Hire software engineer candidates: How to make your hiring process more competitive?

The hiring process can serve to amaze great candidates – or it can turn them away. Particularly if you’re in the tech industry like us, how to make your hiring process that attracts one of today’s most in-demand talent pools – software engineers?

Having helped Singapore-based companies hire and secure the right tech talent in Vietnam for over five years enables us to gain insights into the field, practice, and adjust our hiring process over time. Eventually, we found out the version that works best for both employers and job seekers.

But you don’t need to waste another five years to better your hiring process. We have listed them down in this post for you – the three pillars that help improve your recruitment process instantly. Do check them out!

What should be included? And What not?

Most employers are more likely to overdo than make light of their candidates’ selection rounds. Though it comes from good intentions that they don’t want to get the wrong hires, it may come with more cons than pros.

A too-many-round vetting process is unproductive. It costs money, consumes unnecessary time and effort of the skilled folks of your team. Even worse, it can be a wall that pushes candidates away from proceeding with your company.

Looking for answers to what should be included in a tech hiring process won’t be much of help in this case. Starting with reviewing your hiring steps and selecting what shouldn’t be there can be a good move. Here’s what you can consider eliminating to transform your hiring list into a candidate-friendly shortlisting process yet retains its sufficient help to your decision making.

Require never-ending separate sittings

Interviews have gained the trust of employers in the tech industry in terms of checking software engineer candidates’ actual coding skills, culture fits, and language. But you don’t need to book separate interviews to assess those candidates’ mentioned skills and capacities.

The following is how we manage to vet tech candidates for our clients in two sittings:

• IT recruiters get in touch with candidates about their availability for the interview.
  
• IT recruiters gather PIC of English assessment, Algorithm test, and Technical interview’s schedule, choose out the time slot that works for both the candidate and interviewers.
  
• IT recruiters inform the candidate and interviewers of the first sitting’s date and time.
  
• IT recruiters conduct the first sitting: the candidate goes through the English assessment, Algorithm test, and Technical interview.
  
• IT recruiters send out qualified candidates with assessment results to clients. 
  
• The second sitting is set for re-evaluation from the client.

Though there’s a lot for the recruitment team to do, sticking with the two interviews helps us ensure the vetting’s quality while saving time for both our clients and candidates.

Over–interview

There’s a huge difference between making good use of interviews and overusing them. It is not convincing enough to determine the qualifications of a software engineer just by looking at his resume. An interview can play a big role in assessing the candidate’s actual skills, experience and personality. But this doesn’t mean all the vetting steps have to be interviews.

If your company is building a project that requires pretty much time for doing research on a specific topic, or skills, the candidate’s performance on your take-home assignment can be more helpful for your evaluation than a time-limited interview. 

Put steps into the right order

Rearranging candidates’ assessments in a more coherent order can save employers lots of time and effort. Here’s the order that helps ease our candidates’ and folks’ hectic schedules:

We put the 1-1 English interview as our first round of elimination. Candidates need to pass this interview before going to the next round – the algorithm test, followed by a technical interview with the Tech lead. So no wasting time for employers to shortlist unfit candidates. Also, uninterested candidates can start proceeding with other job opportunities that match their profiles.

How long should your hiring process be?

You have the list of assessing rounds and their formats. Now it’s time for each step’s duration setting.

Our 1-sitting vetting process usually lasts 2 hours:

• 30-minute English assessment: From our experience, 30 minutes should be enough to check candidates’ English skills. For more details on this, you may want to check the piece: A deep dive into our tech candidate shortlisting process
  
• One hour for Algorithm test: The test consists of 3 parts to grade levels of candidates from junior to senior and is taken online with the interviewer’s observations to ensure transparency.
  
• We use the 30 minutes left for a 1-1 technical interview: Candidates will be interviewed by our tech lead and receive the take-home assignments if required.

You’re all caught up!

Now it’s time to make a productive hiring process and ready to grab for your team great tech talent. Have a question regarding what we do to help our client hire and manage remote software engineers in Vietnam? Leave a message here, and we’ll be in touch shortly.