Kumari Trishya

The business world has seen more paradigm shifts in the last couple of years than typically seen in a decade. We have seen everything from rising demand for remote work to mass layoffs.

Amidst all this, talent acquisition teams face several recruitment challenges to find suitable candidates for their organizations.

With changing needs of employees, changing technology, and ever-evolving recruitment strategies, recruiters have their work cut out for them. Therefore, companies must be proactive in attracting and retaining the best talent.

It is essential to understand the challenges faced by recruiters and the strategies they can use to ensure successful talent acquisition.

This blog post spells out the challenges faced in talent acquisition, changing needs of the employees, reasons for failing recruitment strategies, and five tips by recruiters to fix recruitment strategies in 2023.

Challenges faced in talent acquisition

As recruiters and employers continue to look ahead to 2023, one of the most significant recruitment difficulties they face is successfully managing talent acquisition. Among these hiring challenges, the following are the most prominent ones:

Not meeting the changing needs of employees

Recruiting expectations continue to evolve as the workforce changes.

For example, employers are looking for candidates with better education, more experience, and the right technical skills to get the job done.

This means that recruiters must have the necessary tools and processes in place to ensure they are identifying the best possible candidates. We will focus more on these changing needs of employees in the next section.

Failure of existing recruitment strategies

Recruitment failure is often a product of too long or cumbersome processes, which can lead to missed opportunities to hire the right people.

Additionally, if recruiters don’t have the right tools, they may struggle to identify suitable candidates or find enough time to assess them properly, leading to a major increase in the time-to-hire metric. This can result in a high turnover rate, which can cause further disruption and strain on resources.

Also, read: 10 Key Employee Retention Strategies In Tech

Staying ahead of the competition

Employers want to ensure they can source and hire the best candidates. As a result, there’s a great deal of competition when it comes to hiring top talent. This means you need to have a recruitment strategy that is both proactive and agile.

Additionally, recruiters must be prepared to act quickly when suitable candidates become available. This is vital to capitalize on any potential opportunities.

Now let’s learn more about the changing needs of employees.

Changing needs of the employees

Today’s employees are looking for more than just a paycheck. They want a job that offers them meaningful work and opportunities to grow their careers.

Some more things on the checklist to derive more value from work include:

• Committed to creating a workplace that values diversity and inclusion
• Allows for flexible hours
• Provides opportunities for personal development

Employees want to avoid being confined to a corporate position that will kill their energies. Additionally, businesses are reconsidering their positions’ benefits and considering how these candidates would see them in the post-pandemic society.

To achieve this they must identify potential hires’ desired skills, roles, and experiences and build recruitment strategies around those criteria.

Additionally, businesses should consider leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to automate mundane recruitment tasks and enable recruiters to focus on meaningful conversations with potential hires.

By recognizing the unique needs of today’s employees and investing in technology-driven solutions that cater to those needs, businesses can increase their chances of finding the perfect candidate for the job.

But before that, it’s vital to identify the reasons behind your current recruitment strategy that is not bringing in results.

Reasons why your recruitment strategy is failing

Recruitment strategies can fail due to a variety of reasons. Some of these might be out of your control as a recruiter. However, there are some that you can identify and work on.

Some of the most common, fixable reasons behind a failing recruitment strategy are as follows:

Lack of focus on building an employer brand

Establishing a competitive advantage in the labor market depends heavily on your ‘Employer Brand.‘ Nowadays, prospective employees frequently read reviews of a company before applying. According to CareerArc’s 2021 Future of Recruiting Study, 82% of candidates consider the employer brand and reputation of a company before applying for the job.

So, if they discover that you have a weak employer brand, it may discourage them from sharing their application.

Content marketing can be an insanely successful approach to increase brand recognition and amplify it. That’s why recruiters need to identify its value. Publishing insightful and helpful information for users can aid in creating enduring relationships with applicants.

Also, read: How Tech Recruiters Can Build Better Employer Branding With Marketing

Lack of clarity regarding your target audience

The people who meet the criteria for a given post regarding applicable skills, qualifications, work experience, and values are your target audience as a recruiter.

