Technical Recruitment – Tips to Hire the Best Developer

Hire an attitude, not just experience & qualification.-Greg Savage

Recruitment is an indispensable feature of every organization. The ideal hiring process is a company’s model aiming to find the best fit for the right job at the right time.

The overall procedure of hiring and retaining professionals is becoming technology-driven.

Any company hiring talent needs to stay abreast of advancements in the industry to stay competitive.

The step-by-step approach brings inexperienced talent helping the organization to develop.

The comprehensive recruitment process has various phases that vary from one company to another depending on the business vertical, organizational structure, company size, nature of operations and selection procedure.

Today, recruitment without the help of technology can’t be imagined. With new recruitment solutions coming up every now and then.

Do you know approximately 64% of the recruiters feel they are deprived of the right digital strategies?

Recruiters feel despite their best efforts to choose the right tools for finding talent, the result is not optimum.  

This article is basically a comprehensive guide on the complete technical recruitment process.

Here is an overview:

• Why is hiring and retaining technical talent is a huge task?
• How to successfully recruit technical talent?
• Identify the requirements and challenges
• Attract qualified and deserving candidates
• Understanding technical talent
• Building a technology backbone
• Search the technical developers in the right places
• Select the right region and timezone
• Ensure developers have relevant experience
• Choose the best price/quality ratio company
• Screening & shortlisting
• Interviewing
• Compose & sign a contract
• The bigger picture
• Key takeaway

Why is hiring and retaining technical talent is a huge task?

The main reason for this is inefficiency in the hiring procedure although some feel there is a global shortage of technical talent.

The whole world has innumerable experienced and highly qualified professionals, you should know how to choose them.

How to successfully recruit technical talent?

Here are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Identifying Requirements and Challenges

Requirements:

Before hiring the best developers, you must consider business needs first. This can be done by defining the various hiring challenges faced and what requirements have to be addressed.

For example:

• Are you willing to hire a development team at the same time?
• Do you feel good developers leave your company in a short time?
• Despite your best effort, are you unable to hire good candidates?
• Do you look for an affordable developer or team but end up in a costly experience?

Once you are aware of the pain points, finding the right solution becomes easier.

 Challenges:

• Your challenges may include:
• Building a strong employer brand
• Lack of qualified candidates
• Unable to expand the candidate reach
• Targeting passive developers
• Building a talent pool
• Lack of cooperation within the team
• Reactive hiring
• Not making the most of your data
• Retaining the development team

Step 2: Attracting Qualified and Deserving Candidates

Once you are clear with the requirements and challenges, now is the right time to take the word out.

• Figure out the loopholes in your in-house team.
• Check what are the needs in terms of ability, performance, and personality.
• Keep a track on input vs output when it comes to the team. See the increase in workload that requires hiring.
• Analyze the overall performance of the company and the employees.
• Note down about the missing qualities, qualifications, and proficiencies that you want in your team.
• Be mindful of the reason why employees are leaving.

After all, this is done, now is the time to do the following:

Make candidates aware of the position:

Provide a link to the candidates to learn more about the job.

This gives a clear insight into what they should be expecting if they work there.

Tell your story:

Have you observed a video on Facebook’s career page? If you haven’t, have a look today. The video clearly depicts what it feels like working at Facebook.

This is an amazing way to tell about your organization’s objectives, vision, and culture. This helps in grabbing the attention of the candidates with shared interests.

Step 3: Understanding Technical Talent

A common issue almost every company faces is understanding the technical talent.

You have HRs or recruiters who may struggle with knowing which skills are important for a specific technical position they want to fill.

For example: Do you want to hire front-end developer, backend developer or full-stack developer?

What is the list of the skills this company should have?

You should identify the right skills for the right technical roles. Once that is successfully completed, you should know how to understand technical talent.

The developers you hire should be the best technical talent. Think about what your ideal candidate or team should be like? Define the applicant’s persona.

As per Stack Overflow Global Survey:

• 90% of technical developers are male
• Approximately 3/4th professionals are below 35
• 90% of developers learn a new language outside of their formal education.
• 90% of employers work part-time
• A frequent job change is a norm

While diving deeper, you have to find out what makes the technical talent tick.

• Which factor drives them?
• What motivates them the most?
• What are their needs?
• What are their priorities?
• What is a deal-breaker for them?

According to this same Stack Overflow Global Survey, here are a few great insights you should consider:

• The top priorities of every technical talent are compensation and benefits
• Their personal training and growth
• What they care most about are their salary and incentives.
• They also seek a comfortable working environment.

Step 3: Building a Technology Backbone

As a company, you should know how to build a “technology backbone” of the recruitment process.

The best way to tackle all the recruitment challenges is to hire an offshore development team.

Yes. Rather than hiring local candidates or in-house teams via a long usual recruitment process, why not hire a highly qualified remote team?

You will get the best of both worlds as the team hired is budget-friendly and also experienced.

If you want to create a meaningful relationship with your chatbot developer or game developer or whoever you are hiring, you should know how they feel.

Fret not, there is no need to become expert at coding to hire the best technical developers. However, you must know the basics of technologies you are hiring for.

Give technical developers a challenge

Experienced developers like challenges. They love opportunities that help in showcasing their skills. Give them a task and see the response.

