Category

Recruiting Tips

Guide to writing a good job posting Blog

Guide to writing a good job posting

By Human Resources, Recruiting Tips

Recruiting is a seriously competitive industry. And first impressions matter. That’s why your job description writing skills are an important weapon of your organizational armory and why writing a good job posting is essential to success.  

The most effective job descriptions are engaging and inclusive, while also being clear, concise, and to-the-point. Anyone should be able to understand it. A great job posting prompts the right people to apply and helps you trim down your time-to-fill.

Your description should accurately reflect the duties and job responsibilities of the position. When well-written, it produces a realistic picture of a job and answers the question,
“What does the person in this role actually do?”

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July 8, 2020
What You Need to Know About the Skills Gap Blog

What You Need to Know About the Skills Gap

By Human Resources, IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips

Tech recruiters find it extremely hard to hire highly-skilled employees. In fact, 64% of HR managers believe that employees won’t be able to keep up the pace with future skills development needs. While 70% of employees admit they haven’t yet acquired all the necessary skills to perform their current job. While the disruption caused by COVID 19 pandemic has disrupted the US labor market, the skills gap will remain once the crisis is over.

The skill gap leads to recruitment problemsIf the skills gap is not addressed, it might lead to a serious recruitment crisis. In the following article, we’re going to talk about what strategic, forward-looking talent managers should know about the skills gap and what they can do to mitigate it. 

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June 16, 2020
How to assess programming skills – a review of the best methods Blog

How to assess programming skills – a review of the best methods

By IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips, Technical Interview

Did you know that the costs of recruiting a software developer can be as high as $60k? Unless you’ve got a huge recruiting budget, you can’t afford to hire an employee whose skills haven’t been verified and just hope for the best. In fact, knowing how to assess programming skills, whether front end, back end, or full stack, is fundamental to any successful IT recruitment process. 

How can tech employers test one’s abilities upfront? It’s more complex than just looking at a programmer’s CV. 

In the following article, we’re going to review how to assess programming skills using different assessment methods, with a special focus on the optimal setup, namely the work sample coding tests followed by the HR and technical interview. By following our advice, you’ll minimize the risk of hiring an under- or over-performing candidate, or simply someone who isn’t a good fit for your company.

Let’s take a look. Read More

April 29, 2020
15 tips and sourcing strategies in recruitment Blog

15 tips and sourcing strategies in recruitment

By Recruiting Tips

Attracting top talent is essential to the future of your organization. If you want to get ahead of your competition, you need to hire the best talent (and implement the best recruitment strategies) to help you get there. For this reason, creative sourcing strategies in recruitment are important to develop. 

Candidate sourcing, or just sourcing, is the means of identifying candidates for a job opening. Talent sourcing is a proactive approach to candidate recruitment. It emphasizes searching for qualified people with some strategies focusing on those actively looking for a new job and others identifying as passive candidates. Being familiar with your organization’s sourcing strategies in recruitment is essential. 

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April 22, 2020
17 recruiting tools every recruiter should use in their recruitment process

18 recruiting tools every recruiter should use in their recruitment process

By Recruiting Tips

The technology and capabilities of modern recruiting tools are something that’d leave even the most tech-savvy of us in awe. 

These hiring tools are designed to make an HR recruiter of any industry find better talent, hold a better interview, and employ a better employee. They’re created for both corporations that make an insane number of hires every month, as well as those that seldom hire new staff. 

Chefs have their favorite knife, footballers have their favorite boots, and recruiters have their best recruiting tools to make their job easier. 

But with so many recruiting tools for employers out there, how does an HR manager pick out the best from the rest?

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April 15, 2020
Social recruiting in tech: How to make the most of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit

Social recruiting in tech: How to make the most of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit

By Recruiting Tips

With 94% of recruiters admitting that they use social media for candidate sourcing, the competition for tech talent is as fierce as ever. However, it’s wrong to assume that you can’t stand out from the IT recruitment crowd. There are many ways (some of them creative) in which you can use social recruiting to source new hires!

In our previous articles, we already discussed how you can leverage LinkedIn, and communities like Stack Overflow and GitHub to find developers for your team. Now, we’ve decided it’s time to see what Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have to offer in the matter. 