Before starting a recruiting drive, it is crucial to identify your target audience. It aids in the creation of recruitment messages that are relevant to the target talent. Additionally, it gives you access to places with a higher probability of locating potential employees.

Making a candidate persona for each position you’re trying to fill will help you pinpoint your target market. The candidate persona is a fictitious depiction of the ideal applicant for a given job.

Building a recruitment strategy that attracts suitable candidates is simpler when you know your target audience. This results in a more productive workforce.

Lack of focus on candidate experience

One of the most common reasons recruitment strategies fail is a lack of focus on the candidate’s experience.

As the job market has become increasingly competitive, recruiters must ensure that candidates have a positive experience throughout the recruitment process.

This means providing clear communication and ensuring they understand their roles and responsibilities before taking on a job.

If this isn’t done correctly, candidates may feel discouraged and look elsewhere for opportunities. Good candidate experience is non-negotiable!

Also, read: 5 Steps To Create A Remote-First Candidate Experience In Recruitment

Lack of proper candidate outreach

This can be especially true when recruiting remotely. Without appropriate methods of reaching out to potential candidates, recruiters could miss out on top talent that would otherwise be interested in their positions.

Additionally, without proper outreach, recruiters may lose qualified applicants overwhelmed by competing offers from other companies.

Things to consider when fixing your recruitment strategy

Talent acquisition solutions must keep up with employees’ changing needs to attract top talent. Companies need to invest in solutions tailored to their industry and flexible enough to meet the unique requirements of each potential hire.

Fortunately, some proven tips can help you fix your talent acquisition issues in 2023.

Here are five tips from recruiters to help you fix your recruitment strategy:

Leverage technology

Technology has made it easier for recruiters to find qualified candidates quickly and efficiently. Utilize the latest tools such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and more to streamline the recruitment process and save time.

For instance, you can turn to a leading plug-and-play technical recruitment solution in HackerEarth.

HackerEarth comes with the integration of major ATS providers. You can drive true innovation with the assortment of virtual tech hiring tools offered by HackerEarth.

Analyze data

You can’t make the right hiring strategy without analyzing data. Use analytics to gain insight into past recruitment efforts and develop strategies based on the data you find.

By understanding the information provided by your current recruitment methods, you can create a plan that fits your goals.

Also, read: Data-Driven Recruiting: All You Need To Know

Communicate your goals

Make sure everyone involved in the recruitment process is on the same page. Be sure to communicate your desired outcomes and expectations. This is vital to allow each team member to better understand what success looks like.

Offer training opportunities

Train new hires on their roles and responsibilities to ensure they have the skills necessary for success. Ongoing training and development are critical for retention, so investing in employee growth can pay off in the long run.

HackerEarth understands the value of upskilling employees and provides tailored learning paths.

Embrace diversity and inclusion

One of the best ways to ensure successful talent acquisition is by fostering a diverse and inclusive environment.

Diversity in backgrounds, experience, and perspectives can open up opportunities for better candidates, which will ultimately help your organization thrive.

Conclusion

The best way to turn your failing recruitment strategy around is by identifying the possible challenges you might face. Once you have identified the major challenges of internal recruitment in your company, you can take the required steps.

By using the above-mentioned tips, you should be able to develop a comprehensive recruitment strategy.

Don’t fear taking risks and embrace innovation as you try new strategies – they could be the key to a successful recruitment campaign!

Skill assessment software has become the new buzzword in the software development industry. Recruiters are looking for highly skilled candidates to handle their software development duties. The market for systems integration, software, and IoT hardware has reached $520 billion as of 2021 compared to $235 billion in 2017 and is expected to continue the trend for many years. As a result, the demand for talented software developers is witnessing unprecedented growth.

While the number of software developers globally is estimated to reach 28.7 million by 2024, this number falls woefully short of the required levels. As the demand for software developers shows no signs of abating, recruiters are eager to hire qualified software developers.

Are you also looking to hire the best software developer to grow your business? How can you ensure that the candidate you select best fits the role?

