Building a Stellar Workforce in 2021 with a Tech Recruiting Platform (A Practical Guide)

Despite best efforts, do you end up spending considerable time and resources on scouting, hiring and building an uninspired employee?

It is understandable; the current recruitment climate is competitive. Amid an ongoing work revolution, everyone wants to evolve in the new landscape efficiently. Hence, there is an urgent need to design an elaborate process to set yourself apart. But what’s the use of it if you aren’t gaining from it?

Hiring strengthens your current workforce with dextrous and brilliant performers. But what occurs eventually is the stark opposite. Companies often make wrong hiring decisions, which hurts the organization and its stakeholders.

The corona-induced ongoing tumult has taught us that people, not businesses, create value. With massive digital transformation and tech adoption, every company is embracing technology in varying measures to survive and thrive. Having the right set of technically-advanced and savvy individuals is making the real difference in driving success for most leading organizations today. 

But things are easier written and said than done. A 2019 Benchmark Report: Hiring tech talent for CIOs and CTOs states it takes 50% longer to hire for a tech role than all other types of positions.

Finding quality talent with the right technical skill sets is a daunting task. 

Then how do leading companies have a future-ready tech workforce? How do they have an impactful roadmap that lends them a competitive advantage over their peers?  

If only it were as simple as bellowing- “Avengers Assemble!” 

But, there are no two ways about it. 

The formula begins with a great strategy! 

Industry leaders invest billions of dollars in assessing and assembling high-performing teams. They go the extra mile by cultivating a world-class multigenerational workforce with the requisite support, resources and tools. And continue to sustain and retain them by ensuring high engagement levels.

The result: A positive and resilient organization with a stellar technical workforce.

We have witnessed this scenario. Hence, we bring you some actionable insights that make a significant difference in your quality technical talent hiring process. Our five-step approach provides detailed insights to organizations to become future-ready and future-proof. It includes discussing the crux of a highly efficient process required to filter coders, the various ways of contributing to their professional development and elucidating the concept of continuously engaging them.

Before we begin, here are the three integral elements that are the cornerstone of the technical recruitment cycle:

Now that we’ve enlightened you about the three pillars that you need to incorporate within your organization, let’s dive deeper to explore each pillar’s nuances:

A) Hiring:

How to assess and hire a quality coder? Despite being one of the most lucrative industries, it is an open secret that the tech industry faces a massive talent crunch. Besides, factoring in the competition levels, you’ll understand why it’s critical to close the hiring window with a minimum time-to-hire.  

Also, the inability to differentiate great coders from mediocre ones hinders an HR professional’s hiring efficacy. After all, most candidates have similar qualifications. Hence, the clarity on the extent of a candidate’s fitment is often minimal.

If this is a common phenomenon in your hiring drives, then it is time you revolutionize your hiring approach. 

Here’s how you can scale your development teams and maximize hiring agility in three steps:

A hiring plan sets the hiring cycle in motion, making it one of the most significant decisions made by a hiring manager. However, it is often given the least time, thought and attention. You must give your hiring plan a much-needed amendment to improve your organization’s overall hiring health and direction. 

• You must eliminate pre-interview inefficiencies, whether you are hiring for a fresher profile or a lateral hire. The more clarity you derive in the initial selection, the better your chances of shortlisting, interviewing and hiring worthy fits. For example, streamline and strengthen the recruitment process by clarifying your staffing objectives. It is vital to first understand the role and level for which you’re hiring to develop the right job description that attracts an ideal fit. 

• Let’s take a use case: Considering you are hiring freshers in bulk through campus placements, how do you ascertain who a quality coder is? Here’s a step-by-step approach you can take to filter out the best from the rest in no time. 
• Mercer | Mettl offers an exhaustive range of tools that streamline and scale hiring and offer an evidence-based overview of an applicant’s potential. Here is its three-step process augmented by its tools to close the gaps and maximize your hiring quality. 

a) Quick Filtration: Round 1 

Candidates often exaggerate their abilities and proficiencies in resumes to create a pleasing impression. When recruiters hire in bulk, they are hard-pressed for time to validate such claims and face challenges later. Mercer | Mettl’s vast repository of coding aptitude questions addresses such concerns. You can choose from a set of readily-available standardized tests from its enormous library of programming assessments. Or you can choose to tailor-make pre-hiring assessments matching organizational objectives to explore candidates’ desired skill sets without bias. 

b) In-depth Analysis: Round 2

Aside from coding aptitude, it is equally relevant to possess knowledge and expertise in a language or technology. Hence, the second step entails utilizing Mercer | Mettl’s role-based simulators- coding simulators – that test a candidates’ coding proficiency in general programming languages. Mercer | Mettl’s simulator offers recruiters the liberty to test real coding skills in any number of programming languages. With real-world challenges at play, the simulators provide a real sense of a student’s or a fresher’s project building abilities. 

c) Online Interviews: Round 3

Mercer | Mettl’s online coding interview tools lend unparalleled ease to the recruitment process, regardless of the number of candidates. With a shared live development environment, amplified by audio, video and chat functionalities, hiring managers can undertake online coding test interviews via pair programming to assess skills in real-time and make quality decisions on tech candidates. 

