Hiring senior engineering managers at BT

Here is what it said, more or less: I am hiring senior engineering managers and engineering managers to join BT's digital team. This is a unique opportunity to build your own team and work at proper enterprise scale. If you are in the UK and the brief sounds like you, please drop me a message.

Why I am keeping the post

A lot of LinkedIn posts age badly. This one ages well because it does not promise anything fancy. We were not selling a moonshot. We were selling the chance to lead a team inside a large UK telco that had decided to take its software seriously. That is a clear pitch and the people who responded to it were exactly the people I wanted to talk to.

When I look back at the hires that came out of that period, the pattern is clean. The strongest candidates were the ones who liked the constraints. They liked that we had real customers, real regulators, and a real codebase with history. They were not looking for a green field. They were looking for a place where good engineering management would actually move the dial.

What I would tell my 2021 self

I would tell him to be even more specific about the team and the customer. Generic hiring posts collect generic candidates. The ones that name a real problem, a real product, and a real ambition collect the people who are already half-decided before they reply.