One of the key performance indicators for recruitment is the hiring metrics. Surprisingly, only 30% of the companies fill a job role within 30 days of hiring, whereas the remaining takes at least 1-4 months. Therefore 57% of candidates lose interest in the job due to the lengthy hiring process.
Moreover, hiring techies is a challenging task. You need to bring in the best talent to get ahead of the competitors. Small companies might not have big budgets to match their competitors, and large companies struggle with not having the right brand image to attract the right candidate who wants to make a difference.
How can you attract the right best techies? Many companies don’t know how to leverage the job market. Added to this, constant advancements in the digital era are making companies shift towards incorporating pre-employment assessment tools for recruitment.
integrity, willingness to learn, and mindfulness are some of the top traits you should look for in a candidate. When asked Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, about his hiring strategies, he said, “We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity.” You must hire authentic people with whom you can trust high-quality projects.
Moreover, a person who is always eager to learn and curious will develop innovative ideas to make a change. They will contribute more to enhance the company’s performance. They will acquire knowledge and motivate their peers to learn new things. Mindfulness is another skill that is always overlooked. Good listeners are capable of absorbing more information and expressing their thoughts more confidently.
Hiring the right fit for your company is an art. But what if you are non-tech savvy and you need to hire a techie? How do you find the one that you are looking for? Well, you may hire for their good attitude and other interpersonal skills, but what about their technical skills? Keep reading to save time in hiring the right techies.
Qualified Resume Filtering
The first step is to improve the quality of your resume search. When you are looking for hiring techies, you are focusing only in that direction. Thomas Verghese, the managing partner at Saxon InfoTech, Columbia, Maryland, says, “Technical people tend to get specialized in a single vertical and pick up [technical] business skills on the job by working on a project.” Carefully decide what exactly you are looking for in your techies and filter the resumes which would attract the top talents.
Jack Molisani, president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, says that as a recruiter, you need to ask these questions while hiring:
- Is this the person you are looking for? If you need a techie, is he/she a qualified/experienced techie?
- What is their level of seniority?
- How many years of work experience do they have?
- Do they have the knowledge on tools to get the job done?
- Can the company afford them?
Being clear and precise in the resume search itself can simplify your hiring process. It helps you to focus on your goal and find the ideal candidates for the company. Attracting top talents is one of the challenging tasks where many companies fail, especially startups. So this will act as a foundation for the rest of your hiring process.
Money
When it comes to hiring technical talent, money plays a major role. Don’t be fooled by the money talks. A 2020 survey reveals that out of 65,000 stack flow developers, 70% of the developers say they are looking for “better compensation” as an essential criterion while looking for new jobs. This was one of the most common reasons.
Keep in mind that when hiring top developers, if the money isn’t right, then you cannot have the best talents. Money is not the only criteria but satisfying their expectations means you will end up hiring the best. Lowballing candidates will create a negative impression on your company. Paying them what they are worth is kind of an investment to improve your company’s growth by developing better products than your competitors.
Develop A Strong Interview Strategy
At this stage, you might have narrowed down the list of candidates that you will be interviewing. Now you need to assess their soft and technical skills by asking them detailed questions during the interview. This is where you can incorporate pre-employment screening software like SkillRobo.
Now you need to hire tech professionals. Technical skills are the most critical aspect as it relates to the required knowledge to perform tasks in a practical environment. The technical skills that your ideal tech candidate should possess include – a thorough understanding of programming languages such as C++, Python, JavaScript, etc.; operating systems; proficiency in different software, coding, designing, debugging, HTML, testing, networking, and project management and Big Data analysis.
Preparing questions and interviewing candidates in the traditional way can be time-consuming. But when you use pre-hire assessment tools, it comes with a predefined set of questions to test the technical knowledge of the candidates precisely. It can be an online assessment software where it allows you to assess candidates remotely around the world. In addition to this, tech professionals need to have soft skills such as critical thinking, communication and interpersonal skills, team playing, problem-solving, and willingness to learn, etc.
Conducting assessments is not just enough, you need to complete a thorough reference check. While conducting previous employment verification, as a recruiter, you can ask these questions:
- What role did they play in your company’s past projects?
- What were their roles during a typical day?
- How knowledgeable are they in terms of technical aptitude?
- What were their potential areas of weakness?
- Any suggestions or final remarks on the candidate?
Digging a little deeper can help you to know more about the selected candidates. This information will be likely to help you with their training.