Did you know? One of the world’s largest companies, Google, analyzed five years’ interviewing data to reduce its time-to-hire.

Let’s elaborate the Round 1 and Round 2. Here’s how you can quickly filter your candidates while analyzing them extensively.

Resumes can be exaggerated or bereft of actualities, but technical screening proves which tech candidates have the right skills and the ability to perform the job for which they are being hired. By using an eclectic combination of knowledge and application-based techniques, such as MCQs and simulators, technical screening ensures that the employers don’t have to undertake time-consuming interviews with applicants who are neither qualified nor suited for a particular position. 

Even if you have a limited hiring requirement or a hiring freeze, technical screening adds many benefits to the process by minimizing hiring time and maximizing value.

Here are five simple steps to enable technical screening:

1) Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) is the first filter to shortlist the candidates. You must create a list of technical questions in the MCQ format. These are not merely go-to questions. The key to framing these technical questions is covering a topic or skill extensively. The focus is on deducing essential knowledge, concepts, applications, learning, analyses for a diverse set of technologies but directly related to the role. It also evaluates a candidate’s higher and future levels of thinking. MCQs are among the most useful question types to gauge a candidate’s technical core from every dimension. They offer a quick and precise evaluation over a tremendous scope of the content. 

2) Based on the MCQ results, eliminate unsuitable candidates without the required core skills, coding skills or aptitude. Candidates meeting your essential coding criteria can proceed to the second round. 

3) Coding simulators are the second filter that assesses shortlisted candidates. Coding simulators offer a real sense of the candidates’ ability as it asks them to mirror real-world challenges. Candidates are either asked to create code from scratch, work on test cases, fix a bug or create an algorithm. While writing the code, hiring managers observe their problem-solving skills, how adequately they perform the desired tasks, coding proficiency in general programming languages and much more. Once the candidates complete coding, they are auto-graded almost instantaneously, based on several parameters of code quality, efficiency, correctness and scalability. This provides direct and detailed insights into their coding aptitude and on-the-job potential.  

4) Further, filter the candidates for a technical screening interview based on detailed automated reports that thoroughly evaluate their technical abilities. Technical screening reports are a preliminary step to conducting secure live coding interviews. 

5) Make an evidence-based decision and improve your hiring quality.

• Mercer | Mettl’s advanced online coding test platform offers an unprecedented range of programming languages and simulators for all significant coding job roles. This technical hiring platform is comprehensive, user-friendly and provides an easy-to-use interface for the candidate and the assessor. Its evidence-based analytics on candidate potential and performance deter hiring managers from shortlisting based on bias.

• A rich repository of 100,000+ technical questions for 300+ skills covers every existing and new-age language, framework, technology, topics and skills requirements. Similarly, its coding simulator is embedded with a list of simulators to test real coding skills in any number of programming languages with a supremely user-friendly interface.

A Seamless Platform To Deliver Assessments Securely, With A Robust Proctoring Technology

Let us elaborate the Round 3 of the tech hiring process that enables quality decision-making during the interview phase. 

• Once you’ve sieved through the candidate pool, and gauged specific insights using technical screening, empower your technical hiring using real-time coding interviews. HRs can use a unique online coding test interview platform that allows candidates to write their test cases during the interview process and assess their real-world skills. This efficient interview approach provides the interviewer with an accurate understanding of a candidate’s thoughts, collaboration, utilization of various languages, frameworks, library or APIs when writing code. It highlights multiple facets of a technical candidate that is otherwise missed. 

• In a shared and live development environment, enhanced by audio, video and chat functionalities, hiring managers can mirror a real-life scenario, using the same resources one has on the job. This process is extremely targeted and streamlined and does not compromise on the quality. 

• Mercer | Mettl offers a game-changing advantage for recruiters and candidates, with access to an easy-to-use interactive online coding test interview platform. All features are available within Mercer | Mettl’s single comprehensive and seamless platform. They include inviting candidates, scheduling interviews, communicating digitally and creating in-depth reports. 

• Additionally, it offers better talent measurement based on behavior, cognition and technical skills. Some more interesting provisions include customized solutions mapped with role requirements across all job levels, hands-on skill support, swift auto-evaluation, scalability, a suite of anti-cheating solutions, result validation, access to previous screening’s data and proficient tracking of the tech hiring funnel. Its online coding test platform can be smoothly integrated with any HMS and is location-agnostic.

Automate Your Coding Interviews With a Seamless Coding Interview Platform

This 3-step process is highly efficient at helping you hire the right coder. It also lends incredible efficiency to the process in terms of cost and time. In this entire process of planning, screening and interviewing, Mercer | Mettl’s tech recruitment platform enables the hiring team to pin-point the right qualities needed in your developer and the right skill sets that make them ideal. These steps filter the candidates and assess each individual in detail, concerning broad knowledge and niche application. Additionally, its tech hiring platform probes for candidate weaknesses on any particular topic to further bolster the organization’s decision-making. They are time-efficient, cost-effective and progressive with each round.