You need to find a well-rounded candidate that is sufficiently qualified in both hard and soft skills. Asking the right technical interview questions when recruiting developers is important but so is clear communication, good work ethic, and alignment with your organization’s goals.

First, let’s tackle the technical expertise of a candidate, which can be determined with a coding assessment platform. It is one of the most popular skill assessment tools as it offers recruiters direct insight into the candidate’s skill set.

What are developer technical skills testing software?

Technical Skills Assessment Software solutions are used by companies to ascertain the candidates’ technical skills. Recruiters use these platforms to test the technical skills of the candidates, like coding, while shortlisting prospective employees for technical roles. Software developer assessment platforms are widely used for pre-employment testing as they offer the flexibility to set difficulty levels, select the coding language, and then rank the candidates based purely on performance. As a result, companies can eliminate candidates who do not possess the necessary skill sets from the recruitment process.

A coding assessment platform is nowadays an integral part of the recruitment process as it allows for live coding interviews as well. Moreover, these software solutions also support remote interviewing for different technical profiles. A technical talent assessment platform comes with an in-built video feature to facilitate remote interviews. Alternatively, the software can also integrate with a suitable video call platform.

Why companies are using technical assessment software to hire the right talent

Most software development companies use skill assessment software to complete the coding assessment for candidates who have applied for the vacancy. These platforms allow the companies to screen out unsuitable candidates at the outset, allowing the time and flexibility to select the best developers for the available profiles.

Higher accuracy

Technical assessments are quickly replacing traditional interviews in software developer assessment. Technical assessment software ensures higher accuracy while selecting candidates for specific profiles. The results of such a skill assessment are free from bias and are more reliable. Moreover, these tests help with the long-term prospects of the candidate in the given profile.

Real-time assessment

Skill assessment software allows recruiters to test the coding abilities of a candidate in real-world scenarios. This helps ensure that the shortlisted candidates possess all the required skills that the job demands. A technical assessment of a candidate’s skills offers deep insights into their ability to cope with the demands of the job.

Quicker and accurate

Completing a software developer assessment through technical assessment software is much quicker and more accurate than any other option that recruiters can use. These assessments are conducted at pre-interview levels and most often can be completed online. As a result, recruiters get insights into the skill set of the candidates before the interview stage, thereby allowing for shortlisting of the most suitable candidates only. Hence, the recruitment processes can be expedited through this approach.

Interesting recruitment process

An online assessment platform enables the recruiters to define the coding language and difficulty level per the requirements. This feature makes the assessment test an interesting experience for the candidates as well as for the recruiters. By eliminating mundane recruitment processes, these platforms allow the recruiters to shortlist the candidates based on purely their performance in the technical test.

Better employee retention

Online skills assessment software allows recruiters to accurately match candidates with suitable job profiles. As the candidates possess the required skills for a given profile, they enjoy better job satisfaction when they start working. As a result, employees are more likely to continue working with the company for an extended duration as their skill sets perfectly match the job requirements.

Also Read: 6 things to look for in your coding assessment tool

How does online skills assessment software work?

A skill assessment software tests a candidate’s expected skills through an engaging user flow. Recruiters can get rid of multiple offline hiring stages with the help of online skills assessment software. Moreover, these software solutions empower informed decision-making by ensuring transparency around the performance of every candidate. Here is a summary of how online skills assessment software works: –

• Define the parameters: – First, you must select the coding language and difficulty level required for the test. You can also define the good and bad answers to help the platform grade the candidates accurately
• Invite candidates: – You can invite the candidate through email or share a direct link on the recruitment page with the candidate. You can also monitor the progress of the candidates through this software
• Check the result: – After the coding assessment has been completed, you can check the performance of candidates in the software. The candidates will be ranked based on the parameters defined by you
• Finalize a decision: – After you have assessed the performance of different candidates, it is time to make a final decision. You can email the candidates with details related to the further selection process

Also, read: Some technical interview questions that you should ask potential software engineers when interviewing

Go beyond the technical: Soft skills the right talent needs

Now that you know how to ascertain the technical knowledge of your candidates, let’s take a look at some of the behavioral aspects of a candidate that sets them apart from the rest.

