Tungl’s CTO, John Kerr, reflects on what he’s learnt over his years of experience hiring tech talent, and share’s what his top tips would be to others.
Get as much information before you meet a candidate
The last thing you want to do is to spend an hour interviewing someone who you realised in the first 5 minutes wasn’t right for the role. This nightmare can easily be avoided if you thoroughly review the candidate before you meet them in person.
For example, rather than doing a quick sense check of a CV, thoroughly read through and pick out any interesting bits that you can discuss in more detail later. It might take more time, but it’s worth it in the long run when you’ve got the right hire.
Online skills assessments are a great way to find out lots of useful information about the candidates. I set questions to assess both technical ability and interpersonal skills, so a mixture of code challenges, technical knowledge and competency-based questions. Technical testing gives me the confidence that they can do the job, and in the interview, I can spend more time on the why and how.
If you want to find a good fit for your team you need to understand who they are and what makes them tick, so take the time to find out more about them before the interview so you can ask them the more interesting, telling questions.
I’ve found online skills assessments more effective and efficient than other types of technical testing.
Be transparent and honest from the get-go
Being transparent about expectations from the start means you can avoid wasting time when there are discrepancies further down the line. A vital step in the process is checking what the candidate is looking for matches the vacancy I’m trying to fill. Also, from having had experience of being both sides of the table, I strongly believe salary expectations should be discussed at the start, not at the end when it usually is. In my experience as a candidate, I made it through to the final interview but found out they couldn’t meet my salary expectations. This was a huge waste of time for both myself and the company, which could have easily been avoided if discussed earlier.
It’s also important to give candidates honest feedback when they’re not successful. If they’ve spent time in assessments and interviews with you, you should be upfront with why it didn’t work.
Don’t just hire for the sake of hiring
“We need to hire 5 developers”, if you need to fill a certain number of roles then you’re bound to compromise on quality. I would much rather not hire at all than hire badly, which isn’t always doable but bad hires can be more costly than they can do good. If you don’t hire quality candidates, then it can take the team more time to pick up the pieces fixing their mistakes. Having high standards ensures you only accept those who are truly right for the role and the team, which can sometimes mean not hiring at all.
Be open-minded
I’ve learnt that being open-minded about what you’re looking for is the key to finding exactly what you need. I don’t look for specific skills or experience, I focus on fundamentals and transferrable skills. It’s important to remember that people are the product of the place they have worked, they only have the specific skills they acquired there, but that’s not necessarily all they are capable of. Someone who has various skills across the board may be able to bring something to the team you didn’t know you needed.
I’ve found that when a tick box list of skills approaches has been used to identify talent, it can cut off the right people, so it’s more helpful to maintain a holistic view where possible. In tech especially, the skills you want one year might differ from the next. Stacks are getting reinvented all the time (or at least they should be) for example, 3 years ago you would be hiring for Angular but now it’s all about React. You want people to know the fundamental skills of the technology but it’s more important to find transferable skills and people who can adapt.
Being open-minded could help you find the perfect candidate, but it also means you may need to commit to more training for long term results.
“The industry is crying out for a revolution”
I believe the current recruitment process isn’t working the best it could be for anyone. Frustrated hiring managers trying to frantically fill roles, frustrated recruiters trying to find talent in a competitive market, and frustrated candidates ruling themselves out of roles because they don’t tick enough boxes. Transparency and honestly would make the process much smoother, as it manages expectations from the start and could save people much more time. It’s important to be open-minded and flexible with candidates as non-standard career paths increasing and especially with remote working becoming more prevalent.
My key learning from my experience of being a CTO is to focus on hiring with intention and aiming for quality over quantity.
If you want to see how Tungl tech assessments can give you more insight into your candidates before an interview whilst streamlining your recruitment process, contact Team Tungl today!
