Who would be a hiring manager?

A day in the life of line manager hiring a Data Engineer


Wes Plumb
Wes  Plumb 
4 min read Reading Time
3 February 2025 Date Created

Juggling Hiring with Core Responsibilities
You start your day reviewing a report for an upcoming leadership meeting, but hiring keeps pulling your attention away. Your team desperately needs a data engineer—your analytics pipeline is inefficient, and reporting is slowing down. But hiring isn’t your full-time job. You barely have time to review resumes, let alone chase down HR for updates or coordinate interviews.

Struggling to Find the Right Candidates
When you finally get to reviewing applications, half of them don’t match what you need. Some candidates are too senior and beyond your budget, while others lack hands-on experience. You specifically asked for Python and SQL skills, yet many applicants have more theoretical “big data strategy” backgrounds rather than real-world implementation experience. Your talent and HR team do their best but they aren’t technical and don’t undertand the difference between Data and Software Engineers or Data Analysts and you don’t have time to sift through unqualified candidates—why is it so hard to find the right people?

Competing with Big Tech for Talent
After identifying a strong candidate, you quickly learn they have an offer from a FAANG company or another investment backed vehicle with deep pockets. You can’t match their salary or perks. You try to sell your company’s fast-moving, impact-driven culture, but deep down, you know that for many engineers, compensation and stability are major deciding factors. You’re left wondering how to make your offer compelling without the ability to adjust budgets.

Interview Bottlenecks and Process Delays
Coordinating interviews turns into yet another major challenge. Your senior engineer’s input is crucial, but they’re already overwhelmed with work. Meanwhile, the recruiter keeps asking for feedback, and before you can even schedule a second round, candidates start dropping out. You feel stuck—if you speed things up, you might make a bad hire, but if you slow down, you risk losing top talent.

Balancing Leadership Expectations and Team Pressures
Your boss keeps asking, “When will we have someone?” as if hiring is entirely within your control. At the same time, your current team is stretched thin, taking on extra work to compensate for the missing data engineer. You need to fill the role quickly, but you also need to keep your team from burning out. It’s a no-win situation, and there’s no simple fix.

By the end of the day, you haven’t made much progress on hiring, yet the urgency remains. Tomorrow, you know you’ll face the same struggles, with no clear solution in sight.

Does this all sound familiar? Now read this and take control