Communication

Communication skills are crucial while assessing the skills of your new hire. When working on a new project, developers must know how to start, the what, why, and how of the project for successful completion. And this happens when they ace at written and verbal communication well.

Oral communication: Imagine a developer reviewing a code for errors based on their manager’s instructions. Now, they have to explain where they found the error and how they are planning to improve it. This requires the developer to communicate their explanation in a simpler way that clarifies all the doubts.

Written communication: Beyond the documentation, your full-time developer needs to communicate over email and Slack messages. So, check how clearly they can communicate their written message.

To identify whether the developer you’re hiring is good at communication, do this:

• Set up scrum meetings with the hiring managers and observe the interaction style of the developer
• Get them to write emails and see how clear they are in their written communication

Also, read: Ask the right interview questions to reveal a candidate’s personality

Leadership

While working on an important project, your team needs to take the final call— sometimes without their team leader too. That’s where they need to have the in-built leadership trait in them to ease the work.

To analyze this trait while hiring your next developer, don’t *just* emphasize asking them technical questions but also ask them about their life experiences where they displayed ownership and leadership qualities. Listening to their responses, you can identify how good leadership skills they have.

Also, read: What Leadership Means To Us At HackerEarth

Skill assessment software solutions are designed to transform how hiring processes for technical profiles are completed. Armed with such solutions and ensuring to test candidates for culture fit, recruiters are in a better position to select the best candidates in an unbiased manner.

Remember, a mix of strong technical skills and interpersonal qualities is how you spot good candidates for your tech teams.

Some days ago, we polled our Twitter and LinkedIn community and asked them if they would ever take another job at the company that laid them off. This was the result.

The two years of the pandemic (2020-2022) saw 1100+ companies globally laying off employees. In the first 8 months of 2022, we reached half that number with 500+ companies announcing layoffs in tech in August. The number of employees who had lost their jobs globally stood at 72,900+ at the end of the month.

The massive wave of downsizing has hit every tech sector in the world. Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs have reduced their employee size, with BofA and JPMorgan saying they are being cautious. Meta, Twitter, Netflix, Noom, Wipro, and Oracle are just some of the tech names that have had to let go of their workforce. Nordstrom, Wells Fargo, Beyond Meat, Peloton – almost everyone has had to take these measures to preserve capital.

The question everyone is asking is – didn’t we learn anything during the pandemic?

COVID was a bonafide ‘black swan’ event that defied predictions. However, many economists have been talking about an impending recession for a while now. Despite the warning signals, most of the corporate world ended up repeating the hiring-and-firing pattern that has become the norm after macroeconomic events.

This is what normally happens during every downturn:

1. Companies go into ‘freeze’ mode. Hiring stops, budgets are cut, and perks are canceled.
2. If the company has not planned ahead, the hiring freeze very soon turns into a layoff.
3. When the market starts to rebuild, companies hire overzealously to make up for lost time and effort.
4. This overzealous hiring usually pays off in a V-shaped recession where the markets rebound sharply after a dip. Most recessions aren’t this forgiving, and companies that have hired in a rush may end up having to find ways to cut extra baggage.

Our post-COVID normal followed the same pattern as well. There is no denying that the use of technology boomed during the pandemic, causing every industry sector to adopt and focus on new tech tools.

The overwhelming consensus that ‘every company is now a tech company’ caused a sudden demand for developers. Even as we were all still coming to terms with the ‘new normal’, tech hiring (and hiring in general) burgeoned so much that top-tier talent was able to demand a 100% salary hike in an unprecedented candidate’s market.

All of which led us to this.

Tech hiring has undergone a sea change in the last two years. We have replaced outdated modes of assessment and interviews with new AI-based tools for efficiency. Remote work is the mantra we all live by. While the overall ‘work culture’ in many tech companies has become more empathetic and people-focused, this empathy has still not trickled into the way we handle layoffs in tech.

