No More Second Guessing: How To Assess Tech Talent as a Recruiter

Because of the competition for talent and time required for assessment, tech recruiting has become a major challenge for both HR and Tech departments.

In Germany prior to COVID-19, there were 124,000 unfilled vacancies for tech experts. The average hiring time for a software engineer in Germany is 180 days, and up to 40 hours can easily be spent in tech teams to hire one software engineer.

During his Factory Berlin Masterclass, expertlead’s Managing Director & Co-founder Arne Hosemann shared his top tips to confidently assess tech talent effectively and efficiently.

Years of experience does not equal skill level.

While it’s tempting to believe everything that’s written on a resume, reality is oftentimes different from what is presented on paper.

Arne reminds us, “Do not only focus on years of experience. There is no clear correlation between years of experience and skill level.”

Get technical feedback during the pre-assessment.

Don’t waste valuable time before ‘looking under the hood of the car’. While the candidate is in pre-assessment, start assessing their technical skills by checking out previous code.

Or even better, “Get feedback from your tech team early on. They obviously won’t review CVs for you, but you could have them review specific items in the profile that you have questions about or review previous experience that you found on platforms like GitHub.”

Beat unconscious bias by defining clear hiring criteria.

Don’t get lost in the woods. While it seems obvious, don’t forget to define your hiring criteria, and define your metrics to compare candidates.  “If you don’t do that, you are going by gut feeling and will be prone to bias.”

Do a deep assessment of your candidate, preferably a live pairing exercise to get inside their head.

While it might be tempting to skip the deep assessment of your candidate to save valuable time for your development team, don’t take the risk.

“If you don’t do a deep assessment, you have a very high likelihood of a skill misfit — they might be incredibly skilled but they might not fit the real life problems that your company has.”

A take-home assessment helps and is time conscious, but it still leaves you in the dark about how the candidate approaches their work. Consider instead a live pairing exercise.

“A live pairing or coding exercise is the most insightful step in assessing tech candidates. You want to find out what a person is thinking when they face a certain problem. You don’t get that with a take home assignment. You see the solution if right, not how the person thinks.”

Still need more candidate assessment support?

Check out expertlead online to discover more about how they leverage a community of experienced tech experts to create and conduct peer-to-peer interviews, live coding exercises and technical Q&As.

Rewatch Arne’s Masterclass to learn more about how to assess tech talent effectively and efficiently. Check out our events calendar to find other inspiring and educational events at Factory Berlin.