Posted by Hello, I’m Krishnan, CEO at Geektrust.com. We help enterprises and startups hire developers, both as full-time employees and on a contract-to-hire (C2H) basis. C2H is usually seen as a way to get low-end work done, and the impression is that you cannot find high-quality talent in the C2H mode. I’m here to break that myth! Here’s the story of how we helped one of our clients hire 30 high-quality developers quickly via C2H.
Client – a billion dollar tech company based out of the US.
A couple of years ago, I met a potential client – a billion-dollar tech company looking to scale up their tech team in India and trying to get some key skills on board quickly. They had a 20+ member recruitment team but were finding it super hard to scale at the pace they wanted. Business was booming, clients were demanding more from them, but hiring was slow. They reached out to Geektrust to help them with their hiring needs, and we got going immediately.
However, it took anywhere between 6 weeks to 8 weeks to get 1 candidate on-board. We realized that while our vetted candidates were clearing interviews faster, we were still constrained by their recruitment processes, and adding more candidates didn’t speed up hiring at the pace the India leadership team wanted.
Enter contract-to-hire
At this point, we proposed a contract-to-hire model where we would do 3 rounds of assessments (screening, code pairing, technical interview) and give them candidates who could join within 21 days. The code pairing and interviews would be done by the Geektrust community of developers (we have over 150,000). While initially there was skepticism whether this would work, we were able to hit it out of the park, and their hiring pace picked up to such an extent we became an integral part of their workforce planning strategy.
Overall we gave 71 candidates to this client out of which 54 cleared their interviews. That is a 76% interview to offer ratio! And that too at a company that was voted one of the hardest to clear interviews at.
Typically, contract-to-hire (C2H) is seen as a way to get non-core work done at low cost. However, we realized that C2H can be used as a hiring strategy to get high-quality developers on-boarded quickly. Since these folks start as contractors, if you are not happy with their on-ground performance, you can let us know, and we will off-board the concerned contractor. Since our assessment process is very solid, this tends to happen very less (2% as of now).
We are able to assure you that we onboard high-quality developers with a rejection rate of only 2% after onboarding, thanks to our rigorous assessment process. Candidates are required to take one of our coding challenges, through which we evaluate their ability to write good, clean, and readable code. We prioritize real-world skills over just output correctness. The badges in the image below contribute to 60% of a candidate’s performance in the code assessment stage.
After successfully completing the code assessment round, candidates move on to an online interview with developers from the Geektrust community. These interviewers are individuals who have already passed our coding challenges and have been placed by Geektrust at one of our client companies. The interviewers set a high bar, and only those who perform well proceed to interview with clients.
In addition, since these devs are not FTEs, you always have the option to easily reduce the workforce based on market situations (like now). At Geektrust, we have 1000+ openings, and we are able to give the developer other opportunities that fit their profile, either as FTE or as a contract.
Overall, if you’re looking to hire developers fast, want highly vetted candidates who can join quickly, want the flexibility of not having folks as full-time employees, and you’re interested in seeing how people perform in their real world environment before converting them full time, you should give C2H a go.
If you’re interested in knowing more, do check out our page and write to us. Alternatively, you can ping me on Linkedin or Twitter. I look forward to hearing from you.