The war for tech talent continues to grow with no signs of slowing down. Hiring managers and recruiters still find it difficult to hire and retain in-demand tech talent.
While some recruiters resort to coding boot camp graduates to hackathon winners, others focus on third-party recruitment firms. If you follow the same rules for hiring developers as everyone else, you might end up onboarding the wrong candidate, which eventually drains the budget and staff training resources and nullifies employee return on investment.
Assessing candidates' core competencies with technical skills screening software would inform you if they possess the required textbook knowledge and skills to be a part of your company.
Hiring a developer may include walk-in interviews, campus drives or pool recruitment drives, candidates with data analytics or market research experience, techpreneurs planning an exit, or software developers contributing to open source tech communities like HuggingFace, GitHub, Microsoft open source and building communities.
You can also consider former beta testers, software quality assurance analysts, DevOps, web developers, and data operations associates for developer positions.
You’re not the only company looking for top-tier talent – you’re also competing with the likes of big tech companies like Google or Facebook. Knowing where to look for developers is just the first step. Once your company can master the workflow of finding, assessing, and hiring new developers, you’ll be on your way to building a star-studded team.
Here are five unconventional ways to find developers that your team probably hasn’t tried yet.
GitHub is the world’s largest social coding site, with nearly 31 million developers. Simply put, it is a cloud-based platform for open-source (OS) developers who use it to host and share code based on frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.
A developer’s GitHub profile can provide you with a wealth of information. However, before you start shortlisting profiles and approaching developers on GitHub, make sure that the developer is open to job opportunities.
Did you know: The global developer population is expected to reach 28.7 million by 2024 and has increased by 3.2 million since 2020.
Source: Statista
First, you must create a profile on GitHub. Set up your account with your company and personal information. After creating your profile, you can run the search bar to find developers using 3 parameters, viz., language, location, and followers.
For example, if you wish to find someone who’s skilled in JavaScript, based in London, and with a follower count of greater than 20 people, your search will look like this:
A follower count of 2-10 is considered good, and anything between 26 and 75 is exceptional. Any developer with 75+ followers is considered super amazing. GitHub will provide a list of developers' repositories that you can reach out to.
However, you must filter your search accordingly. After you run your search, GitHub will show you the results for repositories by default instead of users first. You need to amend that view by selecting users from the left-hand menu.
StackOverflow is a Q&A site for enthusiast programmers and professionals and is a great platform to hire amazing developers.
The process of shortlisting developers' profiles is similar to that of GitHub. However, before connecting with developers via StackOverflow, here are a few things to remember:
StackOverflow is a Q&A site where developers post and answer technical questions. You must look for candidates who address specific questions to see if they fit your requirements.
Developers are segregated based on their user badges and reputation scores. An ideal candidate ranks high for both. Every question that is posted on StackOverflow has tags associated with it. You can use these tags to find developers who fit the bill.
Tech communities are full of potential hires waiting to be discovered. Some other places to find great developer talent include Reddit, HackerEarth, and Data Quest.
Huggingface is another open-source Python editor used to build transformers or beta versions of playground APIs for large language models. HuggingFace is one of the largest software development repositories, upholding countless software functions and libraries.
HuggingFace is one of the prominent websites that software developers use to showcase their work. These developers have worked on multiple machine learning case studies and trained effective data models for different businesses to fine-tune their products and services. Unlike GitHub, HuggingFace also has a dedicated user profile for software developers.
However, aligning the software developer's zone of genius with your company's software stack requirements can be a bit tricky.
A hackathon or a code fest is a competitive event in which a team of highly skilled developers and subject matter experts work together under the same roof. The goal is to create solutions for a specific problem within a tight deadline. Teams usually build a working prototype, such as an app, a website, etc., to solve a given problem.
Hackathons can be a great platform to hire developers, especially fresh graduates. Some of the best coders and programmers participate in such events. However, recruiters need to understand that both active and passive candidates take part in a hackathon.
In such cases, the best practice is to ask the participants to fill out a feedback form. At the end of the event, you can ask them to talk about/rate their experience with the hackathon. You may also want to include a question in the feedback form asking if participants would be interested in joining your organization and exploring job opportunities. This will help you form a candidate pipeline and reach out to interested candidates.
Major tech companies are obsessed with hackathons. These events are expected to become more prevalent, and traditional hiring methods will become obsolete as time passes and organizations evolve. HackerEarth reveals that around 80% of Fortune 100 companies utilize hackathons as a strategy to fuel innovation, with half of the hackathons being annual events.