Since development is a competitive profession, candidates who post their work have an advantage over other candidates. Look for candidates who have a clean, up-to-date portfolio that contains their past and recent works. When they engage in coding competitions and increase their online presence by providing readable content, they can be your next best fit.
Moreover, don’t sell your company. A sound techie will find their place for themselves and will be comfortable. According to Stuart Wall, founder, and CEO of SignPost, the candidates that you are inviting for an interview should feel free to realize the railroad that they are taking. They will make the decision for themselves whether to turn the offer down. The company might lose some, but the retention rates will be high.
Get Help If Needed
It is okay to get help, especially when hiring developers. If you don’t want to use paid services, then you can opt for social media platforms and job portals like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is trusted by many companies and is voted as the most trusted network for job seekers in 2020. Around 40 million people search for jobs each week. Moreover, you can use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. 62% of job seekers use social media platforms to assess employee brands. Since you are looking for techies, Stack Overflow is a community where you can look for quality developers as they share their technical knowledge on the platform.
Solving A Live Problem
The techies that you select will ultimately be coding for the user. You be that user and test how they handle a real-time problem. Explain a particular flow to them and clarify your expectations. Once they are done with it, give them the role of a user and evaluate their user testing skills. If they can solve the problem without much difficulty, then they can accomplish the same scenario in your company without breaking a sweat. He/she is the one you need to hire. Even when you hire the best candidates, mistakes tend to happen. The business world is moving on using the rule of “Hire slow, fire fast.” This ideology doesn’t mean you need to be slow in hiring, but the final decision has to be made with keeping in mind all the aspects pertaining to the company’s future.
Hiring Mistakes that Wastes your Time
Many companies make the mistake of hiring inexperienced candidates to save money and show numbers. They prefer quantity over quality. This means that you will lose the resources in a few years, which will cost you more. It doesn’t mean you cannot hire freshers, or you need to only hire professionals with 6-7 years of experience. You need to consider candidates based on their skills and how they perform during the interview.
In addition to this, most tech companies look for only technical skills. It is crucial that a developer should have excellent knowledge of coding and programming. But having soft skills such as problem-solving, time management, team playing, and critical thinking makes them a good asset for the company. They should have a balance of both technical skills as well as soft skills.
The developers that you are hiring are there to help your company achieve its goals. Therefore, you need to clearly share your company’s vision. Conducting brainstorming sessions can be crucial for the developers to help them understand their roles and responsibilities. They would know what the company is expecting from them for success.
During the onboarding process, ensure that the newly hired techies feel connected to the company. Different offices have different vibes, and if your new techies don’t fit in, it becomes a major financial disaster. It wastes resources and time and affects the company’s productivity. If you are looking for remote working conditions, then hire candidates who might be comfortable working on their own with limited collaboration. The developers need to match with the company’s culture for enhanced productivity and to achieve organizational goals.
Here is another area where companies make mistakes and lose their valuable resources. It is tough to accept criticism. The developers that you hire work towards a common goal. Sometimes you may not get the expected results. This means that you need to tell the developer that you are expecting something different and that they need to improve. Here, instead of bashing them, you can provide constructive criticism, which will help the developer to improve and move forward in the right direction.
Another important thing that you need to ensure is that the techies should be able to meet deadlines. For instance, you are developing an Android app, and it ends up with a glitch. You ask your developer to fix it, and they completely forget it and miss the deadline. This will have a considerable impact on customer feedback in the app store and affects the company’s reputation. This is why the candidates must meet deadlines. Sometimes they may fall behind, but they need to know how to handle a crisis, and this quality makes a huge difference. While hiring, look for these traits to save time in hiring the best fits possible.
To wrap it up, you need to have a robust hiring approach when recruiting techies. You can find the best tech screening solution – by introducing SkillRobo. SkillRobo is a pre-employment assessment software that offers tons of useful features to simplify your hiring process. It provides competitive tests for hiring the most suitable techies with easy options for sending invites with just a single click. Recruiters will be provided with instant reports with detailed metrics, which will be helpful for you to get a deeper insight into the candidates’ performance. Moreover, it has features for fully customizable tests to set your own preferred type of technical questions, which can be conducted in a secured online environment. Its engaging user interface helps candidates to have an authentic interview experience, and with its enterprise integration feature, you can directly get the results to your HR evaluation systems.
Visit Skillrobo to know more and Sign Up for a free demo today.