Challenges in Hiring Programmers

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Aug 13, 2012, 04:00 ET

LONDON and WARSAW, August 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Software development companies and corporations with high IT demands are facing challenges in effectively identifying candidates with suitable programming skills. Recruiters for such companies do not have appropriate tools in place to help them distinguish the good from the bad. This leads to high rejection rates because candidates' programming abilities are just not good enough, or the wrong person being hired for the role.

According to a recent Forbes article^[1], a mishire can cost a company about USD25k, so it is crucial to have the right processes and tools to enable companies to hire the right person. In order to properly vet each candidate, the company would have to devote hours of the precious time of an experienced senior technical staff member to assess each candidate's technical abilities. This is highly inefficient and wasteful of valuable human resources.

Overwork Your HR or Overly Stringent Requirements?

As for organisations that are flooded with too many applicants, they must employ overly stringent requirements or mechanisms to find the right candidates. This will definitely cause the company to filter out some candidates with strong programming skills who might not have the most illustrious résumé or past experience. Take the example of Google: they receive about 1 million résumés per year^[2] but only hire about 1,000 to 4,000 employees annually. Imagine the amount of work Google needs to do to look through each résumé; and imagine, too, the number of good programmers who have been overlooked.

Optimise the Hiring Process

Codility (http://codility.com/), a web-based system for screening candidates for programming jobs, can be used to improve the hiring process. Codility enables companies to verify the programming skills of candidates in automated way, even for very large numbers of candidates. Moreover, recruiters who do not have the necessary specialised IT and programming knowledge can use Codility to screen candidates for their clients, thus adding more value to their services.

Simulated Work Environment Methodology

The successful methodology used in technical screening must simulate a natural programming environment. This is achieved with Codility by allowing the candidate to write and submit, using their web browser, a small snippet of code to solve a particular task. In the backend, the candidate's code will be compiled and tested not merely for correctness but also for performance, to determine the efficiency of the candidate's solution. Codility has a large database of categorised aptitude tests. Tests are language-independent and can be administered in any of 14 of the most popular programming languages.

Comprehensive Reporting

A practical report on a candidate's programming skills needs to clearly assess two aspects: whether the candidate's solutions work correctly and whether they can handle large amounts of data efficiently. Codility (https://codility.com/) achieves these goals through careful usability design and the proprietary code assessment technology. Codility tests have been proven to save approximately two hours of a recruiter's time per screened candidate. The Codility test report is not only a valuable filtering tool, but it also serves as a starting point for a technical interview, since it includes the candidate's coding samples along with precise assessments of correctness and scalability.

Focus on Candidates

Customers of Codility have reported that they save up to 100 hours compared with their previous hiring process. This significantly reduces the cost of screening candidates for programming jobs. For face-to-face interviews, companies can devote more of their time and effort to understanding other aspects of the candidate that are important to be a good or even great employee.

Applicable Everywhere

The need for qualified technical talent exists almost everywhere - from small start-ups to financial institutions, universities to retailers. Codility clients reflect this diversity. Codility has helped to optimise the recruitment processes of blue-chips (such as Amazon, Samsung, PayPal, Opera, Nokia and Siemens), financial services providers (e.g. DebtX, Fidessa, Asurion), research institutions (Oxford University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and hundreds of start-ups (including Shopify, eHarmony, iSocket and Playfire).

For more information about Codility's services and methodology or free demo, call

+44 (0) 208 970 78 68 or +1 855 888 58 80 email [email protected] or visit the Codility website at https://codility.com/

Footnotes

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkwilliams/2012/06/05/dealing-with-a-bad-hire-the-case-to-teach-and-adapt-rather-than-fire/

[2] http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-job-at-google-interview-questions-hiring-process.html

Press information available from:
Dominika Sobantka at Codility
E. [email protected], T. +44-(0) 208-970-78-68

SOURCE Codility