How to Attract and Select the Best Developers
If you are reading this eBook, then know that you’re not alone in thinking that finding and hiring great software developers is a challenge.
According to the 2020 StackOverflow Developer Survey, which surveyed 65,000 developers around the world, only 2.3% of developers are currently unemployed and looking for work.
We are facing a serious shortage of available tech talent. And what’s even scarier, it will only get worse. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the need for software developers will increase 21% by 2028!
In this eBook, you’ll learn some of the most effective recruiting strategies used by top tech companies to attract and select the most talented software developers…and don’t worry – you can implement them even if your company doesn’t have an established employer brand, large budget and a ton of time. All you need are our proven tips and
tricks for recruiting tech talent. So without further ado, let’s get down to it!
5 tips for attracting top developer candidates
Bad hiring is a costly mistake and everyone knows about it. If you are a small or medium enterprise, this could truly wreak havoc on your business.
The first challenge in recruiting software developers is attracting them. Since 83% of developers are already employed and not looking for a new job, this is a big challenge. But there is an upside to this story: 57% of them are interested in hearing about new job opportunities, according to the latest StackOverflow research.
However, you have to be aware that these days, every decent developer receives a dozen job offers a week! Therefore, the question you need to be asking yourself is: How can you make your company stand out? What can you do to differentiate your employer brand from the rest of your competitors? Why should they choose your company as their next employer?
Remember, you are dealing with hard to impress candidates, so your regular recruiting methods won’t cut it. If you want to win the tech talent war, you need to start using innovative recruiting strategies. Luckily, we have a few easy to implement, but highly effective ones to share with you. Keep reading!
Top 5 tips for attracting the best developers
Here is how to get even the most passive developer candidates excited about joining your company:
Tip #1: Define and promote a great EVP
Employee value proposition (EVP) is the cornerstone of all your efforts to attract developers. Simply put, EVP is your offering to developers. Sure, you’re offering them a job. And a competitive salary. But so is every other company. What is it that you can give them, and they can’t get elsewhere?
We’re not talking perks and benefits here. You need to dig deeper and find out what is it that developers really want. Most top developers are looking for new and exciting ways they can advance their technical skills and careers.
According to a recent research, a majority (55%) of developers say that professional
development is the most important factor for choosing an employer. Salary (52%) was the second most frequently cited reason for choosing an employer, followed by the opportunity to work on interesting projects (43%).
To learn more, check out our Step-by-step guide for creating an irresistible EVP!
Tip #2: Differentiate your job ads
Avoid a typical job ad structure : A blurb about your company followed by a boring list of job duties and skills you’re looking for. Instead, lead with your EVP (check the previous tip if you have no idea what we’re talking about). Put your candidates needs first!
Next, think about the format of your job ad. Regular text job ads are boring and all the same. Make your job ad eye catching! According to a PointClickCare research, developers prefer comic strips, video and infographic job ads. You can even ask them to add a few geeky punchlines.
Finally, think about where you’ll post your job ads. There is nothing wrong with posting on job boards, but the chances that gainfully employed developers will visit them is close to nothing. Instead, go where they are: GitHub, Stack Overflow, AngelList, Reddit, etc. are great places to post your jobs!
Tip #3: Attend and organize tech events
The best place to find talented software developers are different tech events. You won’t find developers on job fairs and open careers days. You need to go where they hang out – tech conferences.
Besides attending tech events, you should also organize them yourself. Of course, organizing a tech conference is a huge project you might not have enough resources for. However, you can host a variety of lower key tech events, such as:
- Meet-ups
- Coding workshops
- Hackathons
- Bootcamps
Make your company known for organizing great tech events! This is probably the most important tactic you can employ to secure highly skilled developers – be known as a learning organization. Make that a key part of your employer brand.
Tip #4: Re-think your career site
Attracting your (passive) developer candidates’ attention is just a first step in your recruitment process. Once you manage to get them interested in working for your company, you need to close the deal and sell the job.
The best place to do that is your career site. According to The Talent Board research, the career site is the #1 place candidates go to research the company they are considering as their potential future employer. LinkedIn’s research has also found that 59% of candidates visit the company’s career site after discovering a job!
Your career site is your chance to stand out and differentiate from other employers. Unfortunately, you can’t rely on your plain old career site for that. Instead, you should create a specialized microsite dedicated solely to your software developer candidates. You need to cater to their needs and answer their questions in their language.
