How Top Tech Recruiters Spot High-Performing Leaders

By Sarah Doughty | Chartered Managers Canada

One of the interesting things about being a technical recruiter is that you get a very unusual view of how companies are actually managed. Over the course of a recruiting career, you can participate in thousands of hiring processes and work with leaders across almost every level of an organisation. You see the executive hiring directors, the director hiring managers, and the managers building their teams.

You also hear things that don't make it onto a job description.

Recruiters often get an inside look at why a team is hiring, what isn't working, where people are overloaded, why someone left and what a leader is actually like to work with. We see how those leaders treat people throughout the hiring process, including us. That gives good recruiters a pretty valuable perspective on leadership.

We see past the company names, impressive titles and polished interview pitches and get a better sense of who actually gets things done, who builds strong teams and who is simply very good at taking credit.

Here are some of the things experienced technical recruiters look for.

Integrity and Trust

Integrity is one of those leadership qualities that rarely appears prominently on a job description, but it is foundational to everything else. Great leaders do what they say they will do. They are consistent, honest about problems and willing to make difficult decisions rather than performatively pretend an issue has been solved.

You see the opposite all the time. Leaders who announce initiatives without actually addressing the underlying problem. Leaders who ignore an overburdened team while talking about work-life balance. Leaders who ask employees to accept budget constraints while quietly protecting their own compensation.

People notice these inconsistencies. Eventually, so do recruiters.

Trust also has a direct impact on performance. Research around psychological safety consistently points to the importance of creating an environment where people can raise concerns, admit mistakes and challenge ideas without fear of punishment.

A great leader doesn't just ask for trust from their team, they behave in a way that earns it.

Actually Getting Things Done

It is surprisingly easy to mistake proximity to success for actually creating it. This happens particularly often with senior leaders who have impressive resumes and recognisable company names behind them. Someone worked at a company during a period of tremendous growth, so we assume they were responsible for that growth. Someone was an executive during a successful product launch, so we assume they were a driving force behind it. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't.

Good recruiters dig into the context. What did they actually own? What decisions did they make? What changed because of them? How large was the team? What obstacles did they remove? What did they personally do that contributed to the outcome?

We're looking for leaders who can actually move things forward. Sometimes that means a VP picking up the phone to resolve a cross-functional problem. Sometimes it's a director fighting for funding, removing an unnecessary process or stepping into a difficult team dynamic. Sometimes it's simply understanding what is slowing their people down and doing something about it. The title doesn't matter nearly as much as the evidence.

Self-Awareness and Low Ego

One of the biggest red flags we see in leadership candidates is an inflated ego combined with an inability to accept pushback. This is particularly dangerous in technical organizations. You hire specialists because they know things you don't. A good engineering leader should want those people to tell them when they're wrong.

If employees are afraid to challenge a leader, problems stay hidden, bad ideas survive longer, risks aren't raised early. People stop bringing forward information that might contradict what leadership wants to hear. High-performing leaders don't need to be the smartest person in every room. They need to create an environment where the smartest people in the room are willing to speak.

Self-awareness matters here, too. Research has found that genuine self-awareness is much less common than most people assume, and that it is closely connected to leadership effectiveness. There is a reason experienced recruiters pay attention to how a candidate talks about failure, conflict and mistakes.

• Do they take responsibility?
• Do they give credit to the team?
• Can they describe something they got wrong?
• Or is every problem someone else's fault?

Those answers tell you a lot.

Natural Curiosity

Judgement is important in leadership. But judgement without curiosity can become dangerous. A leader who believes they already know the answer stops looking for new information. They start making decisions based on assumptions, past experience or whatever worked somewhere else. That can work for a while. Then the market changes, the business changes, or the team changes and suddenly the old playbook doesn't work anymore.

Curious leaders keep asking questions. They want to understand why something isn't working before deciding how to fix it. They seek out information that challenges their assumptions. They ask their teams what they're seeing that they might be missing. This is particularly important in technology, where the environment can change quickly.

The best leaders aren't necessarily the ones with the strongest opinions. They're the ones who are confident enough to have an opinion and curious enough to change it when the facts change.

The Recruiter's Advantage

Recruiters don't have some magical ability to identify great leaders. We simply have a different vantage point.

We see leaders across companies, teams and industries. We hear why people leave. We see how hiring managers behave when a search isn't going well. We hear what candidates say about their former leaders. We see which leaders attract great people and which ones struggle to retain them.

Over time, patterns become pretty obvious.

The best leaders tend to have a combination of things that are difficult to fake: they have integrity, they get things done, they have enough humility to accept pushback and enough curiosity to keep learning. And perhaps most importantly, their reputation tends to follow them, not because they worked at the right company or held the right title, but because people genuinely want to work for them again.

That is one of the strongest signals a recruiter can find.

About the Author: 

Sarah Doughty, Vice President Talent Operations at Talentlab. Sarah Doughty serves as the Vice President of Talent Operations at Talentlab. With a specialization in technical recruitment, Sarah brings over 12 years of hands-on experience, excelling in the pursuit of elusive digital talent. Her track record includes expertise in constructing robust high-tech employment brands, guiding recruitment teams, crafting corporate recruitment strategies, implementing passive search techniques, and cultivating extensive passive candidate networks in pivotal North American markets.