Importance of having the right candidate screening strategies in technology hiring.
Hiring the right technical staff is essential for any business, but choosing the right hiring strategy is even more crucial. Companies spend a lot of time and effort hiring only to find that they have hired the wrong person. After all, they didn’t put enough time and effort into the interview process or onboarded someone because they were struggling at it for a while.
As of now, one of the most common ways to screen talent in the first round is through resumes, which are nothing more than marketing collateral created by developers. What if someone is not too good at representing themselves, or what if some of your talent acquisition recruiters are not adept enough to understand the cruciality of a project listed there? Does viewing StackOverflow or Github profiles and spending minutes on every applicant constitute the only way to go about it? Time is of the essence here. Like sales, today’s competitive environment favors companies with a quick hiring process that can quickly identify candidates in the hiring pipeline.
As technology evolves, how we find and attract talent needs to evolve with it.
In our recent episodes of Hiring Diaries, we hosted Vishwanadh Raju – Head of Talent at Dun & Bradstreet India, and former talent leader at AXISCADES, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. Since it was all about having the right candidate screening strategies for technology hiring, we asked him about the importance of the proper candidate screenings strategy.
Mudit Srivastava, Host, Skillspace.ai:
Welcome to the show, Vishwanadh. To begin with, what is the point of discussing candidate screening strategies? What’s your perspective as a talent leader at D&B and as a startup mentor on how early this discussion should take place?
Vishwanadh Raju, Dun & Bradstreet:
Okay, so firstly, let me thank you, Mudit, and thank Skillspace.ai for giving me this opportunity. I genuinely believe that you guys are doing something outstanding. And that’s the reason why I’m talking to you guys. Coming to your question. In light of the complexity of positions within different companies, as well as the fact that they may be associated with different technologies, it is essential for companies to have a robust assessment mechanism. For example, if we hire ten people, there will be ten different criteria, including technology skills, other domains, and everything else.
Gone are those days when companies rely on a typical 30-40 minutes kind of assessment and all of that because that is not objective in the way it is coming out. That’s where platforms like Skillspace.ai come into play. A robust assessment is required because we are trying to hire for a company, and then that company has XYZ kind of requirements to be filled by this person by doing coding, system design, and all of that. (To put things in perspective, according to this 2021 Glassdoor report, companies listed 33% more skills on job ads in 2020 than they did in 2017.)
In my opinion, many companies are thinking about it, some of them are doing in-house, some of them work with people like you. But a lot is happening as we speak at this point. Some companies have figured out an excellent smart way; some companies are still on that journey.
Go back to Martec’s law, right. As technologies advance at an exponential rate, adoption of the technologies or the required organizational changes are happening at a logarithmic pace, much slower in comparison to the pace at which the technologies are evolving. So I would say there is a lot of scope for people like you to help companies like us to ensure that these intelligent assessments are done in our pursuit of onboarding the top technology. So that we can understand and we can make decisions from there. That’s my view.
Lastly, coming to your discussion of how soon should this discussion be around candidate screening strategies happening in a startup. I would say that it all depends upon how the company looks at the technology stack. Let me take an example. If there will be a very future company, let’s take the example of Meta. Their assessment methodology versus requirement is entirely different from a company on the other side of the story. So it is imperative that the business teams are aligned quickly to the talent teams as well; both of us go to the market and analyze the offerings that the market can provide for us.
For an absolutely early-stage startup company, I think they should have a clear vision of what kind of skills they would like to hire. I wouldn’t want them to mechanize so much because it doesn’t have value when you’re just hiring your founding team or the first couple of engineers. They need to explain why and communicate the value proposition to the appropriate audience. As the assessment is introduced in the process, the team and processes should talk more about the role rather than skills, and slowly connect with the people and tell them why they’re doing what they’re doing.
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This excerpt was taken from a recent episode of Hiring Diaries with Vishwanadh Raju, Head of Talent at Dun & Bradstreet India. Our entire conversation covered several topics, including:
Screening strategies for top tech talent: Understanding their importance
Decoding the process of automated technical screening.
Aligning engineering and TA functions for a successful process
Preventing funnel attrition and making the screening process more attractive to candidates.
Implementation and impact of fair technical assessments
Crafting assessments for senior engineers and data scientists
Setting the right hiring benchmarks and timelines
Things to consider when choosing an assessment platform
Evaluating and refining candidate screening processes
Remote-first hiring: creating fantastic candidate experiences
And more.
To view the entire discussion, visit here – https://skillspace.ai/hiring-diaries-203/.
More about Skillspace.ai and Hiring Diaries
The goal of Skillspace.ai is to deliver better experiences for end-to-end technical assessments with scale. In our platform, you can hire tech talent through coding assessments, AI challenges, take-home assignments, 1-on-1 interviews, and much more, all in a highly condensed and simplified manner. From early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco, Alibaba, and Capgemini, we have earned the trust of companies across all industries.
We have created Hiring Diaries to support the engineering and talent acquisition communities that have trusted us so far. The goal is to create a series of live discussions with the top 1% of talent and technology leaders who share our passion for giving first. Hiring Diaries covers various topics regarding scaling technology teams and hiring the best talent. You are welcome to attend any of our upcoming events if you wish to learn more.