If you want to assess and hire quality developers, then developer assessment tools are your go-to. These tools allow recruiters and hiring managers to effectively screen a high number of candidates in a short time. Also, it eliminates bias from the entire recruitment process. Here’s how you can use these tools to assess and hire developers:
Resumes can sometimes be deceptive, as candidates tend to overexaggerate their skills. According to studies, up to 78% of resumes are misleading, and up to 46% contain actual lies.
In 2012, Scott Thompson, the then-CEO of Yahoo, was removed from his position after it was found that his resume was padded with an embellished college degree. Skill-based assessment tests help recruiters check the truthfulness of candidates’ resumes. By applying skill-based assessment tests, employers can verify if their candidates actually possess the skills they claim to have.
Bad or negative candidate experience can lead to organizations losing out on good developers and even result in significant monetary loss. Studies show that 42% of candidates decline job offers as a result of negative candidate experience.
This is where developer assessment tools come to the rescue. Major organizations consider skill-based assessments as an integral part of the developer interview process.
Developer assessment tools let candidates code in an environment of their choice. With such tools, candidates do not need to travel long distances for interviews, get rejected based on a phone conversation, code on whiteboards, and so on.
These tools can help structure the interview process. A structured interview means that all candidates are asked the same set of questions. Also, recruiters and hiring managers do not know each candidate's specifics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, race—you get the picture.
This ultimately leads to an unbiased hiring decision, and candidates are benchmarked correctly. Candidates receive real-time feedback after completing the assessment, which makes them feel that they have had a fair shot at the interview by showcasing their skills (irrespective of what the hiring decision is) through an engaging process of developer assessments without any human bias.
Using a skill-based assessment tool is an ideal way to assess the technical competencies of a candidate and to determine whether or not he/she is a good match for a job position.
Developer assessment tools offer coding assessments in several programming languages and help hiring managers measure code correctness, the time a candidate takes to complete the test, space complexity, and more.
These tests can provide relevant information about a candidate's ability to perform well in the job. Employers that use skill assessment tests are less likely to make a bad hire.
Research claims that more than 24 million Americans left their jobs due to cultural issues and toxic workplace behavior. Myriad pre-assessment tools test for cultural fit, such as personality traits and cognitive ability. As a result, recruiters can more effectively determine a candidate’s cultural fit by using these tools.
A candidate may have the best technical skills. However, if they don’t have the necessary skills to fit in your existing team, they are sure to fail and probably even leave your company.
The reason why it is difficult to find tech talent is because it is a competitive job market. There are more job openings than the number of qualified developers. You must ensure that you stand apart in a pool of similar businesses so that developers can choose you over other competitors.
One great way is to build an excellent developer brand that attracts top talent. Show them what it is like working for your brand and why they will love it. To build a strong developer brand, you should follow practices such as using your network to build a talent pipeline, setting up live sessions on ‘Why we are the #1 brand for developer talent?’ (an example), understanding brand perception, etc.
Build your network and ask for referrals from friends, colleagues, business partners, associates, or anybody who you think could do the job for you. The most significant advantage referrals provide is that you can contact the developer directly. Additionally, it is highly probable that the person who referred the developer to you may have worked with him/her or may have hired the developer before. Hence, they can vouch for him/her. Also, the prospective developer may trust you more and is more likely to work with you even if the developer has other offers.
If you’re looking for local talent, you can’t go wrong with IT recruitment consultants. However, this approach is one of the more expensive strategies out there. If you have the budget, this can be a good investment. By bringing in outside help, your time-to-hire ratio can be reduced significantly, especially when your HR department is loaded with work.
Being a startup, you have already succumbed to exorbitant hiring budgets and the growth-granting advantage of a multinational company like Google or Amazon, which is the first prioritized destination of software developers. But there are some alternatives that you can turn to:
No matter what medium you choose to onboard talented software developers, remember not to peddle too hard. Rushing into hiring candidates without putting a barricade to protect company standards can not paint a questionable picture of your brand. Don't settle for a mediocre coder, but at the same time, look into all the facets and personalities rather than a clinical developer. Build more empathy and open doors for growth for these new hires who have shown an immense amount of resilience in their work.
Does the stack of resumes look jarring to your eye? Learn about 9 pre-employment tests to help you shortlist the right fit for a job vacancy.
This article was originally published in 2020 and has been updated with new information.
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