If you’re looking for creative ideas to revamp your career site, check out our guide: The anatomy of a perfect career site!
Tip #5: Build relationships
Research from Stack Overflow found that the majority (27%) of developers heard about their current position from a friend, family member, or former colleague. In other words, your best resource to attract great software developers is right under your nose – your existing team of them. However, simply asking your employees to recommend great tech candidates probably won’t get you far.
If you want to turn your existing employees into a powerful sourcing machine, you need to implement a structured employee referral program. You also need to keep it fresh and interesting. For example, you can add a new award every month or turn it into a friendly competition.
Here is another great idea from Google – turn your employee referral program into an event! Google holds regular “sourcing jams” where a group of approximately 25 Googlers come together and comb through their LinkedIn and Facebook contacts with recruiters waiting on standby.
For more details and best practice tips, check out our Guide for setting up an employee referral program!
5 ways coding assessments can help you hit your hiring goals
Software is fast eating the world and no business can sustain itself without the right technology and technologists.
At HackerEarth, we help businesses hire and screen better using online coding and we’ve made this guide to help you hit your hiring goals this year. Read on to know all about automated coding assessments and the wonders they can do to your hiring process.
What are coding assessments?
Coding assessments allow you to create assessments for a variety of programming skills ranging from basic ones like C and C++ to more advanced topics like Big Data.
How can you create a coding assessment?
The easiest way to create a skill-based coding assessment is to sign up for an online coding assessment platform. For example, if you are looking to hire a Frontend developer with tech skills such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript, you can –
- Directly create an assessment by selecting the required skills. The automated assessment creation pre-populates your assessment with a set of questions for the skills you are looking to hire for
- Select a desired experience level (beginner level developer or a more advanced one) as well as a difficulty level (easy to difficult)
- Roll out this assessment to your candidate database by sharing an online assessment invite
- Allow candidates to anonymously take this assessment to prevent unconscious biases
- Identify top performers at a glance and make data driven decisions through in-depth analytics and reports
Once you shortlist candidates, you can also interview them further on their programming skills using an unbiased video interviewing platform for developers.
How can coding assessments help you reach your hiring goals?
Only 30% of the companies are able to fill a vacant role within 30 days!
…and coding assessments can help you reduce the time taken to hire candidates.
The 2 biggest pitfalls that recruiters face when it comes to closing positions are:
- Screening candidates
- Scheduling interviews
In order to close positions faster, recruiters are constantly on the lookout for innovative methods that can help them expedite the time taken to hire a talented candidate.
One innovative way of solving the first pitfall of screening candidates is to use a coding assessment.
Using coding assessments to assess technical competencies is a great way of making sure that you only have the right candidates in the interview stage. It gives both recruiters and hiring managers enough bandwidth to concentrate better on assessing candidates in the later stages of the interview. It is no wonder that coding assessments can bring down your time-to-hire by 50%.
A great way of solving the second pitfall of scheduling interviews is to use live video interviews. Some great benefits of using such a tool are –
- Scheduling interviews gets a lot simpler when assessing remote developers.
- You can watch candidates as they code and evaluate them for job readiness.
- With access to interview history, you always have data on hand to make the right hiring decision.
Coding assessments can bring down your time-to-hire by 50% and using a live video interview too can bring down your average time-to-hire to 10 days!
Coding assessments can help decrease your cost-per-hire
Did you know that recruiters spend 35% of their annual recruiting budget on external agencies to hire 10 technologists!
Ideally, the cost of hiring shouldn’t be proportional to the scale at which recruiters hire. But in case of manual assessments, this happens. By adopting automated coding assessments, recruiters can hire at scale at much lesser costs. Here’s how these assessments can help you –
- You save costs by spending less on assessment resources – Hiring automation tools like coding assessments can increase your workforce productivity by 10% to 50%! This way you will be spending lesser on the assessment process and can use these resources elsewhere. Apart from reducing bias and the risk of human error during evaluation, these assessments free up a recruiters time to concentrate on other activities like sending personalized follow ups, discussing with hiring managers on how to make the hiring process better and creating a smooth onboarding process for future employees.
