Welcome to Talent Talk. Here, you'll find a collection of thought leadership articles from industry experts in the recruitment and HR tech space.
In the age of digitalization and remote work, every business needs to become both a tech-first and remote-first company, at the same time. It’s a huge ask, and the requirement to become both has only accelerated because of the crisis.
In a time where many companies may have paused recruiting specific roles, tech hires are showing no signs of slowing down; if anything, there’s a greater need for talent in tech than ever before. In fact, eight of the top 15 banks from the US and EU increased their headcount through June 2020 as customer demand increases. Strong engineering teams are often the key to long term survival, differentiation, and advantage, especially through a crisis.
At Codility, we’re a committed and talented team of individuals who work hard every day to build stronger engineering teams through our technical recruiting platform. The evidence-based platform remotely evaluates the technical skills of engineering candidates so that hiring managers can make better screening, interviewing, and, ultimately, hiring decisions.
In this article, I’ll talk through challenges we’ve seen the remote tech space facing, ways Codility has adapted to the now heavily remote recruitment climate, and what the crisis means for tech hiring managers across the globe.
3 ways remote tech hiring has changed for the better
1. Interviews are now entirely remote
Covid-19 saw many companies in a state of hyper-growth, desperately having to shift thousands of planned, onsite interviews to online in a matter of days. It’s been a fantastic example of agile recruiting and has been successfully implemented with many of Codility’s clients.
We’ve built features into our platform to help our clients build their pipeline remotely with CodeChallenges. We’ve also created Canvas, a virtual whiteboard to draw diagrams and shapes to translate technical questions on a high level.
Right when Covid-19 hit in March, we saw a 298%increase in demand for virtual interviews using our CodeLive platform in the US alone. Companies are now eliminating onsite and in-person interviews; they are completely reliant upon remote hiring.
Codility has seen some clients interview over 100 candidates, globally, in just one week. This highlights that tech recruitment shows no sign of slowing down and showcases remote recruitment efficiency and flexibility. Numbers like these would have been nearly impossible to coordinate for in-person interviews at such a scale.
2. Interview structures & content are changing.
A change in interview setup has allowed companies the breathing space to reassess interview structure and content. Companies are becoming more disciplined and thoughtful about their hiring priorities.
Businesses are locking down, with more clarity than ever, who they need on their team and what characteristics someone needs. These characteristics include skills, experience, potential, value fit, and more. Interviews are becoming more structured to get a clear signal on all the key aspects a business needs in a candidate.
It’s so important to continually keep in mind that we’re going through stressful and unpredictable times. Companies need to ensure interviewers help candidates feel at ease to show their best selves, and you don’t get a wrong signal due to interview performance anxiety.
Conversation topics are changing too. We’re not only seeing candidates asking about a company’s growth plans, but also their coping plans for a post-pandemic workplace.
These online interviews are changing to accommodate every need emerging because of the crisis.
3. Recruitment needs new ways to measure performance & capability.
The Codility team has always been firm believers that traditional hiring methods are slow, time-consuming, unconscious bias, and expensive. Place this alongside the fact that the most qualified engineers are off the market in less than ten days, and you end up with many companies missing out on top talent for failing to adapt their recruitment processes.
Measuring performance has been notoriously one of the most grueling tasks in any recruitment process. It’s time-consuming, costly, and mostly inefficient.
To answer this, online assessments for engineers are beginning to grow in popularity, they help hire managers to identify the most qualified candidates faster and save time scouring resumes.
These online assessments help predict an engineer’s real-life skills to understand better how they’ll perform on the job. This cuts down on time-to-hire, reduces unconscious bias in hiring, and helps align talent acquisition with engineering management to bring on the best and the brightest for your organization.
We also used the crisis to introduce “Test Mission Control,” giving visibility into the candidate pipeline and completion rates and candidates who should progress to the next stage. We’ve seen a demand for this as companies are now facing a boom in candidate applications for their open roles.
Perks of introducing tech recruitment software to your hiring team
Companies hiring tech roles are not just looking for a quick hire. Companies are looking for a long-term solution to their technical hiring challenges, equipping them with the best engineering teams possible. This is where tech recruitment platforms like Codility shine, especially throughout the crisis, in recent months:
- Host more interviews in less time. Microsoft is performing 100+ remote interviews every day using Codility’s platform.
- Save recruitment hours. Unity saved 2,200 engineering hours in one quarter.
- Broaden candidate pipeline. Oktaincreased their candidate pipeline by 600%.
- Reduce time-to-hire. Loft cut down time-to-hire by 40% after introducing CodeCheck and CodeLIve to their workflow.
Wrapping it all up
We all know that remote work is here to stay. What we need to understand is that remote processes are here to stay too.
For companies looking to explore more remote options or keep their new remote set up as a long-term solution, it’s time to start implementing changes to remote work processes; this includes hiring.
The future for remote work comes with a remote-first ethos. Every action, process, or workflow should accommodate the remote work lifestyle. Remote work was always a pipe-dream or the “future of work” for so many. However, the crisis brought the future to today; it’s time to adapt to it, embrace it, and use more sustainable business growth opportunities.
