It all starts with a decision

Just as companies now outsource server management to cloud providers, they should outsource the most tedious recruiting tasks. Creating and managing a diverse pool of qualified candidates that are actively looking for new professional opportunities is difficult and time consuming. Instead, by strategically outsourcing parts of the hiring process, your recruiters can access a list of global talent that is pre-qualified and ready to interview. This ensures that your team can focus on what really matters: convincing the right candidates to join your team.

We believe that pedigree does not equal talent. Education and work history are meaningful but relying solely on them results in you missing out on great programmers. Great programmers come from all types of backgrounds, and an increasing number of them are self-taught. We believe it's what you can do that matters, not where or if you went to university. Therefore, we recommend replacing the initial resume screening with a high-quality standardised assessment. This opens the top of your funnel to a truly diverse group of candidates with the sole focus on skills rather than pedigree.

In our view, many inefficiencies in the recruiting process are due to a lack of transparency. The employers usually don’t share enough information about the role and culture at the company, while the candidates don’t always communicate what they are interested in and what their requirements are. This means that it takes some time, and in some cases multiple interviews, just to figure out if there is a potential match based on some fundamental criteria. Especially, we believe that compensation figures should be made available to candidates during the very first approach because they are at a fundamental disadvantage in salary and equity negotiations; they always know less than the hiring manager. We are convinced that this is unfair. Overall, our view is that the more information you share with potential hires upfront, the more likely they are to trust your company and accept an offer.

When we started GoTalent, we thought that most companies would be competing for the same pool of applicants. However, we realised that it is not enough simply to look for developers that have your desired tech stack, right level of experience and solid soft skills. What we found is that some companies prefer a deliberate, academic programmer who has a deep theoretical understanding of how a computer works, whereas other companies look for fast, intuitive thinkers, and will reject the academic programmer on the grounds that he or she may not be productive enough. This happens even if both candidates meet the job requirements! Therefore, we believe you should decide upfront what type of developer you want and articulate it clearly during your sourcing stage to avoid wasting time with the wrong type of candidates.

Technical knowledge isn’t homogenous. Far from it! Instead, it consists of different layers of knowledge: the core layer, the language layer, and the framework layer. The core layer refers to engineers’ basic programming skills, the language layer refers to their in-depth knowledge of a specific programming language, and the framework layer builds on these by addressing engineers’ abilities to use a framework to build a working application. We believe that you should assess the core layer during the initial screening and fully focus on the outer layer’s nuances during the final round interview.  

Candidates deserve consistent experience and evaluation. A company can't meaningfully evaluate candidates if it treats each one differently. An unstandardised process produces unnecessary noise that makes evaluation more difficult and harms candidates from diverse backgrounds. To avoid this, hiring decisions should be made using a clear scoring system, where each interviewer knows exactly what skills and characteristics he or she is evaluating. This approach reduces bias and our tendency to pattern match.

We believe that culture fit is essential, but the methods that many companies use to screen for culture fit can introduce noise and bias. To avoid this, we suggest that companies should instead focus predominantly on screening for soft skills; i.e. general, universally valued non-technical skills such as communication ability, ownership and positivity. Although soft skills don’t fit under the traditional label of culture, screening for them is much better than screening for specific personality traits. The danger is that if you screen out otherwise qualified candidates who have great soft skills, just because of personality traits specific to your company culture, you lay the perfect breeding ground for bias in your hiring process.

Just like a software product, the hiring process itself should be continuously iterated and improved. The only way to figure out what methods work best is to collect feedback. We suggest that every company should create a process where it can collect feedback from each candidate that it interacts with. One way to ensure that candidates provide high quality feedback is by providing feedback yourself. Therefore, we also suggest that each company should make the effort to share clear and truthful feedback with every candidate so that they can learn and improve too.