Hire developers based on their real-world coding skills

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This happened a few months ago. I met a client who was looking to hire developers with 5+ years of experience. Their requirement – candidates should’ve passed out from a good college!

 

 

 

 

 

 


I’m Krishnan Nair, Co-founder and CEO of Geektrust. I
 used to head software delivery for Thoughtworks before starting up. In my pre-Geektrust years, one thing I learnt is that the best way to find good candidates is by looking at their real-world coding skills.

My immediate question to them was – “even though they’ve worked for 5 years, do you want to judge a developer based on how they did on a test 10 years ago? And more importantly, do you want to ignore those who did not do well in an entrance exam years ago, but might be very good developers now?”

Spotting talent in software development

The team was genuinely puzzled by the questions. “But, how will you identify them otherwise?”, they asked.

This gave me the perfect opening to talk about skill-based hiring, and the results we’ve seen at Geektrust, with 150+ companies that hire developers based on their present-day coding skills instead of proxies from the past.

We assess skill using in-depth coding tests that take a few hours to complete, and we look for things that matter on the job, writing production-ready code. Unlike platforms where the coding tests focus on getting the output right, we look for how “clean” their code is. Have they modelled their objects well? Have they written code that is readable? Is their code unit-tested, maintainable and scalable?

When a position is opened up, the company gets access to the code assessment report and actual code written by matching candidates. The assessment report gives a detailed look at the code quality, which helps the recruitment team identify good candidates. The tech team gets to check the actual code for the problem solving approach, logic and other subjective parameters before interviewing them. 

Tech hiring is hard across the world because companies still look for proxies in the resume – where did someone study, where are they working now, etc., which filters out good candidates as well. There is so much good tech talent in India that goes unidentified because they didn’t do well in an entrance exam years ago. If it weren’t so sad, it’d be quite funny.

Benefits of skill-based hiring

Since candidates are already skill-assessed, the time that the recruitment and tech team spends per open position reduces significantly. A company with good hiring standards tends to interview 10-15 candidates to find the right one. Whereas with Geektrust, 1 in 3 or 4 candidates get an offer. And all this is made possible through our online platform and the Account Management team – the superstar humans at Geektrust who manage the hiring process from start to finish seamlessly.

Software development is a skill that can be picked up given the right attitude and the right mentor. We started Geektrust with this insight, and over the last few years, helped 1000+ developers find jobs with 150+ companies including Thoughtworks, Intuit, Societe Generale, Target, Zensar, Siemens, Rapido, Zomato, DeepRooted, Quintype, Rang De and more. They were not necessarily developers from the best colleges or from “premium” product companies but they all write good code, and we were able to spot that.

Hiring? Reach out

We constantly engage with candidates in the market, and have a userbase of 10K+ code-vetted developers and 120K+ developers overall for companies to hire from. If you’re from a company looking to build a world-class tech team, do visit the Hire page or write to us at  to start your free trial and experience this yourself. Once you tell us your requirement, we can show you code-vetted developer profiles in 10 minutes.

About Geektrust

Geektrust is a tech hiring platform founded in 2015 with a vision to build a world of potential. Today, we make this happen via our job platform for developers, and our tech hiring product and solutions for companies. We’ve helped over 1000 developers find amazing jobs at 150+ companies like Thoughtworks, Intuit, Target, SocGen, Zensar, Capgemini, Zomato, Deserve, Simpl, Terrapay and Scripbox.

2 comments

    1. Thats your cue to stay away from such companies, the snobbier their hiring tactic the snobbier they are in my experience. You dont want to work at such a place.

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