But the cycle of hiring qualified candidates doesn’t end here. The process continues. 

How is it that companies often boast of their high-performing teams? How does one create a team that is better than the most?

B) Upskilling and Reskilling:

• Did you know that enabling learning and development opportunities for your existing employees are the key to your organization’s longevity and success? With technology changing its course ever so frequently, organizations must ensure its top tech talent is updated on tools, techniques, trends, industry developments and technology. Hence, either by adding new next-generational skills and technical knowledge or updating their existing core skills, organizations need to invest in enhancing their workforce’s abilities and work quality. 

Companies can easily undertake the process of upskilling or reskilling in the following way: 

• Understand and address the specific skill gaps within the team from an organization strategy perspective. 

• Identify who needs to be trained by spotting agile learners to train on specific skill sets.

• Monitor future skill sets by understanding the organization’s future needs to remain competitive, to invest in the right skills for the present and future.

• Lastly, improve your people and business outcomes by building targeted reskilling plans for each employee and measuring your training effectiveness – the greater the focus and customization on the effort and solution, the more gratified and motivated employees to stay with the company.

Mercer | Mettl offers a suite of tools integrated into a technical hiring platform that uncover skills gaps and helps create a future-proof workforce. They include: 

• Mercer | Mettl I/O – A first-of-its-kind, all-in-one coding assessment platform. This highly sophisticated and customizable solution offers a highly advanced, ready-to-use assessment library mapped to pre-defined competencies. This tool provides a comprehensive coding environment for all major programming roles (Front-end, Back-end, Database, Full-stack, Data science, DevOps, QA engineers, etc.). It even supports all major languages and technologies with the best-in-class Integrated Development Environment (IDE), customized to meet organizational requirements. 

• Mercer | Mettl’s learning agility assessments boost the ROI of L&D programs by identifying individual employees’ learning preferences. By measuring a combination of learning agility and orientation, it identifies employees who can keep up with newer skills while taking up more challenging roles.

• Virtual Assessment and Development Centers: A fully online simulation that uses personality inventories, cognitive ability tests, situational judgment tests, day-in-the-life situations, role-plays, case study simulators, in-basket exercises, caselets, presentations, competency-based interviews, and other such activities, cumulatively, to make crucial hiring decisions, and developing and identifying organizational talent. 
• Mercer | Mettl 360View: It is an easy-to-use 360-degree performance appraisal and feedback tool to gain insights into how the employees want to chart their developmental curve.

C) Engagement:

• Why does engaging with employees work? Well, apart from the fact that it drives extraordinary performance, engagement helps retain valuable workers. You must have often noticed that companies offer impressive perks and special benefits to their employees to keep them engaged. They vary from exclusive club memberships and access to places of distinct health services at discounted prices, etc. As much as these offer an added advantage to the employees, organizations need to think beyond them. 

• The real engagement is created when employees feel they are contributing to the broader business strategies – when they think they are being heard and their ideas are being valued and implemented. 

• Companies can engage their tech teams via tech events, social media, ideathons and hackathons. Hackathons involve a bunch of employees comprising developers, software programmers, or designers coming together to build something incredible. It is a fun environment that helps ignite innovation and creativity to create a sophisticated software prototype that can later be built into a possible solution. 

• Mercer | Mettl is an online hackathon and ideathon platform that helps organizations successfully and effortlessly host world-class hackathons. By identifying, hiring the best tech talent and engaging with existing and potential employees, its Xathon offers several opportunities for the prospects and is integral to the corporate culture. 

•  Mettl’s Xathon nurtures problem-solving skills, fosters cross-team collaboration and promotes internal innovation. This allows organizations to actively seek feedback from coders to understand what is needed for the company to succeed –for instance, Area 120. Google created an incubator Google Labs, to test and publicly demonstrate new projects.

Did you know? As per the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2017 Talent Acquisition Benchmarking Report, the average time-to-fill a position is 36 days. And if you think that’s just about it, LinkedIn’s metric states that only 30% of companies can fill a vacant role within 30 days. The other 70% of companies take anywhere between 1 – 4 months to process a new hire. 

But, hiring your dream stack is no longer a far-fetched process. All a hiring manager needs to leverage is the power of a tech recruiting software or a tech recruiting platform. The right tech company, providing a tech-induced hiring platform has the potential to impact your recruitment experience, expedite the hiring process and ensure onboarding the best talent.

What is a recruitment platform?

A tech recruitment platform enables the recruiters to connect and quickly evaluate the coders’ coding knowledge and skills. Scheduling coding tests online, screening candidates, and rolling out online interviews seamlessly, a tech recruitment platform gives organizations an apparent oversight of progress and performance. 

What is the best hiring platform? 

The best technical hiring platform provides expansive coverage of topics for all significant coding job roles. It offers an eclectic mix of expertise and application-based questions for assessments and recruitment. And lastly, the online coding test platform is comprehensive and user-friendly for the candidate and the assessor alike. Mercer | Mettl is one of the best tech hiring platforms in India and abroad.