BENGALURU: A candidate’s resume may appear great but they eventually may not perform well in interviews or practical fields. Take a look in every domain while hiring developers and don’t just prioritise the resume. It is important to recognise candidates who are self-motivated and are clear with what they are looking for in a role at our higher edtech startup offering software engineering training to students and hiring solutions to companies. Stress on the ability to solve a real-life technology issue apart from the coding skills is important. This will give you a better idea about his/her creativity and know-how and whether s/he is suitable to work on a project. While looking for a developer to hire, look for candidates smarter than you.
This will trigger a chain reaction that will allow more and more hiring of intelligent people in your company, thus creating a haven of intellectual people in your workforce who will further attract talented developers in the coming years. A better approach to hiring a developer is by focusing focus more on algorithms and concepts and how they approach a problem. Better the problem solver, the more the capacity to learn a new language. Hence, show flexibility with various languages and let the developer think out of the box. Most of the projects today are not done by a single developer but a full-fledged team.
So soft skills like sound team working and smooth communication are extremely vital. Knowledge and abilities can be spread via communication only, so ensure that your hired developer does not lag in these fields. Look for developers who write complex and tricky codes in a smooth and clean way. If a developer is a high scorer on every aspect and parameter and is extremely talented, then overlook his/her industrial experience. They will be easy to command areas which have non-repetitive problems and will innovatively solve new problems in today’s ever-growing market.- Pramod Kumar, Chief Business Officer, AttainU
Companies today need to understand that contemporary recruitment is a two-way street. The candidate is gauging the potential of exposure and career growth just as much as the recruiter is gauging the candidate’s skill and experience. With a tight job market and a demand for quality candidates, recruiters need to up their game to win in this ‘war of talent’. Even in today’s world, you find fuzzy job descriptions and application forms that take hours to fill.
Let’s face it - poor candidate experience will never attract the right talent. (Skillate, helps identifying, interviewing and hiring the best candidates at scale). Companies need to invest in technology that cannot improve the candidate experience but make the whole process a lot faster. Automated JD assistant and smart career pages are just a few examples of similar technologies. Platforms that can extract information beyond resumes (intent to relocate, work on night shifts, etc.) without involving manual labour can be another game-changer in hiring quality candidates. Generally speaking, organisations need to put themselves in candidate’s shoes and match the tech-savviness of their potential candidates if they want to come across a great employer.”
- Anand Baranwal, co-founder, Skillate
We are building complex technologies for our marketplace, supply chain, fintech, and retail platforms and next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems using computer vision. This is a niche area of function for which we look for engineers who can grasp the business context and solve problems using technology. For us, hiring is a crucial process to evaluate a candidate’s fit into the highly efficient and result oriented team. We hire for core values and there is a very limited talent pool available who are at the intersection of great values and great skills. (Jumbotail, Kirana retail and b2B e-commerce).
Given our technical requirements, finding quality tech talent in India takes time and we definitely would want to hire the best in class, who are not just technologically sound but are also ruthlessly focused on working with clean data. Our best hires are those who have built products/tech that are customer-facing.
Though we expect a very high level of skill, we also look for a very high level of coachability, humility, and a learning mindset. Our interview process is designed to check these basic qualities. We go to great lengths to hire the best talent who are deeply aligned with our values. If we need to make a choice, we almost always give the benefit of the doubt to someone who we believe is a better fit in terms of alignment with our values.
As part of the interview process, we ask candidates to spend time with the real customer and understand why we do what we do. We create a feedback loop for our hiring decisions, based on employee performance. Feed the interview feedback during appraisals, and appraisal feedback into learning how to interview better, and continuously help improve our hiring. We want to hire missionaries who are highly motivated and who are driven by purpose and hungry for impact. We do not want mercenaries who are willing to lend their skills in exchange for money or perks.”
- Karthik Venkateswaran, CEO & co-founder, Jumbotail
Older, staid practices in hiring is a prevalent problem that the nation has been facing. With stagnant practices, the majority of employers fail to lure in the right talent for important positions. Moreover, hiring of the wrong people for the job is expensive and time-consuming which pushes the organization in the wrong direction. This is why job analysis plus reviewing of employee credentials and applications play a major role in enabling organisations to collect information about the duties, responsibilities, necessary skills, outcomes, and work environment of a particular job.
Also, asking job interview questions plays a powerful role in hiring desirable candidates as apart from their skill set, aptitude and personal traits are visibly reflected which helps HR and manager decide whether or not they will be a good addition to the organisation or not. Nowadays, in fact, there are many dedicated education players and marketplace models leveraging technology to fit the right candidates to job profile requirements as it increases the overall efficiency of the organisation and helps in its growth.
- Rachit Jain, Founder & CEO, Youth4Work, a unique talent platform