The A-Zs Of Tech Recruiting: A Guide

Developers today require a lot more from their jobs than just decent compensation and bonuses. In 2022, flexibility and work-from-home options take on a lot more priority than ever. In times of The Great Resignation, companies need to rework their tech recruiting policies and practices to attract top talent. 

Conventional recruitment strategies don’t hold much water in the current tech hiring landscape. Recruiters and hiring managers who recognize this and start looking at newer recruiting methods will come out on top this year — create a workforce that is engaged, loyal, and future-ready.

With our collection of tech recruiting resources, change the way you build your tech teams for the better. 

The smart recruiter does not wait for a talented employee to resign to jump into action. They would have engaged and started a dialogue with the developer community long before any job role opens up.

If developers recognize your brand they are quick to respond to you and your company’s updates. This way you have a warmed-up, talented developer pool at your fingertips.

What are the best ways for engaging and hiring tech talent?

In our recent survey of recruiters, we asked them to tell us their top methods of pre-hiring engagement. Here’s what they said:

• Hackathons (32.1%)
• Coding contests (27.4%)
• Workshops (22.3%)
• Webinars (16.2%)

The power of hackathons for tapping into the power of the developer community is something HackerEarth has been harnessing for eight years now.

• What are the things you need to know going into a hackathon?

Read our Hackathon Survival Guide

• What were the lessons we learned from running over 200 hackathons?

5 lessons we want to share with you

Sourcing for a freshly opened job role is a tough ask. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find great candidates, the deadlines to close a job role are unrealistic, and your talent pool is saturated. And this is where we got you covered!

• How to write job postings that actually work where applications pour in by the thousands?

Download your copy today!

• To write even better job postings and understand what you are looking for, design candidate personas. There is also a free template attached.

Guide to creating candidate personas

• How do you make sure that your job postings are not gender-biased?

Write gender-fluid job descriptions

• Hiring tech talent from social media is a skill in itself. Tailor your recruitment strategies to each platform with this cheat sheet.

Get the social recruiting cheat sheet

Why do traditional recruitment strategies fail, especially when assessing candidates?

• In most campus hiring scenarios, developers are expected to solve coding problems with pen and paper. This is not how the real world works, and is akin to asking somebody to bake a cake without an oven — only leads to subpar performance. Showcasing their coding skills is the one thing developers need to be able to do and that can’t happen on a word processor tool.
• If we put aside issues with manual testing methods, there’s the bigger problem of proctoring. With recruiters being worked to the bone during hiring season, human error is inevitable. Robust proctoring measures are the only way to ensure your candidates are not using unfair means to ace the test. 

Given that coding assessments play a huge role in screening potential candidates, you ought to employ recruitment strategies that are the most intelligent, objective, and skill-based.

How can you take your recruitment strategies to the next level?

At HackerEarth, our motto has always been to match developers with the right opportunities. We designed our Assessment platform to make it easier for recruiters to create role-based tests. 

Let me show you 4 simple ways to create tests on our platform. 

Create coding assessments on HackerEarth

It also comes with a built-in proctoring feature, making it easy for both developers and interviewers.

Explore our built-in proctoring features

The last step in any tech recruiting process is the ‘Interview’. It is probably the most hated step, with developers over the years complaining about clunky and long-drawn-out interviews.

Why are coding interviews broken?

While this is not an exhaustive list, here are the most common reasons:

• The interview looks nothing like the job. Developers are asked questions that do not showcase the technical skills required for the job. Solving questions using binary trees cannot be the most efficient way to test a developer’s coding knowledge.
• Coding interviews are extremely hard, which has made developers wonder who they are designed for. Also, they happen to be conducted in unrealistic environments where developers have no access to code editors or IDEs.
• Recruiters ghost candidates during the long interview process. They are left in the dark with no feedback, no idea what comes next, and no inkling of how they performed.

Can we fix them? Yes, it’s not too late!

First things first. What to look for when hiring a software developer? Will simply evaluating technical skills suffice? The answer is no.

If you want to hire the crème de la crème of the developer talent out there, you have to look for a well-rounded candidate. 

#1 After speaking with several hiring managers, we’ve come up with a list of questions that showcase a developer’s technical skills.

Technical interview questions list

#2 Soft skills are like the cherry on top. They set the best of the candidates apart from the rest.

Behavioral interview questions list

#3 Our product whizkids have added new features to our intelligent remote interviewing tool, FaceCode to make the remote interview experience even better.

New updates for FaceCode

#4 Candidate experience in a tech interview is underrated. It is not given the attention it deserves, which leads to driving away talented candidates. Design a delightful candidate experience with FaceCode.

Get your copy of the ebook today!

What do the developer hiring trends look like in 2022?

It is always a good idea to stay abreast with the latest developer hiring trends that will inform the upcoming year.

• Our 2021 Developer Survey report is packed with responses from 25,431 developers across 171 countries. Let’s find out what makes a developer tick, shall we? 

Get your copy of the report now!

• The brand new edition of our Developer Recruitment survey captured responses from 2500 HR and Engineering personnel. Let’s see how we can build great tech teams, going forward.

Download your copy of the report

Recruiting top tech talent the right way with our bonus recruiting resources

“How to recruit top tech talent in 2022?” is the main priority of recruiters across the globe. Coupled with everything we spoke about till now, here are some additional resources from HackerEarth’s archives that will set you up for success!

• What does the developer hiring process include? Read more in this playbook on Better Tech Hiring. 
• Recruitment strategies in 2022 need to be highly data-driven. This is where a recruitment dashboard comes in handy. There’s a free template attached too.
• Here is a 6-step guide to creating the most detailed and optimized recruiting budget sheet in 2022. Also, attached is a sample sheet for your reference.
• Diversity and inclusion matter in 2022. With this handbook, ensure you stay on top of your D&I strategies.
• What would be the best platform for hiring developers? What tools would you require for each stage of the tech recruiting process? Here is a comprehensive list of everything you’ll need.

Further Reading

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Ruehie Jaiya Karri Author 58 Blogs