Once they solve the challenge, ask them to send them via email. This is an amazing way to use lead generation tactics to have a technical sound team of developers. 

Step 4: Search for Technical Developers in the Right Places

Whether you are interested in top Android developers or iOS developers, most of the talent is passive.

Being passive means they are already working in respective firms and are not currently seeking a job change.

For this reason, they won’t upload their CV’s or visit career sites for job opportunities. So how will you find them?

Experienced and highly efficient developers can be hired via outsourcing. Developers are working in other geographical locations having impeccable skill set.

When you take help from a reliable outsourcing company, you can choose the best of best.

Other platforms include:

• Tech community websites (Github & Stack Overflow)
• Technical community forums
• Talent marketplaces
• Local technical community events

Step 5: Select the Right Region and Timezone

Firstly, an important step is to decide which time zone you are comfortable working with.

If the top mobile developers or designers are proficient, they will make sure that work is being done continuously on the project 24*7.

Even with a timezone gap countries like India ensure efficient results and there is much evidence to prove this point.

Secondly, when you hire app building companies or web development agencies, the region you have selected is also equally critical.

You should consider economic stability, political stability, hiring cost and similar factors. Time zone and region help you collaborate with the best development companies having experienced specialists.

Step 6: Ensure Developers have Relevant Experience

Legit offshore development companies have accreditation and certification from Microsoft, Google, and other major giants.

If the offshore team has those, it is clearly a very good sign. It is not a determining factor but a bonus worth considering.

Step 7: Choose Best Price/Quality Ratio Company

It is daunting that it is challenging to quality and measure it. How does one measure the quality of a company’s service?

It is completely subjective to a degree. Make sure you approximately estimate the relative price/quality ratio for the best app developers or software developers and then proceed with the one having a good ratio.

Step 8: Screening & Shortlisting

To move forward with the recruitment process, you have to shortlist developers accurately. This is where the hiring process becomes a daunting task.

This recruitment bottleneck is resolved by taking care of the following:

• Screen them based on qualification
• Evaluate their certificates, certifications, experience, domain expertise, technical competence, and skills.
• Shortlist developers or companies matching your requirements
• Technical test, communication skills, cognitive ability, and situational judgment, skills are a few candidate assessment tests.

This gives you an overview of the team or developer is a good organizational fit for you or not.

Undoubtedly the most arduous task of the hiring process is to shortlist companies but when you follow the step by step procedure, it becomes hassle-free.

Step 9: Interviewing

The shortlisted top development companies or developers then walk past the interview process.

Depending on the size of the hiring team and unique business requirements, the interview procedure proceeds further.

Having telephonic conversation and video conferencing is a quick and easy way to screen the abilities of the team & applicants. Keep the first conversation short.

But make sure you take time to screen them regarding their knowledge, skills, experience so that the irrelevant company is eliminated.

Step 10: Compose and Sign a Contract

When all the legal examination of the development company is proved successful, go ahead and negotiate.

You can then proceed to sign a contract. In most cases, parties do contribute to the contract and non-disclosure agreement.

Carefully examine the created draft and read it multiple times.

When it comes to payment terms, the best way is to pay a transparent monthly fee for the dedicated development team.

You can choose the engagement model as per your requirements and budget.

Look at the Bigger Picture

Before interviewing and hiring a development agency, have an overview of the testimonials, online presence, reputation and reviews on different sites like GoodFirms and Clutch.

Start exploring their social media profiles, portfolios and various contributions on GitHub, Stack Overflow, Quora, etc.

Consider the following:

• How do they display their work and skills?
• Does the development team contribute to the community?
• Whether they give answers regarding the relevant topics?

Have a bold vision: Developers should know the best way to make an app, software or whatever their task is.

They should always be willing to do meaningful, ethical, technically challenging and genuine tasks.

Ensure your company provides something interesting that your people can put their heart into.

Broaden your analysis and look for their participation in groups related to technology.

During a casual conversation with the developer, try to emphasize on the below things:

• Firstly ask them what they are currently working on and probe them regarding the same.
• Secondly, are they curious enough? Are they genuinely interested in your project?
• Does the virtual team have the zeal and enthusiasm to work? Do they ask to follow up questions?
• Thirdly, do they have the habit of keeping themselves updated regarding knowledge and new technology?
• Fourthly, if offshore developers are willing to train and give tips to your company employees.
• Fifthly and lastly, see whether they are team players, decide a deadline and then successfully complete it.  

Key Takeaway

Every recruitment process is targeted towards hiring qualified developers and encouraging them to apply.

This eventually builds a big pool of talented individuals in the technology industry and reduces the time involved in the recruitment process.

You can fill the roles for the present and future by collaborating with the offshore development company.

A well thought to hire process filters the apt candidate at a faster pace while making you stay focused on engaging the developer for maximum conversions.

Good recruitment not only depicts the company’s professionalism but helps to hire a dedicated team of developers.

This saves plenty of time and effort spent on analyzing, engaging, hiring and retaining talent.

Although only 16% of developers are looking for a new job, an overwhelming 75% is interested to hear about new opportunities. Therefore, the aforementioned were the best tips to hire the right talent. 

Use these tried and tested insights that have innovative techniques to find and hire top developers.