Hiring tech talent is never going to be simple. For sure, there are tried and tested ways of boosting your number of tech hires such as working with recruitment agencies or doing a referral drive internally, but we wanted to tell you about some of our recipes for success that you won’t find elsewhere.
In this post, we share some of the ways we’ve iterated on our existing hiring process for engineers, and brought in some out-of-the-box ideas to help scale our technical teams by 25% over the last 18 months.
This could only happen with huge amounts of collaboration across multiple areas of the business including: talent, engineering, events, finance, comms and branding to name just a few!
5 things we’ve done to improve engineering recruitment at Accurx so far in 2022
1. Changing take-home tests
Our backend take-home assessment is now a reliable downloader task in GitHub.
Previously, we asked candidates to spend up to six hours on a take-home exercise as we felt this gave candidates the opportunity to showcase a variety of skills. However, candidates — understandably — told us that six hours was difficult for them alongside busy work schedules and all their other time commitments.
We reflected on the fact that six hours is essentially a full day’s work and that’s not what we are aiming for when asking candidates to take part in take home assessments. So we went back to the drawing board with our Engineering Managers and Backend Engineers who got the time expectations down ’ to between two to three hours over a week.
On top of this, we’ve opened up the pool of take home test reviewers and final stage interviewers. This means we can:
- Upskill the engineering teams in reviewing take home exercises, these being aligned to our Product Engineering Progression Framework.
2. Get meaningful feedback to candidates quicker.
We now also include a lead interviewer and a shadow interviewer at final stages so that everyone can get involved and feel confident with the interview process. This makes it easier for the Talent team to schedule interviews as there is more interviewer availability across the team. If you’re lucky and have a full pipeline at the final stage, you can have multiple finals going on at one time.
Where possible, we also ensure there’s a diverse interview panel so that candidates get a true sense of diversity across the engineering teams.
2. Switching the format of our frontend take-home tests
Our frontend take-home test have moved from HackerRank to the building of an Accurx Dashboard
As I’m sure we can all agree, having a ‘timed take home test’ isn’t the most efficient way of testing an engineer’s coding ability. It’s old, outdated and not fun for anyone involved. We understood from feedback that candidates didn’t feel the test was relevant, or helped them understand what engineering is actually like at Accurx.
As reviewers, we also found out that candidates passing the HackerRank test weren’t doing well at final stages. This led us to believe there was a misalignment between our take home assessment and the final stage task.
After some back and forth, and working closely with our Staff Frontend Engineers, we came up with the idea of building an Accurx Dashboard. We felt this approach was much more effective and relevant in assessing a candidate in line with the work they would be doing at Accurx.
3. Attending events and recruiting guest speakers
Given it’s now 2022, it’s finally been safe enough for us to meet people face to face! That’s why we haven’t turned down a single opportunity this year to sponsor or speak at an event.
Below are the events you may have seen us at this year:
- Silicon Milkroundabout : Speaker Francesca Riva Head of Data speaking on the future of technology
- LeadDev : Speaker Jenny Sivapalan on ‘Lessons from an engineering recruitment drive’ and Humayra Hanif on ‘Navigating the minefield of changing working relationships when stepping into leadership’
- Turing Fest : Speaker Sally Goble on ‘How we transformed technical debt to tech investment’
We also invested heavily this year in getting our name out there among other start-ups, scale-ups and Tech4Good companies. This was crucial for us because our product isn’t like a music app, or a food delivery service where the majority of users are the general public.
As well as speaking to prospective candidates about our live roles (we currently have 25 live roles open!), events have offered a great opportunity to give candidates a taste of what our office vibe is like!
To give you an idea of our success, we left Silicon Milkroundabout with over 200 leads across multiple areas of the business from software engineering to product management to data science and operations. A quarter went through our entire interview pipeline.
4. Growing our engineering talent team
We’ve had some pretty punchy goals over the last six months regarding tech hires at Accurx and we knew that despite all of our efforts reaching out to candidates via LinkedIn, jobs boards and other channels we needed a bigger team to manage process changes and ensure that we are still providing candidates with a fantastic candidate experience.
Obviously, this allows us to reach a wider pool of candidates, get more candidates through the talent call stage and help us build a stronger picture of the type of candidates we want to see.
We now have the incredible Sophie Reynolds and the brilliant Iraj Samuel on the engineering side of the Talent team this year to support the growth of our technical teams. This has also allowed us to specialise in different areas of software development.
We’re now able to split recruitment into frontend, backend and management roles OR product, platform and management. As the team continues to grow, we aim to be able to split down even further into specialties.
5. Posting here!
Last but by no means least we’re all making use of this blog! We’re very aware that there’s a lot that goes on within Accurx that not everyone gets to see. Whether that’s an update to our progression frameworks, or a deep dive into technical choices made behind a new product.
We feel it’s important to take you on that journey with us, and this blog is a neat little window into the world of Accurx. We’re looking to upload new stories on a rota basis across talent, engineering management and software engineering to help prospective candidates better understand what development and life at Accurx is really like! The work doesn’t stop there.
We have an entire Trello board of ideas on what else we can do to help improve engineering recruitment, but want to make sensible bets on what we think will yield the best outcomes. Some of the other ideas we’re looking to explore:
- Widening our tech stack outside of C# / .NET
- Targeted LinkedIn campaigns
- Social media: let’s explore Instagram!
- Graduate schemes for engineers
- Building a routine around sharing blog and social posts across engineering and the wider organisation to reach larger audiences
Are you an engineer looking for your next role? Check out our careers page for the latest opportunities or get in touch with Lauren directly at lauren@accurx.com
