If you want to build a successful technology startup, you’ll need more than just a great idea. You’ll also need a great engineering team. Because let’s face it: tech startups are hard. Most of your time, you’re creating something innovative no one has ever built before. The competition is fierce and the path is never clear.
That’s why you’ll need skilled engineers who will turn your idea into a product. You’ll need them to be experienced, professional, and committed to your vision. Most importantly, you need to be certain that they will stick with you through thick and thin. But how on earth could you possibly find these engineers that will be a perfect match for your company?
Well, luckily, there are a few tools to help you discover the best tech talent. All of which are designed to improve your recruitment efforts at lower costs.
Let’s take a look!
HackerRank
There are as many bad engineers as there are highly skilled ones. To filter out the low-performing engineers, companies could use some help from a tool such as HackerRank. In short words, HackerRank is an online coding platform that provides coding tests and interview questions for companies to assess their engineers.
It’s an effective pre-screening tool to help any company identify and hire engineers who possess outstanding coding skills. Companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and DropBox have already partnered with HackerRank to help match applicants with technical and coding skills to the right roles.
If you’re interested to hear more, here are the different ways of how you can assess your engineers:
- HackerRank CodeScreen: not sure if the candidate is the right pick for the position? Create a role-specific challenge and invite them to take it. The platform will then automatically review, score, and rank your candidate. There are over 1500+ challenges, 35+ programming languages, and 8 frameworks to discover on the platform.
- HackerRank CodePair: if the candidate passes the code screen assessment, the next step is to conduct a CodePair interview. What you need to do is invite them to join a live pair programming session. Choose the challenge you want them to take or load your own. All participants can edit code, provide input, and test code live on the platform. You’ll be able to evaluate your candidates remotely, cost-effectively, and timely.
Regarding the price, there are two options to try:
- A 14-day free trial if you want to explore the platform’s basic features.
- A Premium package that comes with a set of advanced features. The price will be given to you upon request.
Code Interview
Let’s all agree that traditional whiteboard job interviews don’t always bring out the best out of candidates. In order to build a successful engineering team, a more effective idea would be to conduct job interviews in a real-time coding environment.
Just like HackerRank, Code Interview is another amazing tool for assessing your engineers. It’s a cloud-based live programming tool that challenges candidates to solve coding problems in a live environment with an online code editor and compilers.
To get started with the live programming interview process, you should:
- Send an invite link to the candidate.
- Once they accept, they’ll be directed to join the pair-programming session.
- You and your candidate will share the same pad. The left pane is the code editor, while the right pane gives the terminal-style output. CodeInterview also supports video calls so you can video chat with your candidate.
- Once the interview is completed, everything that has been typed into the pad will be saved. The pads will only be accessible to you and not the candidate.
Here are the three plans you can choose from:
- Pay as You Go: you can assess the engineering skills of your candidate any time you want, for only $5 per interview.
- Pro: for $49 per month, you have 240 interviews per year.
- Enterprise: this plan includes API Access and Priority Support. You’ll need to get in touch with the team to get a quote.
The Predictive Index
Reading a candidate’s resume and conducting a quick reference call are the single most important steps in the hiring process. But how effective are they? Can they help you understand clearly the candidate’s behavioral and cognitive abilities? In most cases, hiring a person based on their outstanding resume qualifications is a recipe for disaster.
What The Predictive Index offers are scientifically-approved behavioral assessments to help you hire the most appropriate and talented people for your company. Their assessments promise to recognize great talent and the people who would be a great culture fit for your company.
Companies of all sizes, both Fortune 500 and small businesses, have used the product to ensure candidate job fit and predict on-the-job success. How does it work? It measures what motivates a person. It gains practical insight into the natural workplace behaviors of people and can predict day-to-day performance with accuracy.
Looking at an individual’s behavior, the tool can also detect any behavioral gaps. Knowing those gaps, companies can now manage their employees in a way that encourages them to perform to their full potential.
Here’s how the assessments work:
- Over the course of 5-10 minutes, candidates take the survey online.
