What software do you use to screen prospective employees?
Hi!
When hiring developers I've always been a 1-to-1 guy, arrange a meeting, talk to the person, get a feel for his strengths and weaknesses. But lately the time needed to do this has increased to the point where I need to start filtering prospective employees more aggressively. So I was thinking of using a screening technical questionnaire in order to assess seniority, tech stack and general experience before I commit to any more time-consuming meetings.
Have you used such an approach, does it work and if yes, what SaaS have you used to do that?
Thanks,
Yasen
Here is what we’ve been doing:
Use workable.com (PAYG subscription). This lets us manage the jobs and applicants. You can see one of the recent jobs at wildrook.workable.com as an example.
We post the job on weworkremotely.com. As we are 100% remote workforce, it was the logical place.
We have templates to respond to candidates we like, as well as those that we disqualify. At each stage we ask a few more detailed questions to progress through the hiring stages.
Once we find a candidate we like ‘on paper’ we have them do a one-way interview using SparkHire. This allows us to see how well they communicate and formalize responses to questions we use to see if they are a cultural fix.
Everyone on the team rates the video interviews and leaves comments. That lets us get unbiased averaging of the candidates. The top candidates then get asked to do a test project and commit it to their own GitHub repo. Ie: for the current front end dev job we have a serverless function API they have to consume. We leave it up to them to show us what and how they would access the API and display it. Last month as we were hiring a content marketing we had them write an inbound piece on something they were passionate about and educate and inspire us. Instead of agitHub, they posted to their own social presence. (Blog, LinkedIn etc)
Now you are down from hundreds of applicants to just a few. We now do 1-on-1 Skype calls. Make sure we are a feel for each other.
Make a decision
So Workable -> weworkremotely -> SparkHire -> Github -> Skype
YMMV. Hiring is important to get right. Yo can’t spend enough time setting up your process and knowing EXACTLY what skills, behaviors and traits you want in your people. They are your most important part of your business, invest in it as you grow.
HTH.
That's an absolute bang on answer, thank you for the details @SilverStr ! I'm a bit unsure how aggressive those screening tiers should be and how may tiers in total. I understand it highly depends on what the labor market is like, whether supply for the particular technology is abundant, etc, but have you had instances where you were left with no suitable candidates because your sift is too fine? How do you cope with that?
We've had this happen. In fact, the frontend position right now is going through a second wave because we just weren't happy with the 400 or so applicants that came in.
I'd rather have no suitable candidates and continue looking than make the wrong hire. That becomes a costly mistake if we settle. The phrase 'hire fast fire fast' is bullsh*t if you ask me. We are investing in growing the team. Do it right, or don't do it.
In our case right now, the burden is on us. We can't afford to pay for the 'ideal candidate' based on local wages. We had a few candidates we liked that walked because they can get about 10% to 20% more elsewhere. That's OK. We know what we can afford to pay right now, and we also know the right candidate will 'click' when we find them. In the meantime we will slug it out. I'm spending a part of each night doing the extra coding covering for that role. Hustling until we get the right fit.
YMMV. Don't settle. It will be far more costly later.
I'd focus more on finding a high-quality source than on automated filtering because of the following:
SaaS, wise Codility and Hacker Rank are pretty widely used for technical screening, but if I could only hire off of one thing it would be a glowing reference from someone I trust. I think that's more predictive than the entire rest of the interviewing process.
Thanks for the reply @alchemist ! I particularly agree with the reference bit - we tend to hire by reference whenever possible, but my local market (which is where refs come from generally) has become very competitive lately and large companies tend to grab the top talent. Which may point me to the 'remote workers' pool, where refs are much harder to come by imo.
Anyone?