How to find top tech talent?

Your team is your unit. Combined it is one entity of what your company is made of. Your products, your services, everything that your company has to offer is offered by this team. They tell your stories, your journey and interact with the outside world for you. All of your ideas and creations, the vision that you have and what you stand for, your team becomes the face of it all. What’s important is to provide your company with the right thinkers and creators who can understand what is being represented and understand its vision at its core. In order to do justice to your company, you need to find the people who align with you on the business acumen, whose skill set aligns with your company’s needs and are passionate about your ideology behind it.

It all boils down to how you find these unicorns who can tell your stories for you in the way you envisioned? Let’s talk about this and see if you and I can figure it all out. It can get tedious but stay with me, it gets interesting.

If you are looking to build a complex web application with multiple layers of complexity, it is imperative you have the right team. So how do we pick these developers and know who is the right one for your team? Great developers are the ones who not only understand your requirements and implement it with lines of code but also who take that extra mile of effort to understand your short-term and long-term goals. They not only bring coding expertise but also product expertise into the picture, who can sit across you and discuss how their ideas might benefit your vision. Only then will they be able to curb challenges that might come up, with the mindset to benefit the product as a whole.

Multiple languages
Do they program in multiple languages? This gives you an insight into their interest in learning and growing. Do they switch easily between back-end OOP languages like C++/Java and can also work on a JavaScript framework to develop a web app? Such developers are rare and bring a rare mix of skills, that are valuable when developing a complex product.

Version Controls
Do they think about the tools they use? For e.g. Version controls? The fact that they use it is great to tell but beyond that, if they could tell you why they chose a type of version control over the other in detail then that would be someone you are looking for.

Unit testing
Do they use any unit testing frameworks? This ensures that they are disciplined in ensuring that every aspect is error free from the beginning. It ensures that they actually care about not only delivering code but also in its long-term success.

Other interests
Their interest in technical meetups to understand what is happening around them and interact with like-minded people and constantly reading blogs about their areas of interest can also show you how committed they are to crafting their skill.

Where do you find these developers?
Are they waiting to be hired? No. Are they looking for a change? Probably not. Now, this is where recruiters need to roll up their sleeves in order to truly make an effort to find them or rather hunt them down.

Going beyond conventional job postings and finding ways to go to them in their natural habitat rather than waiting for them to come looking for your work. Whether you are a developer yourself or not, now you need to think like one and understand their possible mindset to take up your challenge.

Github
One place to look for them is Github. Github allows you to get a direct insight into their coding skill. You can delve into their code and see if they actually care about what they do. Do they have a project with actual users or do they contribute to open source projects? These are telltale signs of competence and confidence.

Real tests
After identifying the people that might be the right fit for your company, it is of utmost importance to test their skills practically. Methods like whiteboard interviews and paper-based testing tend to test for interviewing skill rather than development skill. They, often times, give you a candidate who is well versed with interview preparation and algorithm memorization. A real coding test on a suitable platform which lets you understand their coding relevance to your company is the best way to achieve this. Let the developers develop and showcase their ability. With this concrete result in front of you, you can now be sure of your decision on hiring your candidate.

Conversations from an Internet blog

“Having conducted and participated in a lot of interviews over the years, a lot of companies are stuck in the interview dark ages. Please stop using multiple choice online questionnaire companies, conducting interviews about programming jargon. Please do start testing the candidate on the actual job they are going to do and not some vague technical questions.”- Rehen Saeed

“Whiteboard testing a small subset of a skill that is much more about putting lots of units together. A lot of the challenges you get in programming are nothing to do with actually writing the code. Your challenges come from people and other systems interacting with it. So all you are really testing is their interview experience and how well they can study for a test. So it is not even genuine coding knowledge you are testing.”- Nymain

Once you have found the right fit for your company, you need to make them envision that their passion for coding would be done justice to by your company. It is a two-way street, while they impress you with their skills, you need to captivate them with your vision.

“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them. They hire already motivated people and inspire them”- Simon Sinek.

The process of hiring a great developer may seem tedious. But it is the only way of letting your product finally speak for itself with the right justice done to all the ideas without compromising on your vision.

Preethi Anchan
Content Marketeer and Talent Specialist
Intuhire
www.intuhire.com