Hiring capable human resources for relevant roles is a tall order for any organization. Likewise, for people spearheading the technology department/section of an organization, hiring competent engineers and developers has always been challenging. However, there are ways to streamline this process. This post will shed light on five hiring practices that will help improve your engineering resources with new recruitments.
Leverage LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn is the biggest professional networking and recruitment hub. As an employer or head of the department, you can use its talent search tool called LinkedIn Recruiter. If you are using LinkedIn Recruiter the right way, you will attract the engineering and developing the talent you need.
These are some pointers you should consider to make the most of your profile on LinkedIn Recruiter.
Most of your followers are your potential hires: Research suggests that almost 58% of professionals follow a company profile on LinkedIn because they want to work there. Also, as per figures provided by LinkedIn, around 81% of followers are likely to accept and respond to an InMail message sent by a company. In short, you can scavenge your potential engineer and developer candidates and reach out to them through your followers’ list.
Base your search on your current engineer: Let’s say you want to hire another principal software engineer. To get the list of best candidates, you should run this search by looking for profiles similar to your current or exiting principal software engineer. LinkedIn Recruiter lets you run the search with the existing title and job description to find professionals with similar backgrounds, experience, and skillset.
Bank on Search Insights: LinkedIn Recruiter’s Search Insights feature lets you quickly visualize and analyze a talent pool through interactive bar charts highlighting the pool’s current and past employers, location, education, and experience. Using Search Insights will save you a lot of time you have to spend on comparing different candidates.
Effectively Use Coding Test and Go Beyond It
Engineers hate to appear in coding tests due to many reasons. They believe that these tests are designed to assess their algorithmic skills instead of code-writing ability. They are also very time-consuming and become all more burdensome due to the unfamiliarity of the coding environment they are used to.
Therefore, factor in these recurring concerns of engineers and developers when you devise a coding test. Also, instead of using multiple coding tests for a single candidate, try to have a single test for each candidate for the role they are supposed to fill in.
These are some coding tests you can consider for different positions.
- Finding single local minima in an array: suitable for entry positions (fresh grads).
- Series parsing of logs and extract metrics: For data analysts and backend system engineers.
- Code debugging to validate a series of zipcodes: For engineers needed to work on the existing codebase.
Keep your code test short with easy-to-read questions. You can use boilerplate codes for making it easy for candidates to complete the code test in the given time. Besides the live test, you also need to look at their GitHub account and how active they are on Stack Overflow to access candidates’ coding ability.
Improve Employee Satisfaction and Leverage It as a Referral Tool
Many companies boast a well-defined employee referral program. However, these programs contribute very little to the overall hiring process. One of the biggest reasons organizations can’t make the most of those referral programs is disengaged and unsatisfied employees. An engineer who is not satisfied in their current role and already looking to switch is less likely to recommend a friend or acquaintance for their current organization.
Therefore, you first need to garner a good rate of employee satisfaction among engineers and developers. Once it is achieved, you can use it as an effective recruiting tool. A satisfied employee is more than happy to become your brand ambassador. They can help you to reach out to their social and professional networks for hiring.Besides helping you hire the right people, employee-driven recruiting is also good because:
- It improves overall employee engagement.
- New recruits get quickly gel in with the work environment when they join through a current employee’s referral.
- Engineers hired through employee referrals are likely to stick around for longer.
Use Recruiting and Interview Management Tools and Systems
If you want to streamline your hiring process, you should also work with standalone and specialized recruiting and interview management tools and systems. From initial scavenging to final interviews, these tools and systems ensure you can hire the best engineering talent without investing too much time. These are some tools you can consider for this job.
AssessFirst: This tool makes it easy for you to shortlist candidates with its automated grading. As engineering and developing candidates enter your hiring funnel, AssessFirst grades and compares them to other potential hires and furnish a shortlist for you. AssessFirst is great to use for the pre-selection phase.
Harver: It is a hiring tool that predicts the job performance of potential hires for you through its AI-based and custom-designed situational judgment tests.
Simplicant: It is an interview management tool that you can use to have automated interview scheduling and create interview packets containing all the information that interviewers need to conduct one-on-one interviews. You can use also use this software to manage interview scorecards and exchange notes with fellow interviewers. It is a great tool for streamlining virtual interview sessions. You can also use it as a mobile app.
Make the Most of Candidate Data and Insights
As mentioned earlier, insights are crucial to have better hiring decision-making. If you want to establish a well-oiled recruiting process for your engineering resources, you need to devise a data-based driven recruitment strategy. A data-driven, insights-based recruitment process improves your hiring decisions because:
- Your hiring is based on facts rather an intuition.
- Your personal preferences and biases can’t get in the way of the hiring process.
- You can assess overseas and offshore engineering talent without needing in-person interaction.
By incorporating these five practices into your hiring process, you will improve your engineering and developing resources with the best talent available on the block.
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