Interviewing software developers: speed up the hiring process

Emilien Coquard
4 min readOct 7, 2022

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Moving online with high-quality software development is becoming increasingly critical for large and small businesses to succeed. Developers are currently in high demand but finding, interviewing, and hiring them is time-consuming and complex. It follows that recruiters wish to speed up the hiring process beyond what is reasonable or even responsible.

Bringing new recruits onboard takes about two months on average. In the past, western companies could choose from a large pool of local developers. However, this has changed with the dramatic rise in demand for their services in recent years. While the tech industry requires more talented individuals to drive their operations forward, hiring a developer without vetting their competence is extremely risky. So, how can you accelerate hiring without making huge errors along the way?

Choose an outsourcing or offshoring model

If you want to speed up the hiring process process, the answer might be to look overseas and adopt a new software development model. Organisations often find it highly effective to outsource or offshore their hiring and recruitment processes to build overseas extensions of their current team.

While outsourcing often results in successfully locating cheap talent, it’s not a solution to finding high-quality candidates that can become part of a dedicated team. It’s also not a long-term solution because outsourced teams always operate via third-party vendors. This means the vendor — and the developers by extension — works with you on a project-by-project basis and automatically treats you more as a client than a partner.

On the flipside, offshore teams are composed of highly-skilled developers who work only for you. By partnering with the right offshore development company, your business can build a team custom-tailored to your needs and specifications. An offshore team is identical to your local team, but it’s composed of individuals from different parts of the globe.

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Choose offshoring over outsourcing if you’re looking for a dedicated team that can operate as an extension of your current team.

The importance of keeping candidates interested

Software developers are notoriously difficult to attract and even harder to retain. The saturation of the employment market, combined with rising costs of living in the West, has created an environment where the demands and expectations of developers continue to increase. The massive need for software development has also created a situation where developers feel that they can be highly selective about choosing an employer.

They judge organisations on their incentive programs, the comfort of their working conditions, and how interesting they find the projects they are involved in. Scheduling meetings and conducting interviews can take a lot of time for recruiters, tech leads, and business owners. A company that overly complicates the hiring process may affect a developer’s desire to work there. So, they may continue interviewing for another job without waiting for your organisation’s decision.
You will have to start the whole hiring process again if this happens. These demands create recruitment hurdles for organisations and can pass on top developers that could benefit their company immensely. To avoid this happening and to speed up the hiring process make an effort to keep candidates interested.

Gives candidates a chance to excel

Many companies strive to find the most suitable candidate with the full range of technical skills and knowledge needed for the project. Nevertheless, this option requires quite a bit of time. Suppose you’re looking for a senior or middle expert with excellent credentials. A critical aspect of evaluating their skills is determining what they are good at. It isn’t necessary to review all the technologies and frameworks listed on their CV.

If the developer has not yet mastered additional frameworks, you can discuss them with the candidate. It takes a month for a coder to learn a new skill, but it can take months to find a senior developer with all the skills and expertise needed. By giving candidates a chance to excel, even if they don’t match every single requirement, you can speed up the hiring process. It’s also advantageous for your business as coders can learn new skills quickly.

Make a decision quickly

It’s wise not to put too much emphasis on finding your ideal, perfect, or right match. A person’s ability to learn and master new things should take precedence. By doing this, you’ll be able to hire top talent programmers for your engineering team.

Once you have interviewed and tested a developer, you’ll be able to determine if they are a good fit for your team. It’s also important at this stage not to delay the process and to let the candidate know if they are the right candidate as soon as possible.

You’ll waste more time and the programmer’s time if you take too long to make a decision. If developers weigh their options too long, they might arbitrarily choose another company over yours. But what other options do organisations have to combat this and speed up the hiring process?

Read the full article at: https://thescalers.com/interviewing-software-developers-speed-up-the-hiring-process/

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