Finding great talent is only part of the battle in hiring a developer, whether local or offshore, internal or outsource. The other part is making sure that the talent you find truly is great. To do this you need to build a recruiting process to verify that technical talent.
There are a minimum of 3 steps you should take to verify a candidate’s talent.
- Conduct at least two interviews. In these interviews you should look for if the developer will fit well within your team, if the developer can communicate their ideas clearly, and what kind of work the developer has done in the past.
- Check at least 3 references. These references should be past managers or product owners. Take this opportunity to find out how working with the developer was for other companies.
- Conduct a practical coding test. This can be done as an exercise in subsequent interviews, offline with a verbal review, or online in an IDE that tracks code changes real-time. Coding a single problem may have countless solutions that give the same solution, so code quality, readability, and performance are other factors you can consider. These other factors become increasingly important for senior developer roles where they are responsible for the applications maintainability and scalability. This step is the best way to get into a developers head and figure out how they actually work and approach problems. Make sure your coding test is at an appropriate skill-level you are hiring for.
Although the above checklist seems basic, many companies fail to complete these three steps and hire poorly because of it. In complete honesty, did your company do all three of these on their last hire?
Good luck with the next developer you hire!
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