What does your engineering hiring process look like?
Traditionally, it starts with a resume review, then a technical phone interview, then an in-person session with the team.
But, this process is broken.
How?
First, we’re going to dive deeper into how the traditional hiring process for recruiting engineers is broken. Then, we’ll discuss how introducing online coding assessments can revolutionize your hiring.
The Broken Traditional Technical Hiring Process
We already outlined the basic technical hiring process: resume screening, phone interview, in-person meeting.
Why is this system broken?
It starts with the resume review. Starting your engineer hiring process by looking at a candidate’s resume immediately introduces bias into the hiring process.
In a resume review, the hiring team is looking for:
- Keywords
- Years of Experience
- University / Degree
- Previous Employers
All of these things are a proxy for assessing abilities. It’s assumed that if someone worked at a prestigious company or attended a high-rated university that they’re high performers. However, this isn’t always the case.
When reviewing resumes, it’s nearly guaranteed you’ll overlook candidates from non-traditional backgrounds in favor of prestige. Beyond looking at previous experience as a proxy for skill, bias can be introduced unconsciously by seeing a candidate’s name, approximate age, and even based on the design of the resume itself.
Now that you understand the biases in the resume review of the hiring process, let’s talk about the phone interview. Traditionally, when it comes to hiring engineers, the phone interview is actually a video interview where the candidate and interviewer solve some technical challenges together in a coding environment.
The problem with the technical phone interview is that it puts immense pressure on the candidate to perform tasks that aren’t part of the day-to-day of any job. Technical interviews often require talking through what they’re doing, and when was the last time anyone had to do that in the real world? Beyond this, many engineers are introverts and live technical interviews can become anxiety-inducing.
Finally, we have the broken in-person meeting as the final step of the traditional technical hiring process. The in-person interview is broken because it often introduces bias into the hiring process. Interviewers, whether consciously or unconsciously, start to judge a candidate based on their appearance, answers to irrelevant questions, and whiteboarding skills.
From the resume review to the in-person interview, none of these steps actually measure abilities or skills.
This is why we must transform the hiring process.
The New and Improved Technical Hiring Process Using Online Coding Assessments
You want the very best candidate for your job, right?
Well, you’re never going to find that candidate if you use the broken traditional hiring process.
Instead, you must transform your process from the very start of the hiring funnel.
How?
By implementing an online coding assessment (also known as technical skills screening assessment) as the very first step in your hiring process.
Having an online coding assessment as the first stage of your hiring process enables your organization to immediately assess skills and abilities of a candidate. The organization can implement a standardized coding assessment for junior or non-specialized candidates or you can create a custom designed assessment to really dive into the details. You can set a threshold for each position that a candidate needs to surpass in order to make it to the next phase.
Online coding assessments not only measure abilities and reduce bias, they save your team a ton of time and money because they aren’t wasting their precious time with unqualified candidates.
No longer are you wasting time reviewing resumes of unqualified candidates. Technical phone interviews also become unnecessary because you already measured each candidate’s abilities. This creates a high-quality candidate experience because they don’t have to perform under pressure in an unusual environment.
This means by introducing online coding assessments as the very first step in the hiring process, you can skip right to the in-person interview!
Online coding assessments are proven to save time and money while reducing bias – but only if they’re designed by experts! We highly recommend never designing your tests in-house because they might not be measuring what you intended and can easily introduce bias back into the hiring process.
Online Coding Assessments are the Future of the Technical Hiring Process
Have we convinced you of the power of online coding assessments?
If not, take a listen to some of our case studies, which range from companies who never used online coding assessments to those who switched from our competitors.
You’ll find that every organization is much happier with their technical hiring process after introducing assessments.