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Written by: Allison Dretzin
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.
People that develop code are needed in almost every industry nowadays. The issue is that finding talented coders is challenging. It might be the most challenging thing a company will ever accomplish.
Because, unlike many other professions, talented developers may be several times more productive than their colleagues, developer recruiting is such an essential issue.
If you're hiring a driver to take you from point A to point B, the difference between a high-performing driver and any other driver will be minimal: both will get you from point A to point B in a respectable length of time. It is nearly difficult for a driver to get you from point A to point B 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 summary, recruiting developers is a high-stakes game since the productivity disparities amongst developers may be enormous and business-changing.
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 create genuine contacts and explore potential. I've met some very wonderful folks who hold these sorts of little gatherings. 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 attract top talent to your company.
Publish technical articles and videos, answer questions on popular developer sites like StackOverflow 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 engineers 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 the projects on which developers have worked. You can learn more about how they think and what their area of expertise is if you dig a little further.
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. You can also prepare react interview questions.
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 of 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.
Choosing the finest candidates
It's vital that every developer you hire knows 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. It's critical that your team's most powerful individuals share your vision for resolving problems and advocating for change.
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.
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Allison Dretzin is a Human Resources expert with over eight years of experience in both private and public organizations.