A 2000 study conducted at the University of Toledo and focused on the recruitment process, found that judgements made about an interviewee in the first 10 seconds of an interview had a high correlation with the outcome of the interview. Tech talent and specifically software developers, do not tend to be adept at talking about themselves or attracting attention in typical interview settings. As a result, confirmation bias as demonstrated in the study tends to produce lackluster hires.
We recently blogged about the inadequacies of the traditional hiring process when applied to tech talent recruitment (link). Despite that, the current hiring practices expect the developer to showcase their fit for job roles in ways that are less focussed on day-to-day skill assessment and test them in atypical environments and often on non-relevant topics.
Here are 6 ways companies can align their recruitment and hiring process to better match talented candidates with open job roles.
Shortlisting Candidates through Portfolios
Keyword-driven resumé shortlisting seems to vaguely prioritize by ignoring a developer’s job-relevant skills and depth of proficiency in them. People in the creative domains are often shortlisted on the basis of their portfolios, which are closer representations of their skills as it applies to their day-to-day job responsibilities. Developers are similar to artists in that sense, as they also have a repertoire of projects, personal and/or work-related to showcase their abilities with. Therefore, instead of filtering their resumés through keywords, it is more relevant to take a look at the developer’s portfolio. Their portfolios can be in the form of a dedicated website of their projects, their GitHub repository, their StackOverflow profiles, etc. Doing this at the initial step ensures that the recruiter or hiring specialist zooms in on the most relevant candidates early on in the process.
Focussing on Demonstrable Skills
In a rapidly changing field like tech, it is common to find self-taught developers, especially since online learning is so easily accessible. They might not have brand name companies on their resumé nor a large amount of experience in one particular domain, thereby getting rejected by traditional hiring processes. However, millennials as a generation, are more driven by value-creating experiences rather than impressive names for the sake of it.
For instance, plenty of developers are active on websites like StackOverflow, asking and answering questions, many of them contribute to open source software and also help solve open problems in micro-communities around their favorite software tools and libraries. They also contribute to online publications and tutorials, such as medium and hacker noon. Their participation on such platforms is a faithful representation of both their knowledge and enthusiasm for their specialization. Therefore, it makes sense for recruiters to prioritize these contributions on a candidate’s resumé.
Simulating the Work Environment during Interviews
Whiteboard interviews and other similar pressure-intensive interview formats have consistently drawn flak from developers, for the oft-discouraging experience they create. They are not able to focus adequately on the long-term skills and attitude a developer needs to have, by not creating an environment representative of the developer’s day-to-day work. Instead of focusing on memory introducing unhealthy stress, developers should be allowed access to tools such as IDEs instead of a whiteboard, and be able to search on StackOverflow and lookup library documentation when solving a coding problem. Such conditions would elicit a genuine test of the developer’s fit for the role they are applying to.
Some organizations have substituted whiteboard interviews with pair-programming interviews. In this process, prospective hires spend a couple of hours working on a project with people in the team they would work for ultimately. Pair-programming interviews test the developer in an environment of positive stress and additionally allow both parties to assess technical and temperamental fit.
Emphasizing on Relevant Test-Cases
A significant number of interviewing processes tend to focus more on somewhat archaic problems and esoteric test cases that test candidates on their academic educations, and fail to focus on test cases that the developer would face in their role. Many developers, despite being excellent at building and debugging applications, get rejected because they have not had formal education. Ensuring that a developer’s practical knowledge is the major focus of the interviewing process would help in the selection of better fits for the open role.
Hiring specialists need to establish a baseline level of coding aptitude for an open role, as opposed to testing every developer to the same level of academic complexity in coding interviews. This would free up more time and space to test for directly job-relevant abilities. At this stage, many organizations use platforms such as Hackerrank and Kaggle to test the developers on their basic aptitude for coding. Different levels of challenges and ones that focus on role-specific micro-domains can be easily administered to the developers on these platforms.
Hiring for Aptitude and Scalability
A large number of places end up testing the developer on very specific tools and sub-skills, instead of gauging their general aptitude for learning and scaling. The fast-evolving nature of technology implies that check-list-driven selection processes cannot withstand the test of time. It is more effective to hire people for their potential to learn and scale, once they have met the basic criteria required for that role.
Hiring developers for their general aptitude in their domain is also more far-sighted because several tools fade in and out of popularity with time. A person with a good first-principles understanding of their domain can migrate from one platform to another with relative ease. Keeping this in mind, many places have started giving developers independence of tools as long as they can interpret and solve the problem statements effectively.
Speeding Up the Recruitment Process
Due to obtuse interviewing practices, developers spend many hours learning and preparing for problems they will not face anywhere outside the interviewing process. This might still serve for freshers, but for already employed developers it becomes a high-risk, low-rewards experience. They end up spending a lot of hours simply to migrate to similar roles in a different organization.
The prolonged interview processes can be significantly shortened if candidates are shortlisted and interviewed with best practices as outlined above.
Essentially, these best practices entail scouting candidates through their developer profiles showcased through their contributions, and then creating contextual interviewing questions and asking relevant questions during the process.
Are you Ready to Hire More Productively (and Transparently)?
Keeping in mind that developers bring applied skills to their roles, it makes sense to create a hiring process that allows them to play to their strengths. Developers have come together and created numerous platforms and playrooms on the web where they share their work, interests, questions and respond to each other’s concerns. Where such ecosystems already exist, it serves the hiring processes to leverage and utilize them to not only find but also hone talented individuals for their purpose. This requires foregoing some aspects of traditional hiring practices and paying attention to what developers feel, but the rewards are manifold. More streamlined hiring, astute evaluations of role-appropriateness, and ensuring better cultural and temperamental fits are some easily achieved rewards. In addition, our discussed approach creates a more transparent and democratized approach, which leads to mutual satisfaction for both parties.