Most relevant hiring startup challenges?
Hiring a developer is a long-drawn process – or at least it should be if you are intent on finding the right candidate.
Most HR professionals and IT engineers shirk embarking on this journey that can prove tedious and unproductive. Besides, with candidates, it’s not always WYSIWYG. Frequently the opposite tends to happen.
How candidates appear on paper, interact with you during an interview, and solve test problems are far from indicative of how they will perform in their roles. Trumped-up references to shaky technical skills sometimes lurk underneath glossy resumes. Then there’s the sought-after “fits the company culture” trait – a yeti if ever there was one.
Startup hiring challenges are a common pain point in the tech industry. In this article, we present you with solutions to those challenges so you can easily find and hire the developers you need.
What Are The Hiring Startup Challenges In IT recruitment?
Recruitment challenges at tech product based companies are a given. But why is it difficult to recruit developers, exactly?
Being a remote recruitment agency, DistantJob has helped many clients trying to find and hire a developer on their own. When hiring for startups, our clients constantly point out the same difficulties when trying to find someone:
- “The recruiting talent pool is very small”
- “The market is very tough, startups, big IT companies are our competitors. It’s a challenge.”
- “The most difficult part is finding the right candidate.”
- “Our bar is very high.”
- “A good fit. We can take it slow, but we need a good fit.”
- “We need our candidate to fit into our culture. We want to have fun, but don’t do gimmicks.”
- “Where can we find an all-rounder, brilliant, great communicator, great culture fit, and has the right values?”
Have you felt similar pains? We sympathize. Let’s see what you can actually do about it!
What Are The 3 Hiring Startup Challenges On Recruitment?
Here are the top 3 reasons why hiring programmers and developers is difficult, from extensive experience with our clients:
- Not looking in the right place: Job sites, local recruitment agencies, and companies’ networks are the customary places to look. But your options will be severely limited if you only consider those avenues. Those are already the places where your competitors look through, so you’ll have a harder time finding candidates if you’re not playing at the same level as they are.
- Not asking the right interview questions: A good developer can limit himself to knowing just one common language, like Java, whereas a mediocre candidate can read Ruby for Dummies and call himself an expert. Testing a candidate on broad software development and programming skills is as important, if not more, than a specific language.
- Not looking for the right traits: A group of developers with the same skills and traits is a formula for trouble. An efficient team is a diverse team of easy adapters, team players, and lone wolves.
A troubling trend DistantJob has noticed is how developers prepare to ace interviews – even if their skills and talent don’t extend to much else beyond that prep. Books, websites, and interview problems are all at the disposal of developers. Acing an interview is no guarantee of acing the actual job.
Geographical Hiring Challenges
One of the challenges when hiring a developer that companies often experience is that they have no idea where to look for developers – mostly because they aren’t looking outside the local market.
If a small talent pool is a problem you’re facing, it’s time to stop looking locally and broaden your search
There is a plethora of talented developers all across the world.Hiring developers is no longer a local affair – it’s all about top-notch talent from any corner of the globe – who are just as capable of handling your specific requirements as anyone you can find within the country.
But hiring foreign talent is also part of the current hiring challenges of the global market. Bringing a foreign worker into the country entails its flurry of activities that can be an issue to even the more prepared hiring departments.
HIB visas[1] , visa caps that are promptly met, rules and regulations such as leaving the position open for local hires, paying relocation cost, fines if you break any of these rules – and all for a maximum of six years before the visa expires.
It’s not worth the trouble, especially when a much more straightforward and efficient way exists.That way, of course, is hiring a developer from anywhere in the world to work remotely for you.
And if you’re not sure how to go about that – it’s a one-step process: get in touch with us to tell us what you need, and we’ll do the rest.
Interview Challenges
Hiring challenges in technology, when it comes to assessing candidates, always comes down to two main factors: the people conducting the assessment and the assessments themselves.
Your recruitment team will not only need to stay on top of the technology to operate on your company’s field, but also the hiring methods best suited for that field. This knowledge is imperative when interacting with your candidates in interviews to both impress them and also avoid mistakes that could cost you potentially great developers.
The main reason why recruitment is often so difficult in IT is because most recruitment teams have no one in their midst with tech backgrounds, which makes attracting and assessing candidates extremely hard. For this reason, you should focus on hiring or delegating your recruitment to tech-savvy professionals.
Skill And Talent Acquisition Challenges
Finding the right candidate is not only a matter of their location or how they perform in interviews, but also of their skills. Interviews by themselves will never be a sufficient metric to find out if a candidate is fit for the job. It’s important to establish their know-how to find out if they have the right skill set to succeed.
One of the best ways of complementing your interviews is through coding challenges. These offer a great way to not only test their coding skills, but also evaluate how they function in a potential team dynamic. Preparing these coding challenges requires a knowledgeable person in the field already, since you’ll want a custom tailored challenge for your specific needs. Generic coding challenges will tell you about the candidate’s overall coding skill, but very little about the specific skills relevant for the job position you want them to fill.
Why DistantJob is Your Choice Weapon For Your Startup Hiring Challenges
Hiring developers challenges not only the candidates themselves, but also the staff responsible for recruiting those developers in the first place. What makes us better at hiring a developer and surpassing our competitors is our recruitment team. In the guise of recruiters, they are senior developers with the right connection, knowledge, and insight that they wield to find the remote candidate perfect for you.
Be it combing through long lists of developers expert in conventional languages like Java and PHP or discovering a talent familiar with esoteric programming languages – our recruiters, aka developers, know where to look, what to look for, and what questions to ask.
They design proprietary problems for would-be candidates to solve – not copied off of anywhere, but designed keeping your specifications in mind. This helps us pare down an already-viable list to the top 3-5 candidates whom we present to you.
And if our picks don’t happen to meet your expectations – don’t expect a counter-argument from us. Instead of forcing our choice, we’ll only redouble our efforts and look harder for the right candidate.
We also highly stress the importance of culture fit in our recruitment process, because we know how important that is to our clients. And the bottom line of any culture is communication because it’s the one element that makes culture happen.
So, what are the biggest challenges that you face today when hiring? Odds are, DistantJob has a solution tailor-made for you and your business that will fill that open position in less than three weeks. Hiring a developer has never been easier when you have DistantJob working for you. Access our hiring page today!
