7 proven techniques for hiring employees in tech

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Do you know that a bad hire can cost your company more than $18,700 on average? You can avoid it by creating a process plan and considering some crucial aspects. Check our 7 proven techniques for hiring employees in tech to save your time, nerves, and the company’s money. 

Key ways to attract top tech talent to your company

A bad hire means lost time because you need to pass all the stages over and over again:

• You need to find a candidate;
• Interview all the possible candidates;
• Get through onboarding process;
• Guide and train new hires;
• Carry out termination of employment procedure.

Here are 7 aspects that can prevent you from miss-hire and help you to find candidates who are the best fit for your organization. 

Set up and follow recruitment process plan

Why do you need a process plan? A few hours spent creating a recruitment plan can save your company several thousand dollars per developer hired. So, even if it seems to you to be obvious, still check the list below to make sure that you don’t miss a thing. The common recruitment process plan includes the following stages:

1. Sourcing and screening;
2. Interviewing;
3. Testing;
4. Offering a job;
5. Hiring.

The cutting-edge HR software can help you to improve your hiring strategy, making it a data-driven one. Thanks to such platforms the recruiters can assess and analyze data more effectively as well as draw it from many sources, including CVs, public information, applicant’s responses, and so on. 

Review programmers’ portfolio, Stack Overflow, and GitHub accounts

Every software engineer may have a programmer portfolio, irrespective of the level of experience, to showcase the coding skills through open source or personal projects. It’s critical to check the portfolio of the candidates to receive the insights about:

• Software Engineer skills level;
• Other job-related skills (already acquired and desired to get in the future);
• Level of creativity, design skills, background, etc.

Also, the portfolio can become a source of information for a future interview. All that helps to validate the applicant’s ability to present, describe, and explain the projects.

Besides the portfolio, don’t forget to review:

• The GitHub account. It’s an essential resource to assess an applicant’s skills. Just check and analyze the following metrics: the date of the account registration, number of followers, repositories, and contributors. 
• The activity on Stack Overflow. It’s a “question and answer” website, where programmers can ask/answer questions related to software development. Based on the upvoting and downvoting, accuracy, and correctness of the questions/answers, the members are rated. Analyzing the data, you can exclude the applicants.

Establish company’s presence in the local tech scene

Even if you don’t have a need for hiring a developer, you still should establish the company’s presence in the local tech scene. In such a way you will make your organization a dream workplace or at least just an attractive place to work. That will hasten the process of finding the candidates to fill the position. You can host conferences, webinars, workshops, meetups, social events, and so on. Also, you can just network with other organizations to display your name around the tech scene.

Conduct automated programming tests and questionnaires

If you want to screen and filter the experienced employees from the beginners fast and efficiently, then you should conduct automated programming tests. The key features of the approach are:

• Candidates are to code and debug through real/practical problems with all the results analyzed automatically.
• Hiring managers or technical recruiters can assess the candidates in one or multiple frameworks/programming languages (Python, HTML, Angular, Java, React, and so on).
• All the performance results are analyzed and added to the applicants’ metrics such as code design, solidity, readability, programming language mastery, etc.

Also, you should use programming questionnaires to quickly screen-out proficient developers from the rest. This approach helps to evaluate a candidate’s problem-solving ability and their manner of coding. Today there are a lot of sources and websites with good programming questionnaires like TopCoder, FizzBuzz, Google Code Jam, and many more.

Conduct live coding sessions

It’s probably the most stressful part of the interview. However, a live coding session is a great way to reveal some crucial skills of the applicants to make sure they are a good fit for the company. So, conduct live coding sessions, if you want to see how the candidate:

• Works under the pressure;
• Solves the problem (what approach he/she uses for it) being in stress;
• Communicates and collaborates with other team members to find the best solution. 

Such tests take from 15 minutes up to 1 hour. Just share the screen with the task and watch the process. After the task is completed, the developer or technical recruiter should check the candidate’s performance.

Use work samples 

Why should you use work samples as a test? It’s because seeing the applicant’s skills in action is a far better indicator of his/her performance than the CV, for example. Giving them a piece of work they are to do every day at your company is a way you can exclude the candidates that just can’t do the job needed.

The main principles of such a test are as follows:

• Reflecting the applicant’s performance;
• Standardization of the tests so that you can be sure that they are fully objective;
• More effective grading.

All that makes such real work tasks as a test to be very useful when hiring employees in tech.

Increase recruiters’ technical awareness and optimize the recruiting process

It’s crucial to increase the technical awareness of the recruiters. It’s a surprise, but today a lot of HRs still confuse Java with JavaScript, for example. That can lead to a miss-hiring because the recruiter can’t ask the right questions or mark out the wrong answers to exclude wrong applicants. So, for instance, if you need to hire a Python developer, then the recruiters should be aware of some nuances and crucial aspects of the position to find the best candidate to fill it.

Besides that, the company should invest in technologies. Unfortunately, 2 out of 3 recruiters still lack the tools that can improve their work and optimize the process of hiring employees in tech. Today there is a lot of software, programs, and applications that can:

• Automate some routine tasks;
• Streamline the hiring process so that the HR managers can complete tasks that can’t be automated.

Integration of some tools can help you with:

• Better understanding the market;
• Researching the talent pool;
• Tracking the candidates through the process;
• Analyzing the data of each applicant for better decision-making, and so on.

What’s more, not all the tools are expensive and complex, but they’re effective.

Final thoughts

Hiring employees in tech can be a tough thing full of pitfalls. The field is an ever-changing and evolving one. The top tech employees are needed to keep your organization ahead of the curve. A smart and modern recruitment process along with the right approach should be your starting point. Following this guide, you can not only save your time but reduce the company’s costs and improve productivity.