Find Engineers Your Hiring Team Will Love
Technical recruiters, does this scenario sound familiar?
You work hard sourcing candidates, looking through resumes, and reaching out to high-potential prospects in order to find engineers to fill your company’s crucial open roles. But sometimes you feel like your efforts are for nothing: The engineering team rejects most of the likely candidates you find for them. Maybe they reject them right away, just based on their LinkedIn profile or resume. Or maybe it’s later on, after a phone screen or interview reveals the candidate doesn’t have a key skill. You start feeling under-appreciated and underutilized. The hiring manager and engineering team start feeling frustrated. The relationship between your teams starts becoming a little… strained.
How can you repair this relationship and find engineering candidates that the team actually likes (and hopefully wants to hire)?
To find a solution, it helps to dig into the two main underlying problems:
Problem 1: You’re spending a lot of time sourcing candidates, but to your engineering team, they don’t look “right” — wrong school, no school at all, or an unconventional background. There might be some unconscious biases at play here, or even some very conscious ones. (How often have you heard a hiring manager say that they only want to interview candidates who graduated from a top 20 engineering program, for example?)
Problem 2: You’ve put a lot of time and energy into getting candidates to the phone screen or interview stage, only to have them choke because they don’t pass the technical assessment. Of course, they should be bounced out of the process if they don’t meet the technical bar. The problem is that too many of your candidates aren’t making it, and the engineering team is getting frustrated because they’re wasting valuable time interviewing unqualified candidates.
If one or both of these are happening to you, your recruiting process slows down to a crawl — possibly jeopardizing your recruiting stats and preventing you from meeting your goals. So what’s the solution?
Add skill verification to your recruiting toolbox.
Skills speak for themselves. If the hiring manager has data right away that a candidate has the experiences and skills they need, then they’ll stop worrying about surface-level things like credentials and stop rejecting your candidates at the top of the funnel. And with skills-based hiring, you won’t have to worry that your candidates aren’t meeting the engineering team’s technical bar because you’ll know for sure that they do, even before the phone screen or interview.
Sourcing candidates
Ideally, you have skill verification at the very top of your recruiting funnel, at the sourcing stage. This solves a lot of problems immediately by removing questions about skill. Thich is especially important to hiring managers when they’re considering candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. To do this effectively, you’ll probably need to subscribe to a service that gives you access to pre-screened candidates.
Pre-screened is the key idea here. Many sourcing products on the market give you candidate access. But there’s not a skill verification process to ensure that the candidates they send you actually have the skills they say they have. And the same problem crops up with recruiting agencies. Their candidate recommendations are based on the same techniques you’re trying to get away from (sourcing candidates based strictly on self-reported and unverified declarations of skill).
The Source application on the CodeFights Recruiter platform solves this by having a huge pool of diverse, skilled users to pull from, then building an additional verification step on top of that. If you use a tool like this, you can be confident that the candidates you submit to the hiring manager have already proven their technical skills, allaying any worries they might have about them.
Assessing candidates
But maybe you’re not using a service like CodeFights Recruiter Source that provides you with pre-vetted candidates. If not, it’s important to confirm their skills before engineers ever have to interact with a candidate. As a recruiter, you might not be technical yourself. So you need a tool that will both let you send assessments and interpret the results. This way, you can weed out unqualified candidates early, saving your engineering team’s time and energy.
Again, there are some services on the market that can help recruiters send out technical assessments. But the ability to select coding tasks from a huge pool of professionally-written questions, interpret candidate results, automatically screen for plagiarism, and send coding replays to your colleagues aren’t as common. CodeFights Recruiter gives you access to all of these features with the Test application. CodeFights Recruiter Test integrates with online applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse and Lever. This allows you to send and manage technical assessments right from the platform you’re already using.
Skill verification changes everything
When you can get to the point where you know that your candidates will meet your engineering team’s technical bar, you can feel more comfortable in knowing that your team will like them. The results will speak for themselves. Your phone screen to onsite rate will go up, as will your onsite to offer rate. (On average, CodeFights Recruiter customers see a screen to onsite rate of 71% and an onsite to offer rate of 25%. Some customers have onsite to offer rates of over 40%!)
The hiring manager and engineering team will start trusting your recommendations. You’ll save time. The engineering team will save time and energy. Your company will make more quality hires. Everyone will be happier!
CodeFights Recruiter helps you hire more qualified engineers with much less effort. It’s a win-win for both recruiters and hiring managers!
CodeFights Recruiter is a skills-based recruiting tool for modern hiring teams that helps companies source, test, and measure technical talent. Founded in 2014 and based in San Francisco, the CodeFights mission is to make sure that you’re only talking to the best candidates at every part of the recruiting funnel.
By supporting skills-based recruiting best practices, CodeFights Recruiter gives your hiring team the tools you need to find the right developers for your company’s open roles. Interested in seeing what CodeFights Recruiter can do for your recruiting process? Sign up here for a free demo!
