Eliminating Bad Hires: The Role of Technical Screening
Getting things right in hiring has never been more important in today’s competitive tech landscape. Putting someone who won’t fit into your organization in place can take time, and might even cost the organization financially, while also impacting team morale, productivity and project timelines. The product of technical screening has turned out to be a rock solid part of any effective hiring procedures, allowing companies to screen out undesirable candidates and quickly and effectively find good ones. In this article I explore the necessity of technical screening, and how modern approaches, including interview as a service platforms, are changing how we hire.
The True Cost of Bad Hires
The consequences of having bad technical hires can be so far reaching that financial impact is just a small contribution. One doesn’t need to be an expert in problem solving to figure out that bringing an unsuccessful candidate to the technical team would reduce productivity, increase supervision requirements and cause a delay to project deliverables. Industry studies reveal that a bad hire could cost companies between 30 and 150 percent of the employee’s annual salary — as recruiters, onboarding and replacement costs.
Additionally, team dynamics can have a very serious impact. There is no greater way to cause additional workload for others than that of a technically incompetent team member. It can lead to the loss of other valuable team members in the worst case situations, either because they become overwhelmed, or because they are not satisfied with the situation at hand.
The Evolution of Technical Screening
Actual technical screening methods were traditionally based upon resume review and basic technical interview. Nevertheless, these approaches were found not to sufficiently capture a candidate’s practical skills or problem solving abilities. Modern technical screening now takes place through a more complete set of evaluation methods such as code assessments, pair programming sessions and problem solving real world use cases.
The increasing adoption of sophisticated technical screening tools and platforms has accelerated the rise of remote work. Regardless of location, now companies use other technologies to gauge as to how proficient candidates were with their technical skills. The result of this evolution is a wave of specialized services and platforms devoted to technical interviewing.
Interview as a Service: A Game-Changing Approach
Interview as a Service (IaaS) has become a revolutionary technical hiring solution. This approach outsources the technical interviewing process to special providers who have a pool of interviewers in various technical domains. These services offer several advantages:
Standardization & Consistency
Through standardized evaluation frameworks, IaaS providers also implement the same types of assessment criteria on all candidates. This standardization reduces bias and hence gives more accurate hiring decisions.
Access to Expert Interviewers
It allows companies to access a rich pool of technical experts, with each having detail on different technologies and domains. These interviewers have depth of knowledge and experience that may not be in the organization internally.
Scalability and Flexibility
With this feature, the hiring efforts that organizations put into play can be easily scaled up or down without any worries over interviewer bandwidth. This is especially useful for companies that are growing very quickly or have surprised hiring requirements throughout the year.
Components of Effective Technical Screening
A comprehensive technical screening process typically includes several key components that work together to provide a thorough evaluation of candidates:
Technical Skills Assessment
This is solved practically via (coding) tests, algorithm challenges, and domain specific problems, to evaluate a candidate’s technical capabilities. Automated grading, analysis of these assessments, and objective insight about a candidate’s coding abilities, all are made possible by modern platforms.
System Design Evaluation
System design challenges are used to assess a candidate’s capability of designing systems and making high level technical decisions for more senior roles. Often these evaluations involve talking about scalability, performance, and trade-offs in system design.
Soft Skills Assessment
The coding ability is not the only skill to be technically screened for. All these are equally important. These aspects should be trained in so that technical interviewers can evaluate them in the screening process.
Technical Interviewing: Best Practices
To maximize the effectiveness of technical interviewing, organizations should follow several best practices:
Clear Evaluation Criteria
Set up clear standards for evaluation, by role. These should map or, at the very least, explain the technical requirements of the job and company.
Realistic Scenarios
Instead of abstract puzzles, use real world problems and scenarios in technical assessments. This approach is closer to the real work world and real challenges candidates will encounter.
Consistent Process
Keep the screening process the same for all candidates. This includes matching questions, time allocations and value criteria between tests.
Technical Study of the Future
Technical screening is an area which is changing constantly with new technologies and methods. Candidates evaluation is beginning to involve larger roles of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning used to identify patterns and predict success factors. But that doesn’t mean they should replace human judgment in making hires.
Other technologies, such as virtual reality, and augmented reality, are also becoming viable in the creation of more immersive technical assessment environments. Potential benefits that can even offer more realistic evaluations of candidates’ technical capability and problem solving skills.
Implementation Challenges and Solutions
There are many benefits from technical screening, but getting a good screening process in place is something not to be ignored. However, time constraints, resource limitation, and consistency across interviewers for different organizations are frequently an issue.
To address these challenges, companies can:
- Connect with established Interview as a Service providerso you can leverage their expertise in interviewers and standard processes.
- Train internally based interviewers to keep standards of evaluation consistent.
- Take advantage of modern, technical screening platforms with automated assessments.
- Review and update screening processes regularly and in response to feedback and cohorts’ outcomes.
Measuring Success Using Technical Screening
All technical screening process execution must be monitored and evaluated for effectiveness. Key metrics to track include:
- Time-to-hire
- Performance reviews of hired candidates (as a measure of quality of hired candidates).
- New hire retention rates
- Team feedback on new hires
- Success rates with new team members for project
Conclusion
Eliminating bad hires and building a good technical team is very much dependent on technical screening. A combination of traditional interview methods and Interview as a Service with optimizing your screening platform brings organisations great power to find and hire the best technical talent.
With technology progressing as it does, technical screening will become even more important. Organizations that invest in building strong technical screening processes, better position them to build a strong technical team and keep the competitive edge in the market.
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