DevSkiller platform update – what is new? #February2018

It’s 2018 and boy have we been busy. That means making our platform better and generally helping lift standards in the tech recruitment field. Our users have spoken and we’ve worked tirelessly to make their experience better.

We have a bunch of new cool features and products we have realised that will help you achieve your tech recruitment goals. So without further adieu, let’s see what’s new at DevSkiller.

You can now divide your account into teams

This is a feature we have gotten a lot of request for and it has now arrived. It is particularly useful for companies with multiple branches spread around the world or multiple teams working on separate projects. If you are hiring for a team based in California, you don’t need to see the candidates that another team in your company is testing in Hong Kong.

You want to keep your dashboard clean so that you can focus on your own candidates and share relevant exams with your team. This will be a huge time saver and make it much easier to keep track of the candidates in your pipeline.

Test SRE, DevOps, or SysOps skills in a real-world environment

We think this feature is particularly cool. Managing systems involves a lot of complexity so we thought the best way to test SysOps skills is to give the candidate a system to manage. To do this, we have created a virtual machine which constructs a real-world environment that the candidate needs to configure.

They get given shell access to a machine. And they can do anything on there from perfectly configuring to destroying it. Our platform can then actually check if the server is configured properly automatically. Pretty cool, huh?

You can now anonymize your candidates’ results to remove unconscious bias

At DevSkiller, we strive to make the technical hiring process as objective as possible. Our tests are designed to give you the best indication of a dev’s future performance that you can get.

With this in mind, we have added this feature to remove the influence of unconscious bias on your hiring process. Your team’s hiring decisions should be made purely on ability, and any distractions from that goal should be eliminated. To that end, we now let you anonymize your reports.

This can be done by the recruiter or hiring manager before results are sent off to the team lead who will make the hiring decision. This way, your technical team will simply see a series of technical results and will be able to focus on technical skills when choosing who to invite for an interview.

We’ve added over 200 new tasks

Our customers are constantly demanding more and more tasks and we strive to be constantly delivering. These are spread over a number of areas and include:

• Backend – Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, Java and Spring, Scala
• Frontend – React
• Mobile – IOS (Objective-C, Swift)
• Database – SQL
• Big Data – Spark
• CICD – Jenkins

You can still make your own tasks in DevSkiller if you want but there is now probably a pre-made test that you can use on the platform, saving you time.

Our HR Certification course is helping recruiters become great tech recruiters

A common complaint we have heard from recruiters and developers alike is that there is simply not enough information about tech recruitment. The result of this is that tech recruiters are not able to connect with the same developers they need to connect with professionally. Devs are the targets of relentless spam campaigns, hardening them against the forces which seek to bring them new job opportunities.

As part of our mission to raise the standard of knowledge and skills in the tech recruitment field, we have created a course to give tech recruiters the knowledge and tools they need to effectively source and recruit technical hires. Already over 500 people have signed up with many of them passing the certification exam, proudly proclaiming to the world that they are certified tech recruitment professionals.

When you pass the final exam, you get a classy badge which will tell current and future employers as well as potential candidates that you are tech recruitment certified. Check it out:

Not too shabby.

We have a new way to verify the identity of the person taking the test

Being able to take a test remotely is one of the hallmarks of our platform. It gives candidates flexibility and removes scheduling barriers that could cause them to drop out of the pipeline. But still, some of our customers like the peace of mind that comes from being able to verify that the test is taken in the same place where the candidate says they are.

If a candidate does try to switch out their identity, it is often the case that they will get a double from the other side of the world. Our system will now register the location of the person taking the test. This way you can tell if the test is taken at your candidate’s home in Minneapolis or from a cafe in Melbourne.

You can now buy our book IT Recruitment Process That Works on Amazon

We have taken all we know about technical recruitment and put it into a book: IT recruitment process that works: Proven strategies, industry benchmarks and expert intel to supercharge your tech hiring. This will give you a full rundown of everything you need to know to build a technical recruitment pipeline for software developers, no matter whether you are an SMB or a large enterprise.

Topics include:

• Designing a fully functional recruitment process in IT,
• Optimizing the hiring process for Time to Hire, Cost per Hire, and Quality of Hire,
• Building diverse tech teams,
• The biggest mistakes made when hiring developers,
• Inbound and social sourcing,
• The best tools to streamline the recruitment process,
• A glossary of technical terms for non-coders.

In other words, everything you need to get started in tech recruitment.

You can now buy a softcover copy on Amazon so you can bone up on tech recruiting wherever you are.

What to watch out for

Don’t think that after releasing all of this great stuff, we are going to be content to rest on our laurels. We have a number of new projects in the pipeline that are going to improve tech recruitment. Stay tuned to our blog for more info.