Technical Hiring: Common Problems and Solutions

In the modern, tech-driven world, the success of startups and more established organizations alike is becoming increasingly dependent on the quality of their technical staff. This is even more prevalent in the tech industry, a field in which the demand for IT talent has exploded over the past decades, creating a highly competitive environment for technical hiring.

Onboarding top developers and engineering talent has become essential for any organizations trying to get ahead in this day and age, yet the technical hiring process is often onerous and ineffective. Due to the rise of online networking platforms, finding potential candidates has become much easier, however, as with most online platforms, it is difficult to determine the quality, credibility and competence of the growing pool of tech-professionals.

Demand for technical talent is only expected to increase, and subsequently, hiring processes require innovative solutions that effectively aid in the progress and optimization of our digitized world.

The technical hiring process

Technical hiring is generally outsourced to specialized recruitment agencies, although larger multinationationals are known to manage this in-house. Both recruitment agencies and internal recruitment departments, usually HR, are responsible for the sourcing, screening and assessment of potential candidates who match the job description and the company.

The process is resource-intensive for an organization, with an average cost of $4,129 per hire and an average time to fill a position of 42 days. Generally, the first step in the technical hiring procedure entails the advertising of the job opening. This is typically done through mediums such as LinkedIn, UpWork, AngelList and a plethora of other platforms that have emerged over the past two decades. Candidates apply to these job openings and submit the required documentation such as certificates, references, work experience and in an increasing number of applications, competency test scores.

After the applications are received, the candidates are screened, which is usually handled internally and is a time-consuming process. This because up until this point, only the required documentation is submitted and it tells only a fragmented story about a candidate. Whether an applicant fits in the organization, is genuine about the filed documents and possesses the required skills and experience has to be assessed in this phase. All these essential criteria aren’t sufficiently verified by many digital platforms, effectively placing the responsibility and energy required for verification in the hands of the hiring organization or a contracted third party.

A competitive field

The technical hiring environment is a suppliers market, as illustrated by the unemployment rate for technical professionals in the US alone dropping below 1.9%, and global numbers following similar trends. Tech companies and recruiters are jumping through hoops to attract skilled and specialized tech talent, and while these professionals are progressively hard to find, the organizational domains in which they are required are expanding too.

Specialists in fields such as DevOps, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity and blockchain are essential to companies that want to remain relevant in the coming years, yet the influx of capable minds and fingers in these areas aren’t keeping up with the rising demand. Add the ongoing convergence of these emerging technological fields of expertise to this, and it becomes clear that more qualified people and better ways to find them are needed.

Sourcing

Finding quality technical talent that meets an organization’s requirements is hard, and research shows that 49% of tech recruiters indicated that they have difficulties filling high skilled positions of whom 82% attributed this to the scarcity of skilled applicants.

Even though the digitization of industry, and counterintuitive to the nature of the job specifications for technical hiring, sourcing still mainly relies on word of mouth and personal referrals. However, these analog methods and the traditional path for hiring staff fail to meet the quantitative demands of employers, which has led to recruiters using alternative methods for finding additional candidates. These methods include the utilization of gig economy platforms including UpWork and Freelancer, social media networks like LinkedIn and Twitter and tech-oriented network platforms such as Github and Stack Overflow — essentially anything that works.

Even though these approaches can generate more in terms of leads, they can’t necessarily guarantee the quality and candidates sourced — there is still the need for robust screening and assessment processes.

Screening

A rise in demand with a scarcity of supply naturally leads to an increase in price, and so have the salaries for technical positions. In turn, these salaries have attracted a large number of individuals that often lack experience in the jobs they apply for or whose technical competency is questionable. This is perfectly illustrated by the rapidly emerging blockchain industry, which has experienced explosive growth in demand for blockchain developers over the past five consecutive quarters, but of which the professional supply is drastically lacking in terms of skills and experience. Accordingly, screening the potential candidates before contacting them is essential for a more efficient technical hiring process. Documents can be falsified, experience can be exaggerated, and references can be fabricated. Having a reliable system in place to select only relevant candidates with legitimate qualifications is imperative to saving time and money.

Assessment

There is a myriad of variables that go into hiring decisions, including certificates, work experience, peer reputation, organizational fit and extracurriculars. Hiring a developer or engineer based on a resume and an online profile will not do, and a proper assessment of candidates requires an elaborate set of tools. An organization needs to know more about a hiree than just the superfluous checklist requirements, elements such as critical thinking capabilities, investigative skills, adaptiveness to company-specific problems and the collaborative nature of their potential employee.

These critical assessments occur in the pre-stages of and during interviews. There a numerous tools to assist the pre-interview assessment process — tests in areas such as coding, soft skills, candidate aptitude and attitudes. During interviews, candidates are often tested on their aptitude and skills too, through brain-teasers, logic tests, numerical reasoning problems and several stage settings to assess teamwork and communication capabilities.

Solutions

Machine learning, artificial intelligence and elaborate technology recruiting software are increasingly employed by recruiters and organizations to find and assess appropriate staff. These technologies have altered the nature of hiring by upgrading worker and recruiter experience and often come with a vast array of features for every part of the process, including multiple programming languages, emulators, plagiarism checks, psychometric evaluation methods and competency tests. They can also be strategically employed for initial assessments, making them a reliable and fast filter to separate the novice from the expert.

Technical hiring software offers sizeable libraries of questions for competency measures and candidate evaluation and can be used online. Such recruitment software dramatically speeds up the hiring process while providing developers and engineers with a comfortable setting that allows them to show their competence.

Even though a large variety of such tools are readily available, the technical hiring process as a whole still is arguably disorganized and resource intensive. The inefficiency of the current processes indicates that even though there’s an abundance of support software, the absence of structure prevents technical hiring from becoming cheaper, faster and more reliable.

This is the problem that WorkFork is aiming to solve by reimagining technical hiring. Intentional design, careful curation and the clever use of technology create an innovative solution for matching, screening and assessing candidates. Demand for technical talent is exploding, and WorkFork presents a tech-driven solution to meet this demand.