpoint areas for improvement, ensure syncing on the go, and make way to test continually without compromising overall speed.
- Automation Implementation: Enterprises can concentrate on strategic tasks when processes are automated. DevOps engineer is primarily hired for automation enabling, implementation, and efficient running of IT.
- Ensuring Security: A valuable skill of a DevOps engineer is the ability to write secure code. It provides safety for users of the infrastructure, the building of reliable software and support.
- Ongoing Monitoring: Data collection, interpretation and analysis on an ongoing basis is crucial for organisations. DevOps engineers oversee the apps, infrastructure and troubleshoot potential issues.
Skills To Look For In A Potential DevOps Engineer
There is a broad range of core fundamentals required to be a DevOps engineer. Expertise in virtualisation, comprehensive system build, automation skills, coding and scripting skills, extensive IT knowledge and continuous integration abilities, to name a few. A DevOps engineer also needs to have cross-functional skills to interact with teams speaking different languages, whether it is system engineer or development teams. Other than merely knowing the language to be it Python or Ruby, they need to be skilled enough with the ability to read the design, understand and apply the right one.
DevOps professionals need to keep pace with ever-changing technology and update their knowledge base and skill set, keeping in tune with market trends. It is not merely about implementing Agile, Lean or Kanban but also encouraging the team towards self-improvement continuous learning, ensuring flexibility and enabling visualisation. Strong interpersonal skills, communication with the teams, removing obstacles, lowering costs, working under pressure, improving quality of codes, and keeping everyone on the same page are just a few of the skills pertinent to have.
The Need to Identify the Business Requirements
Simply opening up a DevOps Engineer vacancy and hoping to recruit top-notch, best-suited talent in the field can be a far fetched dream. Since the DevOps engineering domain encompasses a range of diverse skill sets, hiring the best DevOps engineer with the required skill set for a development project is specifically dependent on the business needs. This makes the role of a DevOps engineer subjective.
Business recruiters must chalk out what role is the DevOps engineer going to perform. Beyond the necessary skill sets, there would be a need to define the specialisation required. Does the business need system administration, virtualisation, network and storage management or is the requirement based around coding, automation, IT security, testing and diagnostics services. The DevOps require more expertise and need to be more advanced as the development project grows. This means a continual need for upskilling the team or going towards hiring more specialists.
How to Interview Candidates for the Post of DevOps Engineer?
While interviewing for hiring DevOps engineers, it’s essential to ask the right kind of questions. Here we discuss a few generic questions that recruiters may ask a potential candidate:
- How do you integrate security in the DevOps development processes?
- What DevOps tools are you well-versed with? Are you looking to master any other tool?
- What according to you, has been your most challenging automation implementation?
- How has your work on the script helped to improve operations, the reasons for developing that script and its outcome?
- What does the perfect release look like? What is your role? Did anything go wrong as things tend to? How did you handle it?
- How do you conduct the diagnosis of the problems in production? What could the troubleshooting process look like?
- How do you factor your success as a DevOps engineer, both as an individual and a team?
It’s best to shortlist the potential candidates by asking specific questions that pertain to the business segments they would be dealing with. These generic questions discussed above can be fine-tuned as per the needs of the business.
Where To Hunt For The Best DevOps Engineers?
Hiring DevOps engineers as tricky as it can get, has a significant impact on the enterprise. Its best for businesses to delve deep into the kind of work association or engagement they want to establish with a DevOps engineer:
- · Onboarding Freelancers: Several platforms such as Upwork, Freelancer and even LinkedIn can help businesses find specialists in the IT domain. Just set up an account, create a post, select a freelancer specialist or a team as the need may be and initiate a contract.
- · Partnering With Recruitment Agencies: Businesses inform the agency of the DevOps vacancies they are looking to fill. The full process right from headhunting to interviewing and shortlisting depends upon your preferences and budget of the business.
- · IT companies: Outsourcing a DevOps project to the experts who already have technology in place is an enticing option for most businesses. Once a business finds the right IT partner and has an adequate budget, they can outsource their DevOps development to the experts without any fret.
- · In-house IT team: Enterprises can also look for the right person on their own in house IT team. Due to the complexity involved, the selection needs to be based on experience and skills.
Conclusion
Finding qualified and passionate DevOps engineers suitable for your business, in particular, can be challenging. While most hiring managers are well versed with the complex and intertwined discipline of DevOps, they have come to appreciate the broad domains it encompasses. That is why the DevOps recruitment process needs to dig deep into the excruciating details about what and who does a business needs to start building their DevOps environment.
There are numerous businesses out in the market looking to hire DevOps engineers. So, only a recruiter to come up with an attractive proposition for the talent wins the cup. All in all, it’s best to have clarity on the requirements and highlight why a candidate with your preferred skill set should settle for your enterprise as an employer.
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