So, I’ve been promoted to Senior Engineer in the last couple of months and that felt really good because I felt that people recognized my efforts to progress and that my dedication paid off. The problem is that, as a senior, I am supposed to become more part of the recruitment processes, through code review candidates applications, interviewing, etc. All fine by me, but sometimes I get haunted by the too familiar Imposter Syndrome when looking at the code submissions of some candidates for some of the challenges we ask them, I am supposed to be evaluating people that in some cases have (at my eyes) solutions that I would not be able to implement in such detail or finesse and some times I end up spending some hours going through some solutions just to grasp everything that a candidate has done. Am I an imposter or is this just another phase of the process?
This is the most important thing when hiring. If staff only hire new employees that are less experienced/talented than themselves then the skill level of the team reduces over time. If you give hiring staff the target of finding someone better than they are, the skill of the team increases over time.