Below, you’ll find a list of social recruiting best practices, as well as channel-specific tips & tricks that will help you boost your talent sourcing efforts. As a bonus, we’ll also share a pro-tip on sourcing tech talent on Reddit and how you can match its users with their social media accounts.  Read More

March 31, 2020
Recruitment blogs to follow. Best recruitment resources

20+ best recruitment blogs to follow

By Human Resources, Recruiting Tips

The world of recruitment is a bumpy one: you need to have eyes on the back of your head to know what is going on and how to adjust to the latest changes. 

No matter if you just started your journey as a recruiter or you are an experienced one, you can never have too many resources to follow. What is more, you should regularly update the list to make sure you miss nothing.

It is not that simple, though. Recruiters have a lot of tasks on their plates, and many of them just cannot dedicate enough time to keep checking the news.

While we do not have a remedy for that, we decided that a little list never hurts. Today, we have gathered 20+ recruitment blogs to follow from all over the world and we will show you why they are worth following. If you want to stay up-to-date with news from the HR industry, then we are here to serve you with some great recruitment resources.

Read More

March 19, 2020
Does employment history matter when hiring developers?

Does employment history matter when hiring developers?

By Human Resources, Recruiting Tips, Uncategorized

The concept of recruitment is finding the right person for the job. In the past, various methods have been used to achieve this. In the tech and development space, employment history is often weighted as highly as a candidate’s technical skills. But is it really that important? 

Almost a quarter of developers surveyed in Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey claimed to have never even finished their bachelor’s degree. Of those who did obtain a degree, about one third did not study anything related to software development. 

Most developers have less than five years of professional coding experience and thirty percent have less than two.

Read More

December 12, 2019
StepStone Services' best ever hackathon ideas for recruitment

How StepStone Services came up with of the best ever hackathon ideas for recruitment

By Human Resources, IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips

There are few things that developers like more than hackathons and coming up with hackathon ideas. It’s an opportunity for them to flex their proverbial muscles and do something really creative. Holding a hackathon can be a great way of promoting blue sky thinking on your tech team and generally engendering a pro developer environment at your company. Since these results align with the mission of HR departments to encourage loyalty and productivity among the company’s workforce, hackathons are a no brainer. 

In this article, we’ll be covering the following topics:

  • What is a hackathon
  • HR-focused hackathons
  • How StepStone Services improved its tech hiring with a hackathon project
  • StepStone Services’ 12 step approach to holding a coding test hackathon
  • Lessons StepStone Services learned about holding a coding test hackathon
  • Why developers loved thinking up and developing coding tests
  • Advice and takeaways you can use to hold your own coding test hackathon

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November 5, 2019
Front-end developer job description template

Front-end developer job description

By Human Resources, IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips

What is front-end development and what does a front-end developer do? We have all the answers in this front-end developer job description template.

Front-end web developer: roles and responsibilities

Front-end development means creating components and features that are directly accessed by a user through the front-end of a website. Front-end developers create everything on a website that users see, touch, click, and use. They focus on the visual layout, user interface/interaction, and user experience. In their work, they create the buttons, images, links, and pages that all need to function efficiently, accurately, and quickly in order for the user to carry out a particular task.

Below you can find a front-end developer job description template. This template includes examples of the responsibilities and skills which are typical for such a position. Of course, this template is just a basic starting-point – we strongly recommend that you customize the template so that it fits the exact job which you wish to fill. Please note that, in line with good practice, this front-end developer job description template shows you one way of describing the person you’re searching for, starting from more general requirements, leading up to more specific requirements, and finishing with any optional extra skills or experience.

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October 29, 2019
The Workable ATS tech recruitment workflow for hiring developers

The Workable ATS tech recruitment workflow for hiring developers

By IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips

Workable is one of the most powerful ATS systems out there and is a particularly useful tool for tech recruitment. When recruiting developers, it’s incredibly important to keep track of your candidates. With as many as 20 people applying for each software development position, a simple spreadsheet won’t scale. But luckily, there is a useful Workable ATS tech recruitment workflow that you can use for hiring developers which will allow you to focus more time on the areas that recruiters are uniquely qualified for. Using Workable and the integrations that it offers, you can automate repetitive tasks. This will allow you to spend more one-on-one time with candidates to see if they are a good cultural fit for the company.

