I love resumes. They make our world seem all rainbows and unicorns. With all due respect, though, relying on them for developer screening is a ticking time bomb. In the technical recruiting process, it’s vital to test developer skills. This is the moment when businesses raise many questions: “How do we test developers?”; “Which tests do we use?”; “Which skills should we test?” and more.
Harvard Business Review suggests that many managers get recruitment wrong because they:
- Don’t give enough credit to the developer testing process, resulting in inadequate hires.
- Apply their own judgment to the recruiting process, leading to poor hires.
What can you do about it? Small steps create significant change, starting with:
Technical Skills Screening
Don’t know how to conduct an efficient developer screening? MCQ or multiple-choice question tests are widely used to evaluate a candidate’s general competence, according to various criteria.
Listing your expectations
Let’s suppose that our candidate is a front-end developer who has four years of experience in the field and has worked on numerous projects. This professional is fluent in French and has basic English communication skills. In this case, before conducting an actual interview, you can test your candidate on programming languages like JavaScript, Angular JS, HTML, and CSS, in addition to English and French language skills. This will help you to get a quick overview of the developer’s skills and figure out if an interview is worth the recruiter’s time.
SkillValue, our SaaS assessment platform, includes an option for recruiters who are searching for a particular and complex combination of skills. With SmartQuiz, you can select a unique set of questions from more than 30,000 available options that allow you to cover a lot of ground.
Seeing the wheels turning in their heads
Live coding or problem-solving exercises involving actual code writing can provide a clearer picture of how this candidate will work as a part of a team. It’s important to know if a developer has a systematic understanding of the program. Also, live-coding is a great way to see a complete overview of your candidate’s professional performance.
Comparing apples and oranges
In recruitment, it’s essential to choose the best candidate from everyone who applied. Benchmark your candidates’ skills against the community or other current or past candidates to see who has the highest compatibility with your project.
Technical Interview conducted by a CTO
Finding a candidate with a strong technical background doesn’t mean the end of your recruitment process.
Are you wondering why? In LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report, 92% of talent professionals agree that soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills. According to the same report, 89% say that poor hires usually lack soft skills. If a newly recruited professional doesn’t share your values and principles, your collaboration will fail. Also, this person should somehow be integrated into your team. Along the same lines, recruiters search for collaboration, adaptability, and time management more than any other skill.
Remember to screen for soft skills with a technical interview conducted by a CTO! During the interview, the CTO will examine multiple, important traits of an excellent candidate, including workflow agility and self-training capabilities, and even if the candidate applied good development practices.