Online Recruiting Experience

For a year now I have been working as a recruiter in an international startup. And, it seems, she is ready to share some of the problems that “recruiters” girls encounter, rushing between “personnel solve everything” and “we have no irreplaceable” Everyone needs qualified employees, imputed, and to come to work yesterday. But where and how to look for them?

It would seem that employees of IT-companies in an advantageous position. The XXI century is in the courtyard, the Internet is even in the outback, and programmers can somehow write a resume and place it where recruiters read it. Moreover, for programmers, unlike cashiers or carpenters, remote work is also suitable. But it was not there. Practice shows that finding a programmer is not so easy. Why?

Reasons for the failures

First of all, programmers do not hang out in one place. There is no such site that would collect summaries of all developers in the world, or at least take into account their professional interests. Habitats are determined by language, place of residence, personal interests: both in programming and outside it. Moreover, enthusiastic programmers who are not engaged in an urgent job search may not entertain anything at all. They just work. And when they suddenly think about changing jobs, they write not a resume, but emails to their buddies - employees of the companies they need.

However, there is a place for a large concentration of potential programmers. Lots of. It is necessary to manually shovel and analyze dozens of sites and thousands of resumes. And even the most efficient recruiters still cannot find all suitable programmers. Even in a separate region, not to mention a country or a few. This is a titanic work that does not always lead to adequate effort results.
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In addition, there is no unified system of professional classification. It is unclear at what point junior developer becomes senior, and by what external characteristics (besides the years spent and salary expectations) these categories differ in practice.

The list of 25 programming languages ​​and technologies in the resume can mean a tremendous experience, but more often it is a list of all the keywords familiar to the applicant.

The heading “department head” can mean both the superprofessional and the one who has already forgotten how to program, and remember how to command.

It is also difficult to determine what is the determining factor for the level of a programmer: education, work experience, the number of jobs in a portfolio.

You can, of course, give the search at the mercy of professionals: recruitment and outsourcing agencies. But their search engine is not much different from what I would have spent on my own. They just have more people and time. And the saddest thing is that the money spent on agency services will not always lead to success and fill the office (whether important or real or virtual) with the experts of the required level.

Of course, a lot of solutions. For example, a program that analyzes all resumes on the web and lists the most appropriate has become a very “programmer” option. But such a search is more suitable for closing a large number of jobs for low-skilled specialists. Programmers - employees piece.

Experiment: search through competition

Using all the “traditional” ways of finding employees, and seeing their strengths and weaknesses, Hola came up with its own way: to search for remote employees through contests - programming tasks.

There are several advantages:

• having read about the competition on the profile site, interested programmers come themselves, and they even bring friends,
• only the most purposeful try to solve the problem: puzzle lovers, professionals who are easy-going and not afraid of experiments.

The first experience was the task in the C language. It seemed very simple, but in fact it was not at all. In addition, the criteria for evaluating the correct decision were initially subjective. For a couple of years of the existence of the task, Hola received several thousand solution options. And not much less than letters and comments with criticism.

After summing up the winners turned out to be about 70, and several of them became employees of Hola. The rest received prizes, but for various reasons did not join the ranks of Hola programmers.

Taking into account previous mistakes, Hola started the next contest about JavaScript . It will continue until the end of June. The task seems to be very difficult, although the level practically does not differ from the first. Evaluation criteria have become clearer. So far we have received several dozen letters, but it is already clear that most of the solutions are of a very high level. With some programmers, we have already begun negotiations on cooperation.

The practice of finding remote employees gives good results. Over the past couple of years, Hola has employees in Norway, Russia, Ukraine and even China. Some of them leave: it does not withstand the stresses and specifics of remote work (not everyone can properly organize themselves and their time). But those who stay are perfect Hola. So - we continue the search.

If you have constructive suggestions or questions - share in the comments, we will be happy to answer.