This article will cover the steps of a tech recruitment workflow for hiring developers and how this workflow can be streamlined in Workable. These steps include:

  • Post your ad to job sites
  • Integrate with Devskiller
  • Invite candidates to tests
  • Check your stages
  • Get test summaries
  • Invite candidates for interviews

Read More

October 15, 2019
Different types of interviews

Different types of interviews for technical recruitment

By Interview questions, Recruiting Tips, Technical Interview

As a professional technical recruiter, there are many different types of interviews for you to consider. Some are more useful at particular stages of the assessment process, some are more appropriate for testing particular skills. This article will explain a number of different types of interviews and point out their various advantages and disadvantages.

Types of interviews you can use for technical recruitment

Read on to find out more about,

  • Case interviews
  • Coding interviews
  • Competency-based or behavioral interviews
  • Final interviews
  • Panel interviews
  • Phone interviews
  • Second interviews
  • STAR format interviews
  • Structured interviews
  • Video interviews
  • Working interviews

Read More

October 10, 2019
8 Reasons why you should use an applicant tracking system

8 Reasons why you should use an applicant tracking system

By Recruiting Tips, tech trends

Inside HR Departments, recruitment is one of the hardest tasks to master. Recruiting managers spend hours looking at resumes, making phone calls, and performing interviews in order to select the best candidates to join their company. They know better than anyone else the consequences a bad hire would bring to their company. The right applicant tracking system can help avoid this.

Making a bad hire can become a big expense (a bad developer can cost as much as $485,371.38). In other words, finding the right people can be crucial to the financial success of a company.

Applicant tracking systems help companies of all sizes find the right candidates

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August 28, 2019
teamwork interview questions: Software engineer interview questions

Teamwork Interview Questions

By Human Resources, Interview questions, IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips

There’s a lot more to the world of teamwork interview questions that asking ‘do you work better in a team or alone?’. The truth is that even in technical development roles, being a team player is important. 

But with many startups, software houses, and even corporations using teams as a way to accomplish tasks and foster corporate innovation, the modern ‘team player’ has to have a wide range of personal skills and a flexible work ethic. 

This means that whether you’re hiring a front-end developer, a data scientist, or a CTO, everyone needs to be able to work in a team environment in some way, shape or form. Read More

August 20, 2019
5 ways to assess cultural fit in your tech candidates

5 ways to assess cultural fit in your tech candidates

By Human Resources, IT recruitment, Recruiting Tips, Technical Interview

When you’re hiring for tech roles, you need people to be job fit, meaning that they are actually capable of doing the job you’re hiring for. For example, you need to be sure that your tech candidates know certain programming languages, can navigate certain software, etc. Nevertheless, these specific skill sets shouldn’t be the only competencies you evaluate your tech candidates for. According to Forbes, 89% of hiring fails are a result of poor cultural fit. Which means you need to ensure that the potential tech candidate and your company are aligned in both core values and ways of working. While job fit is one thing, cultural fit is an entirely different kettle of fish. And arguably one that is just as important. 

Neither should take precedence over the other, in fact, in a perfect world, your ideal tech candidate should have both. And even though the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a deficit of over one million tech employees come 2020, that doesn’t mean you should be rushing to hire the first person who comes along with the requisite job skills, even though they won’t mesh well with your company. Because the cost of a bad hire is much higher than you think, especially when it comes to developers.

So, while you can verify each candidate’s technical skills via assignments, coding challenges, and technical interviews, how do you assess something much less tangible and far more subjective, such as cultural fit? Read More

July 30, 2019
7 step formula to hire top tech talent

[Video]7 step formula to hire top tech talent

By Recruiting Tips, Uncategorized, Video

Hiring the right software developers is hugely important. It requires a large investment (up to $31,970) to get the right person. If you get it wrong, you could be looking at a loss of almost a half million dollars in the worst cases. So every professional and engaged tech recruiter worth their salt is constantly working to build a process that is both efficient and effective.

Hire the right tech talent

But it doesn’t have to be that hard. In this video, we explain our proven 7 step formula for hiring the right tech talent. Find out why you should,

  1. Start sourcing creatively, focusing on quality over quantity
  2. Start using an automated technical screening platform
  3. Run online coding interviews
  4. Make timely and fair job offers
  5. Make your recruitment team more technically aware
  6. Eliminate unconscious bias
  7. Nurture your candidates

Read More

July 16, 2019