Finding The Right Tech Candidate In 4 Steps

When searching for qualified IT experts, the greatest challenge for many companies is to assess the qualification level of the individual candidates. Moreover, the lack of expertise on the part of recruiters and agencies often leads to unsatisfactory experiences for applicants.

Frequently, the recruiting process only focuses on the candidate's CV or previous employers. However, since many qualified IT professionals have acquired their knowledge through self-study or on the job, the CV alone is not conclusive. That is why at expertlead, together with our community, we have developed a multi-level quality screening to guarantee that candidates have the necessary skills and requirements for your project.

The screening process involves experienced members who are already part of the community and have successfully completed the testing, assessing the skills of other IT experts in a 90-minute interview. Thanks to our community of experienced IT freelancers, expertlead is able to screen almost the entire range of technical skills required in IT projects today.

Our quality screening process consists of four components, which we will discuss in more detail in the following article:

1. Personality Interview

In contrast to most other testing methods, we closely examine the soft skills of a candidate during a one-on-one personality interview.

During this first interview the following points are examined:

• Language skills: in which languages does the candidate have the necessary skills to work in?
• Communication skills: How easy is it for the candidate to communicate his progress, suggestions or problems?
• Motivation: What drives the candidate?
• Project experience: What expertise could the freelancer gain in past projects? In which fields has he been working?
• Flexibility: How well does the expert react to short-term changes and requests?
• Ability to work in a team: Initial test of the candidates ability to work in a team.

2. Coding Test

A coding test is the second step of our quality screening process. In this test, which takes several hours, developers demonstrate their technical skills. For each tech area there are dedicated tests (Frontend/Backend/Mobile/Data Science etc.), which we develop together with our community of IT experts and update continuously. The evaluation of the test results occurs automatically.

3. Technical Peer-to-Peer Interview

The IT landscape is very complex and constantly evolving. This makes it difficult to find a testing solution that is capable of assessing the various tech stacks, programming languages and frameworks, and at the same time give candidates the feeling that their skills are being assessed by an expert in their field.

In order to guarantee a positive candidate experience and to speed up the recruiting process and make it as efficient as possible, we have developed a unique Peer-2-Peer Interview methodology. Here, experienced IT experts who have already joined the expertlead community assess the skills of potential candidates in a 90-minute interview. This technical interview consists of a theoretical part and a practical part. The practical part consists of a live coding session. This methodology allows the experts to assess the coding skill and speed of candidates under real life conditions. Further, it enables them to see if candidates are able to quickly find alternative solutions and communicate these to their peers. The exact composition of a test is determined by the area and specialisation that is being tested. Consequently, the interview set up for a Back End Go Developer will differ greatly from the interview of a Python Data Analyst.

expertlead selects a suitable expert from its community that is capable of assessing someone's skills in the respective technical area. This requires them to be at least as technically knowledgeable as the candidate. Assuring the two parties are at least on eye level has two benefits. One, the quality screening can securely determine the candidates skill level, and two the candidate has a positive screening experience.

4. Continuous Quality Control

To ensure our high quality standards, we collect feedback from our customers after the completion of each project. Both the project manager and the team members give us an impression of how the collaboration went. Using a standardised feedback method, we continuously monitor the progress of our community to ensure they are keeping up with the fast developing IT Industry.

Together these four steps allow to eliminate the risk of wrong hires, while simultaneously significantly reducing the time to hire for companies looking to reach their ambitious tech road maps.