Most managers start hiring with "I need a senior backend engineer."

That's a job title. Not a competency.

Try this instead: what specific skill or way of thinking is my team missing right now?

Maybe your team writes clean code but falls apart during production incidents. Maybe you have strong ICs but nobody who connects the architecture across services. Maybe you build great things but never measure whether they worked.

Once you name the real gap, a completely different question follows: where are people with that skill spending their time right now?

Not "who's job hunting." Where are they doing the work, today, in public?

That question changed how I build teams. What's the one competency gap you'd fill on yours?