Hiring an engineering manager means evaluating people leadership, not coding speed. Look internally at tech leads first, source through leadership communities and referrals from engineers who worked for them, run scenario interviews about performance and delivery, take references from former direct reports, and define how much hands-on work the job includes.
Start with your own tech leads. Someone already mentoring, unblocking and running planning is proving the skill in front of you, and internal promotion preserves context that an external hire spends months rebuilding. Externally, the strongest referrals come from engineers who worked for the person: ask your team who the best manager they ever had was, then find them. Leadership communities such as Rands Leadership Slack and conferences focused on engineering leadership attract people who take the craft seriously. Managers who write publicly about team building, hiring or performance conversations are easy to evaluate before you speak. Avoid sourcing purely on title, since scope varies enormously between companies. Structuring what you are looking for into a broader [talent acquisition](/talent-acquisition) plan keeps the search honest about level.
Make the scope unambiguous: how many direct reports, how many teams, which products, and who they report to. Then answer the question every candidate asks, which is how much hands-on coding is expected. Companies mean wildly different things by this, and mismatched expectations here cause early departures. State whether they own hiring, performance reviews and compensation decisions or merely contribute to them, since a manager without those levers is a coordinator with a manager title. Describe the team's current state honestly, including attrition, morale and any performance issues waiting for them. Strong managers are attracted by a fixable hard situation and repelled by discovering it after joining. Our [engineering manager job description](/job-descriptions/engineering-manager) covers scope, authority and expectations in that order.
Ask about specific people. "Tell me about someone you promoted, what they needed and what you did" produces detail from real managers and generalities from people who only held the title. Follow with the harder version: someone whose performance was not working out, what happened and how it ended. Candidates who have never had a difficult conversation have not managed for long. Skip coding tests. They screen out excellent managers and tell you almost nothing about the job. If technical credibility is a concern, use a technical discussion instead, such as reviewing a design decision their team made and asking what they questioned. Consistent scorecards across interviewers matter more than usual, because manager evaluations drift toward likeability.
Use scenarios and panels rather than tests. Run a leadership scenario round covering a missed deadline, an underperformer and a conflict between two senior engineers. Hold a panel with engineers who would report to them, then actually weight that feedback, since these are the people best placed to sense whether the person listens. Add a cross-functional round with product and design to test how they negotiate scope. Include a hiring discussion, because building a team is a large part of the job and our [engineering manager interview questions](/interview-questions/engineering-manager) cover it well. Finish with references from former direct reports rather than only from their previous manager, which is the single highest-signal step most companies skip.
Plan for a slower search than an equivalent engineering role, since evaluation depends on judgement and references rather than demonstrable output, and a poor fit damages a whole team rather than one codebase. Internal promotion is usually faster and lower risk when a credible candidate exists. External managers accept offers where the scope is real, the reporting line is stable and leadership has a clear direction, and they decline roles where the previous manager left for reasons nobody will discuss. Be prepared to talk honestly about that. Once hired, their first big project is often hiring, so give them proper tooling and a working process from day one, including [applicant tracking implementation](/ats-implementation) support if your current setup is a spreadsheet.
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