It’s most likely that your engineering hiring process begins with you scanning through resumes, carrying out technical phone interviews before an in-person interview with yourself, or various team members. However, this process is failing us.
Why Does the Traditional Hiring Process for Engineers Not Work?
When we focus our attention on the resume first, you are already showing bias in the process. The hiring team will be looking for keywords, the level of experience a candidate has, their qualifications, and their work background. The university a candidate attended or the impressive company they worked for may lead you to assume that they are excellent candidates. But this may not be true.
Without realizing it, we look at a resume and begin to develop an idea of a person. Even the design of the resume can lead us to make opinions. Often, a resume leads us to overlook non-traditional aspects that make a great hire.
A technical phone interview involves you and your candidate working together to solve technical challenges. The candidate may be asked to explain the process of solving a problem that is not related to the future job role. The situation is extremely and unnecessarily tense, which puts more pressure on a candidate who is likely to be introvert.
The last step is the in-person interview and is another step that leads to bias. We unconsciously judge people on their appearance, or how they come across, even things like their whiteboarding skills.
When you consider the flaws in the hiring process, it’s clear to see that to obtain the best technical engineers, we need to transform how we go about hiring them.
How to Use Online Coding Assessments to Renew Your Hiring Process
You may need to just tweak your hiring process, or you might have to change it completely. While change takes effort and willingness, it is completely necessary if you want to hire the best engineers.
To do this, you will need to implement online coding assessments, or technical skills screening assessments at the very beginning of your hiring process. By doing this, you will be assessing the skills and abilities of candidates straight away. When you assess skill first, you remove the possibility of bias and you save yourself and your team a great deal of time. You will also save the company money by speeding up your hiring process.
Online coding assessments can be designed to suit the role or position you need to file. You can create standardized coding tests so that each candidate receives the same assessment. They can be customized for junior or senior roles and can include an assessment of real-world situations that demonstrate the candidate’s skills that are needed for the job.
For the candidate, they are also able to save time by not attending interviews that they don’t have the skills for. Online coding assessments remove the pressure faced in technical phone interviews, allowing candidates to better show their skills. This improves the candidate experience and at the same time enhances your employer brand.
Once you begin online coding assessments as the first stage of your hiring process, you will then be able to go directly to the in-person interview.
The benefits of online coding assessments are clear, but only if the test is suitably designed. It is strongly recommended that your coding assessments are designed by professionals.
