Welcome to Talent Talk. Here, you’ll find a collection of thought leadership articles from industry experts in the recruitment and HR tech space.
Every professional in the recruitment sphere knows that finding and securing top tech talent is no easy task. Developers are often approached by recruiters that don’t understand their field of work and are left feeling frustrated by the experience. That feeling has serious implications and could lead to you missing out on great candidates.
We recently sat down with Natalia Panowicz, CEO of Codility, to find out what it takes to hire top tech talent and to create a stellar candidate experience from start to finish.
Hi Natalia, thanks for joining our Talent Talk. Tell us, what is the secret to recruiting tech talent successfully in a competitive job market?
To be competitive in this global war for talent, you need to be able to hire in days, not months. By optimizing your process, you can hire a world-class engineering team faster while cutting interview hours for engineers and recruiters.
If you want to speed up your time-to-hire, you need to separate the great from the good and qualify based on skill. A technical assessment platform can help you do that and help you scale and deliver a seamless candidate experience.
Developers are drawn to diverse companies, so along with a robust recruitment strategy, you need a strong company culture that reflects what developers value. More tech companies are now setting strategies to bridge the gender gap and represent the diverse talent they foster.
What should a hiring team then focus on when looking to engage with tech talent?
A tailored sourcing strategy will allow you to engage with tech talent virtually and find the right candidates faster. Using tools such as Codility’s CodeChallenges and Sponsored Challenges can help give recruiters an edge when sourcing tech talent and attract these candidates into the pipeline.
It’s also imperative to provide a transparent and realistic view of what candidates can expect in the technical hiring process and the role, team, and company they’re hoping to become a part of. Keeping the two-way communication open so that they feel connected with you through every stage of the process is also important to building a great relationship with the candidate.
Finally, building an employer brand that developers want to work for is important to attract and win talent but what’s also important is providing a great candidate experience so candidates have a positive impression of your company.
What are some best practices you can recommend for teams looking to hire tech talent? Do you have any real-life examples that come to mind?
We've helped many companies source and hire top tech talent faster, scale their recruitment processes, expand their candidate pipelines, and build strong and diverse engineering teams.
Here are our recommendations:
- Find a technical assessment platform that can scale with your business like Okta did with their campus recruitment program expanding their candidate pipeline by 600%.
- Prioritize skills and abilities over well-written resumes, mitigate bias in your recruitment process and create a world without CVs, as Okta demonstrated in their approach to technical hiring.
- Use standardized coding assessments to speed up the process, enabling hiring managers to make faster, more data-driven hiring decisions like what Samba TV implemented to create a competitive advantage.
- Mitigate bias in your hiring process to ensure that candidates are assessed accurately and fairly, like Zalando's method to champion a gender-equal workforce by 2023.
