Traditional vs ways of recruiting developers
Firstly, hiring developers is a challenge for most recruitment or talent acquisition professionals at any time. Not to mention, with an estimated 5 job opportunities to 1 software developer in the UK. The odds are firmly in the favour of the candidate. In addition, add to this a Global pandemic, periodic lockdown and restricted travel and the challenge for the TA and recruitment team increases exponentially!
With this scenario, you would be forgiven if you were slightly pessimistic about hitting your hiring targets. However, worry not! Welcoming this week’s guest Clive Smart. He joined us to offer advice based on his experience of trialling. A new concept for engaging and interviewing Developers at his current company, SkyBet & Gaming.
He begins the show, by telling us the challenges he faced before he introduced his idea.
“The candidate has all the cards, and often you’d find this unicorn. Then at the last minute, they’d pull out. They didn’t want to move or they had another offer”. With this experience firmly in mind, he decided on a new approach and he tells us, “what I wanted to do was switch it in my favour”.
Improve the candidate experience for all Developers
Moving onto the actual idea. Clive tells us that it was a combination of attending an event in Manchester, an offer that was being promoted by his current employer and his experience of paying Developers in the past. He says, “I had paid some Developers in the past a little bit of a bounty to do a technical test”. However, this didn’t appear to go far enough for him!
He rolled out a full-day interview where the Developer (candidate) comes into the office and spends the day with the software engineering squad, conduct paired-programming with team members and the feedback from the candidate was positive as he tells us,
“The feedback from them was amazing. It was something new, it was innovative”. From a business perspective, “we were seeing candidates we’d not seen before. One of the candidate’s we hired we couldn’t find them on LinkedIn or Twitter”.
If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll see & hear Clive talk about:
- The best platforms to find and engage Developers
- Engaging your software team members to write job specifications
- Getting stakeholder buy-in to new recruitment days
- Paying versus not paying Developers for their time
- Instant 360 feedback for interviewees
- Thinking recruitment pathways for neurodiverse candidates
Thank you to our fabulous sponsor EnterpriseAlumni
