Tech Hiring: COVID-19 declared a pandemic. What does this mean for your hiring cycle?

“The COVID-19 viral disease that has swept into at least 114 countries and killed more than 4,000 people is now officially a pandemic, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday.” — Bill Chappelle, NPR

COVID-19 is now officially a pandemic. Successful companies all over the world over are now taking huge precautionary measures to protect the health and safety of their employees. This largely means stopping all non-essential travel and company wide sanctions to work from home.

A lot of companies are taking one of two fairly drastic steps:

1. Delay in hiring
2. Stop it altogether

The problem with this is that it greatly impacts your bottom line or delays critical projects.

You don’t have to stop hiring! Instead, virtualize your hiring process

Your hiring process can easily (if not already) be automated and virtually conducted online.

1) Sourcing

What to avoid:

A lot of companies are already asking their employees to work from home and avoid unnecessary travel. Why shouldn’t your hiring team also being doing this?

Avoid large crowds like career fairs and networking events. Events and conferences like these are getting cancelled as the outbreak continues. Expenses like hotel bookings, equipment rentals and plane tickets may or may not be refunded, so it’s not a great time to invest in in-person events.

What to do:

Instead, stick to the online job boards. Reinvest your in-person spend by channelling it into advertising, PR, and job boards. You will source better qualified talent when your company branding and online presence is strong. As a plus, it’s more convenient for potential candidates to find you online than it ever will be in-person.

Where you should be posting:

• Job boards — We love the following job boards and cannot recommend them enough to employers: Stackoverflow, AngelList, Krop, Ladder, Github, Startupers, Mashable, Muse
• Social media — Put your spend in advertising campaigns on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Instagram, Reddit.
• Your own company website — strengthen your own branding and online presence by spending less on in-person events and more on design, marketing and content creation that strengthens your own website.

2) Interviewing

What to avoid:

Stop or significantly limit performing in-person interviews. Not only will this expose your team to potential viruses but it’s inefficient and you should stop interviewing as a way to technically vet your candidates (more on this later).

What to do:

Protect the health and safety of your employees and candidates by conducting interviews online. Emails, chat rooms, and online video calls can easily achieve the same vetting goals as a face-to-face. It will also save a huge amount of coordination effort, time, and money.

How so?

• Email assessment forms — a detailed form gathering candidate background and personality fit questions can save you a 1+ hour long in-person interview or call
• Individual or panel interviews can be conducted through tools — Zoom, Google Hangouts, Kast, Slack (all free)
• Video Calls — Getting a sense for how someone presents themselves (communication style, attitude, form, etc.) can easily be replicated and sourced by a video call
• BONUS: It’s much easier to end an online-only video interview early when you know you don’t want to move forward with a candidate. On-site interviews demand a large time commitment from candidates, who often have to commute to your office and then back home. Online interviews have minimal impact and disruption to your day-to-day schedule compared.

3) Technical Vetting & White-boarding

What not to do:

Don’t invite candidates for onsite interviews. Period.

Onsite interviews are a great way to expose your entire engineering team to COVID-19. These are the people who keep your lights on. A production issue can turn into a nightmare if your senior staff (i.e. the ones who are often doing the technical vetting!) are sick and unavailable.

What to do:

You can easily assess developer coding skills remotely or from the office but there are pros and cons to each process:

• Take-home code tests — custom tests & cost effective, but takes a long time to collect and evaluate
• Live video coding test with a dev — in-depth assessment, but takes up valuable engineering time
• Use online code challenge tools — convenient & automated, but can easily weed out good devs, doesn’t always test real-life scenarios
• Use Mintbean — combine the best of both worlds, you get convenient online technical vetting, with crowdsourced developer insights. Shield your dev team from in-person interviews.
• Essentially, share links, not germs :)

To do our part, we’re offering 50 free invite credit to our newly launched remote hackathon technical assessment platform for qualifying companies.

Schedule a 20-minute zoom meeting here: https://mintbeanio.orpluto.com/c/josephkarim to see if your company qualifies!

Final thoughts

COVID-19 has affected almost every industry, however we can not let the fear mongering affect our day to day. We most definitely need to take safety precautions, but thanks to modern technology and the online tools available. People like us in the tech industry can easily resume business as usual, using these circumstances as an opportunity to test out remote working and hiring methods making your business more robust as a whole.

Have hesitations about remoter workers? See how we debunk those myths in our next article!