When you are looking to recruit a developer or other tech profiles it is often difficult to identify the objective criteria that would make a profile the perfect candidate. In this article we reveal the keys to accurately define the essential criteria of the position that will help you make the right recruitment choices.
4 hours to kickstart your next recruitment:
- 1h30: Candidate analysis
- 1h00: Analysis of competing offers
- 1h00: Drafting of the offer
- 0h30: Preparation of the scorecard
Step 1: Make your benchmark 🔎
Before starting to list your constraints, make an overview of the existing offers and positions and draw on best practices.
a. Existing positions
Consult professional platforms and developer communities where you may find public information related to similar positions. For technical positions, focus on a few interesting sources: LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow, Meetup, Twitter, Gitlab.
Your objective: 1h30 to find 30 profiles that occupy positions close to the one you are recruiting for. List them, then identify:
- The job titles
- Levels of seniority and responsibility
- The type of companies to be addressed
- Education and training
b. Similar offers
Also do the exercise on job descriptions. Consult job boards: AngelList, Welcome To The Jungle, LinkedIn.
Your objective: 1 hour to find 5 to 10 similar offers. List them and identify:
- The job titles
- The context
- The description of the missions
- Required skills/experience and bonuses
- If possible, the salary range
Tip: If you are looking to recruit a profile with skills and experience in specific languages, you can filter companies by technical stack on Behind The Code by Welcome To The Jungle.
Step 2: Write your job description 🖋
At this stage, you should have an overview of the standard profile you are looking for. Drawing on the conclusions reached and existing best practices, focus on the criteria that would make a potential candidate the ideal employee.
Your objective: 1 hour to write your job description. Define:
- the title of the position: this gives a first idea of the offer’s content and the associated responsibilities. Are you looking for a lead, a senior, a junior?
- the context: clearly describe your company’s activity and all the contextual elements that could interest potential candidates (fundraising, number of people in the company and in the technical team in particular, key customers, etc.)
- the job description: it must be as concrete as possible, you must detail the missions and responsibilities
- seniority: what level of experience is required for this position? Will the profile have a managerial responsibility related to his experience?
- technos: what is your stack? What languages should the profile be proficient in? What are the essential, important and bonus languages?
- a salary range: it is important to define a salary range beforehand, but be flexible. If a candidate exceeds your expectations and could be a real asset to the rest of the team, be open to negotiation! For developer positions, use our salary calculation formula.
- constraints: Strictly define the constraints that are important for the position. Are you open to Bootcamps training? Do you only want to recruit people from top engineering schools?
- bonus skills/experiences: What elements in the profile experiences could be of interest to you outside the essential skills and experiences?
- location: are you open to remote work? If so, in what proportion?
Tip: Keep in mind that the more generalist a profile is, the more difficult it will be to recruit. Do not try to recruit a profile that is too generic and be as differentiating as possible. To understand the specifics of the position you are looking for, prepare a typical week for the person, print the calendar and do the exercise yourself. You will thus have a good vision of the different missions and subjects on which it will be involved and therefore of the specific qualities of its role.
Step 3: Build your scorecard 📋
Your job description is ready, you now have more visibility on the criteria that will make a profile the perfect employee-to-be. To go even further and avoid mistakes, focus on your expectations on the job. The bestseller Who — The A Method for Hiring provides an extremely interesting vision, best practices and tools to be adopted to recruit the best profiles. Its scorecard is the approach to follow to help you specify the objectives of the position, your expectations and the skills required.
Your objective: 30 minutes to build the scorecard of the position. Complete:
- Missions: define the core of the position. The overall mission must be concise, attractive and understandable.
- Achievements: highlight clear objectives to be achieved. Between 3 and 7 challenging and achievable realizations. It is important to be realistic, expectations that are too high can cause people to run away or create a gap once they arrive in the company.
- Skills: define how the employee is expected to operate (know-how and key skills). Also prioritize the skills: essential, important and bonus.
Tip: you can download the scorecard from the author’s website Dr. Geoff Smart. Print it and keep it in mind when evaluating a candidate. It will be useful in assessing a candidate’s skills and suitability for the position and the criteria defined.
Step 4: Source the ideal profile 🎯
You are now clear about the person you are looking for, their future assignments and expectations about their role in your team. It is time to implement your sourcing strategy and the candidate evaluation process.
To help you identify the most relevant sources, consult this article dedicated to the channels for acquiring tech profiles. It reveals key tips to design an efficient sourcing strategy.
Step 5: Recruit 🤝
This article is based on a collaborative guide on tech recruitment. We wrote it in collaboration with recruiters or C-levels who agreed to share valuable advice.
HireSweet helps start-ups automate the most tedious recruitment steps. Specialized in technical recruitment, we have built Artificial Intelligence tools that analyze public and open source data. Based on predefined criteria, our algorithms highlight the most relevant profiles for a given offer. If you are interested in collaborating on our tech recruitment guide or if you are curious about how we work, write to us at contact@hiresweet.com