- The tool analyzes the four main factors that can determine a candidate’s workplace behavior: dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality.
- After the end of the assessment, each candidate is assigned a Reference Profile. It’s an outline of the way they think and work.
- The results are available to the company immediately.
Yobs Technologies
In recent years, we have been witnesses of video job interviews becoming more popular and being a vital part of recruitment. According to studies, nearly 90% of hiring managers said they have hired a candidate with the help of video interviews.
However, there are two problems with video interviews. Hiring managers often introduce unconscious bias in the hiring process and tend to prefer candidates that look like them. The second problem is that hiring managers often have difficulties assessing the candidates' soft skills.
Yobs Technologies (acquired by Gong) is an AI platform that deals with these issues. It helps avoid hiring bias and hiring the wrong person for the job.
What their Behavioral Insights API tool does is process psycholinguistic, prosodic, emotional and facial data points in a video interview. It analyzes the 5 most important dimensions of personality and other behavioral data. For example, behavioral characteristics are assessed by decoding the tone and pitch of the interviewee’s speech.
The 5 dimensions of personality the tool assesses include:
- Openness: how acceptant is the candidate to change and new ideas.
- Conscientiousness: how organized, rigorous, reliable and attentive to detail is the candidate.
- Extraversion: is the candidate more energized and comfortable in the company of others or in solitude?
- Agreeableness: can the candidate create bonds with others quickly and resolve conflicts?
- Neuroticism: is the candidate susceptible to stress in daily activities?
In short, this AI can predict candidate performance by determining their soft skills. It allows hiring managers to make informed hiring decisions every time and hire the best person for their open job positions.
Pymetrics
Do you have a pile of resumes sitting on your desk, waiting to be read? Feel free to throw them in the trash because we have some disappointing statistics coming your way!
Did you know that roughly 250 people apply for an average job? Or that 30 - 50% of the time companies make the wrong hire? Pymetrics promises to put a stop to the ineffective and biased hiring process with their neuroscience games and advanced AI. It assures to end the ineffective hiring process that results in:
- terrible candidate experience
- low offer acceptance rates
- people leaving in their first year on the job
The tool tries to tackle these problems that many companies face today. It does that with the help of short neuroscience games that are available online. They take around 25 minutes to complete, measuring social, emotional, and cognitive traits.
Here’s an example of one of the games:
For each trial, you will be presented with a red circle or a green circle.
Press the space bar when you see a red circle.
Do not do anything when you see a green circle.
What this game tries to measure is impulsivity, attention span, and learning.
According to Pymetrics, their enterprise partners have seen an increase in their:
- employee performance rates
- retention rates
- job acceptance rates
To make sure you’re hiring highly skilled engineers for your job, this is how Pymetrics can help:
- Choose your best-performing team members. They will then play the neuroscience games so that the platform can make custom algorithms for your company. The AI program will create a model of your company’s perfect employee to compare it with other candidates.
- Now it’s your candidate’s turn to play the neuroscience games. After every game which lasts for about 2 minutes, they’ll receive feedback about how they played.
- You’ll receive an extensive trait profile of your candidate. It’ll show how they performed on things like tension control, distraction filtering, or cognitive flexibility.
- By comparing the results to the metrics of your best employees, you’ll know how successful this candidate would be in a particular role at your company.
Does it sound like something you and your best-performing engineers would like to try? Regarding the price, charges are based on the number of applications your company gets in a year.
Conclusion
The world of technology is continually moving forward, changing every single aspect of our lives. Recruiters no longer have to go through piles of applications, sit for in-office interviews for hours, and spend thousands of dollars on the hiring process. There is a plethora of effective tools that can assess engineers better than any recruiter.
These tools will allow you to discover highly skilled talent and build a high-performing engineering team. You’ll avoid candidates who only look great on paper and find hidden gems. Resumes, whiteboards, and hiring on a gut feeling will become a thing of the past. The future of work is here and you should embrace it with open arms.