- You save costs through remote hiring – Coding assessments allow candidates to take these assessments from anywhere and at any time. And, the best part is that you can evaluate candidates who are remotely giving these assessments right from your work desk. This way you can assure that there are no unfair means involved and can also save on the logistics and travel costs that would’ve gone into inviting remote candidates to your work location.
- You save costs by avoiding a bad hire – Bad hiring is a costly mistake and everyone knows about it. The amount of money and time you spend sourcing candidates, screening and interviewing them and making offers can never be recovered. Imagine all the effort into finding that right hire and he/ she turns out to be far from ‘right’!
A coding assessment can save 87% of your hiring cost!
Coding assessments can help improve the quality of your hires
74% of companies who admit they’ve hired the wrong person for a position lost an average of $14,900 for each bad hire.
Imagine you hire an employee who turns out to be a bad hire and work comes to a standstill. In this case, other employees should pick up where this employee has left off and take on additional responsibilities. This could hurt efficiency and morale and could lead to greater attrition.
You can avoid all this only if you have the confidence that the candidates who move down your hiring funnel will be the best fit for your organization.
Here is how coding assessments can help you improve the quality of your hires –
- Coding assessments can help you by accurately evaluating a candidate’s skills through automated skill-based assessments. These can help you shortlist a pool of talented developers quickly.
- You can eliminate unconscious bias from creeping into the hiring process. By masking certain information like pedigree and gender, these anonymous assessments can assure you that the candidates who make the cut do so based only on their skill and nothing else.
- Also, the results of these assessments are available for multiple hiring manager to view so it rules out mistakes which could arise from an individual opinion and helps you make better decisions and hire better through a collective opinion.
70% of the candidates who passed a skill-based coding assessment end up getting hired.
Coding assessments can help scale your hiring process
Companies lose as many as 89% of potential candidates due to prolonged screening process.
As organizations keep growing, they also need to keep adding more people to their workforce. Additionally, the job roles and the skill-sets also keep changing based on the need of the hour. When you need to hire a lot of candidates in a short period of time, coding assessments can be a lifesaver.
Here’s how coding assessments can scale your hiring process –
- Be it a 100 candidates or a 1000 of them, creating an automated coding assessment can be a cake walk. Creating these assessments hardly takes time as you just have to choose skills and questions from a pre-populated library of coding questions and this same assessment can then be floated to all of your candidates.
- Once your candidates take your assessment, evaluation can be a herculean task if done manually. Coding assessments help you assess candidates and gives you a list of all who’ve made the cut in a matter of a few minutes in an impartial and a bias-free environment.
- Some coding assessment platforms also give you in-depth reports and analytics on how you can better your assessment process. You can also have access to analytics on candidate performance. You can make some strategic data driven decisions based on these inputs to scale your hiring process even more.
Companies have sped up their hiring cycle by 98% through assessments
Coding assessments can help increase the recruiter bandwidth
36% of HR professionals blame insufficient technology for their inability to automate and better organise hiring and onboarding programs
Recruiter bandwidth is the time and resources at the disposal of a recruiter. Though the hiring requirements keep changing time and again, the recruiting budgets more or less remain the same. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be 1.4 million more software development jobs than applicants who can fill them in 2020. This shows that the need will only increase in the coming years and so will the competition.
Coding assessments can help you hire better on a limited bandwidth of resources. One great way they make this happen is they successfully filter out applicants who do not have the competency for a particular job role, thus leaving the recruiter with a smaller yet stronger candidate pool. This way you can zero in on more qualified candidates with the limited resources at hand.
A skill assessment platform can increase recruiter bandwidth by 66%
About TalentLyft
TalentLyft is the world’s most complete recruitment software designed to help HR professionals find, attract and hire top candidates.
It is unique on the market because it integrates Applicant Tracking System, Recruitment Marketing Platform, Sourcing and Talent CRM solution, as well as Advanced Analytics under one powerful platform.
If you’re looking for an affordable full stack recruitment software, give TalentLyft a try (FOR FREE) or schedule your personalized demo now!
About HackerEarth
HackerEarth is the most comprehensive developer assessment software that helps companies to measure the skills of developers during the recruiting process accurately. More than 1000 companies across the globe use HackerEarth to
improve the quality of their engineering hires and reduce the time spent by recruiters on screening candidates.
If you looking for an accurate developer screening software, give HackerEarth a try (For Free!) and if you have any queries, please feel free to write to us at social@hackerearth.com
