One of the finest investments your company will ever make when it comes to recruiting IT developers, is to take the time to consider your recruitment approach.
Recruiting developers can take a long time and cost a lot of money. Given this reality, as well as the fierce rivalry for top IT talent, it’s difficult to overestimate the significance of discovering and recruiting the appropriate individuals for your team. After all, each new job is an investment in your company’s future success, and if you recruit the wrong individuals, you might jeopardize your company’s long-term viability. This is why it’s never been more important to build a solid online recruitment strategy to attract top IT developers.
People who develop code are needed in almost every industry nowadays. The issue is that finding talented coders is challenging.
If you’re hiring a taxi driver to take you from Place 1 to Place 2, the difference between a high-performing taxi driver and any other taxi driver will be minimal: both will get you from Place 1 to Place 2 in a respectable length of time. It is difficult for a taxi driver to get you from Place 1 to Place 2 ten or one hundred times faster than another motorist.
In the IT business, however, this is not the case. A brilliant developer may be several times more productive than other developers, whereas a bad developer might really detract from the value of your company. In short, recruiting developers is a high-stakes game since the productivity disparity between developers may be enormous and business-changing.
Get a comprehensive picture of your company’s long and short-term staffing requirements
The greatest applicants don’t want to take chances when it comes to picking a job. They want to be confident that they’ll have a steady job where they can perform their best work, make a difference, and advance in their professions.
As a result, it is your obligation as a recruiter to express your organization’s particular requirements. Work with your team to answer the following questions in order to create this image:
- What role will a developer play in your company’s long-term strategy?
- Why does your organization choose a certain development framework to construct its infrastructure?
- What aspects of your technology strategy are you most likely to modify, and why?
- What career path do you hope new recruits at your organization would take?
- In two, five, and seven years, how big will your firm need to be?
- What sorts of people do you think will like working with you in the long run, and why?
- What kind of experience will your business require at each stage?
Most likely, you’ll need to have multiple meetings at all levels of your business, from team leadership to senior management and your executive team, to work through these issues. If your firm is large, growing, or venture-backed, you should hold these meetings twice a year: at the start of the year to define goals and again in the middle of the year to double-check expectations.
You run the risk of recruiting incorrect people for your company’s future trajectory if you aren’t clear on your hiring needs. Consider the anguish that individuals would feel if they were laid off in a mass layoff – this is the circumstance that your firm must avoid.
Finding the appropriate individuals to talk to
Developers can only be contacted in two ways: in-person or online. Regardless of your strategy, if you want to hire talented individuals, you must first attract their notice, and the best way to do so is to be an active member of the developer community.
Hosting a leisurely dinner with some of your best developers and other recognized developers in your region, for example, may be a terrific approach to creating genuine contacts and exploring potential. Supporting these activities by allocating time and money to your existing developers so that they may attend these sorts of events is a genuine and successful approach to attracting top talent to your company.
Publish technical articles and videos, answer questions on popular developer sites like Stack Exchange about topics related to your business, and build and share open-source software that other developers can use to solve problems are some of the most effective ways to recruit great developers online.
Allowing your technical staff to share part of the software they build as open source solutions may be incredibly beneficial, even if it is a lot of effort. Not only will open sourcing some of the projects your teams work on draw external developers to your organization, but it will also force your engineering team to find reusable solutions to common challenges, which will make them work more effectively.
These tactics will help you find the proper individuals, but once you’ve found them, it’s up to you to persuade them to change their minds. This necessitates a thorough grasp of fair market prices, developer culture, and technical leadership. You’ll have a lot simpler time hiring talented developers if you can create an atmosphere where they desire to work.
Putting potential hires through their paces
One common misunderstanding I’ve heard from business owners is that hiring outstanding developers will ensure that they perform successfully. This isn’t correct. All developers can work effectively under specific circumstances, but it’s up to you to create a recruiting process that assures the developers you hire will thrive in your engineering culture, management, corporate values, and technological requirements.
The first thing you should realize when establishing a developer recruiting process is that testing developers and finding a good match is difficult. There is no ideal method to do it, and you’ll never be able to ensure that you recruit the appropriate individuals every time.
Inquire in-depth about previous projects when recruiting IT developers
Effective interviewing and recruiting is a science as much as an art. Nonetheless, there are techniques and methodologies for assessing the more delicate aspects of a software developer’s competencies and capabilities. When these strategies are combined, they produce a very effective screening procedure with an established track record of performance. Consider asking about their experience with container networking to gauge their proficiency in modern software development.
For example, it is critical to inquire about a candidate’s favorite project. You can frequently have them guide you through it, pointing out what they liked and disliked. This is an excellent approach to learn not just what the applicant understands, but also what kinds of projects they love working on.
Give applicants a take-home project instead of coding riddles
Coding problems are not only a poor depiction of what applicants would be doing on the job, but they also incentivize bad behavior. Rather than focusing on a candidate’s expertise and breadth of knowledge during the interview, coding-puzzle-style technical quizzes wind up essentially assessing the candidate’s ability to memorize a sequence of simple math problems, which is almost likely not what you want to test for.
Consider offering a candidate a take-home project instead than forcing them to answer issues on a whiteboard. I prefer to ask candidates to create a tiny application that is comparable to what they would be working on if they were hired. The applicant will be able to think through what they’re working on without the pressure of an interview and will be able to demonstrate how they function in a real-world environment.
Another advantage of the take-home project is that if the applicant comes in for an onsite interview, you’ll have lots to talk about if you use the take-home assignment as a starting point. I prefer to ask applicants what they liked and didn’t enjoy about the project and then utilize their responses to go deeper into their technological choices and methods.
Every developer you hire must know your company’s problems and how they may be solved. Bringing on developers who are only interested in taking orders is a formula for disaster, as your company will be unable to innovate successfully. Your team’s most powerful individuals must share your vision for resolving problems and advocating for change.
Choosing the finest candidates
Developers will be one of your company’s biggest growth factors if all of this is done correctly. One of the finest investments your company will ever make is taking the time to make the appropriate recruits and carefully considering your recruitment approach.