Also, read: Greeks to Geeks: What Plato Says About Bettering Your Team Culture

Airbnb garnered a lot of ‘awwws’ when CEO Brian Chesky wrote a heartfelt email to employees announcing, and apologizing, for the COVID-induced downsizing. The company even offered outplacement support, and its post-employment care strategy was among the most detailed and comprehensive that American companies were offering at that time.

Airbnb was an outlier. Most layoffs in tech that happened during COVID happened unexpectedly, without warning, and over a Zoom call or two. Reiterating what we stated in the beginning, trust issues are an undeniable outcome of such processes.

In the past decade, Nokia received a lot of praise among the developer community for its outplacement program ‘Bridge’, which was created in 2011 when the company was faced with the harsh choice of laying off employees. The program’s objective — and the metric that Nokia used to gauge success — was the percentage of employees who knew what their next step would be the day they left the company.

Nokia’s program showed the tech world that changes needn’t always be brutal and that employers have a responsibility to their employees and the communities they engage with. Using this philosophy of accountability to create processes for layoffs requires companies to be more transparent than they have ever been before, engage in constant communication with employees and local communities, and build a robust outplacement support system that does not just end with a severance package.

This need for outplacement support was called out loudly by our developer community, too.

So, what’s a better way for handling layoffs in tech?

Let’s begin by accepting that layoffs in tech are hard – for the employee who is losing their job, the recruiter or HR professional who is tasked with breaking the sad news to the team, and the company itself.

Layoffs hurt a company’s bottom line. Facts below:

• A 2012 University of Austin Texas review of 20 companies that had engaged in layoffs found that layoffs had a neutral to negative effect on stock prices in the days following the announcement.
• A related study says that the majority of companies that conducted layoffs were less profitable for up to three years after the layoff.
• A third study conducted by researchers from Auburn University, Baylor University, and the University of Texas shows that companies that conduct layoffs are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy in the next five years than companies that had found other ways to bolster profitability.

Also, read: Fear and Layoffs: How to Cope with Tech’s Uncertain Times

When we polled the recruiters in our community, they unequivocally said that hiring post a layoff is harder, as it affects the company’s branding and sourcing efforts.

So, if you are looking for alternative ways to handle layoffs in tech, or avoid getting to the point where you have to cut down your workforce, then we have some tips for you:

• Avoid reflex hiring: Most companies speed up hiring as soon as they see signs of market recovery. The term ‘hiring frenzy’ is real. Instead of going with the trend, make realistic projections for the team you want to build, and approach your hiring meticulously.
• Hire slightly below your projection: At any given time, the HackerEarth staff portfolio operates at about 90% of what we consider ‘full capacity’ or ‘ideal’. This isn’t understaffing. We have consciously decided to not hire a full house to give ourselves some breathing space and avoid a domino effect when the market changes rapidly, causing internal “accidents”.
• Invest in your team culture: If you’re not hiring specialists for every single role, then you need to staff your team with people who are willing to wear multiple hats and adapt quickly. Note, there is a thin line between hiring talent that is willing to diversify and handle multiple projects, versus overworking your team. If you tread this line carefully though, you can build a robust, multiskilled, and adaptive team that can weather market changes without breaking down.
• Invest in your team culture 2.0: Companies often refer to their workforce as a ‘valuable asset’ when things are going well. It’s ironic that you would let go of your most valuable possession in a heartbeat! Stay people-focused first and forever, so when you have to ask your teammates to step up during a crisis, they do not feel like they are being taken for granted.
• Explore all possible avenues: Job sharing (in which two people fill a single role and take home a 50% pay), furloughs, temporary pay cuts, salary rollbacks – there are many ways to budget and save money that do not involve mass layoffs.
• Plan for crisis: We all love the Google model of workplaces that offer every single amenity one can dream of (and maybe more), handsome bonuses, and whatnot. These are lovely add-ons to our work life, but they shouldn’t become addictions. When Better.com had to lay off about 900 people in 2021, the CEO admitted in an open call that the company could have done a better job of managing funds, which could have delayed – possibly prevented – the mass downsizing. The bottom line: manage your money Better.

It’s time to lay off the layoff!

My sorry attempt at wordplay aside, the way a company handles a moment of crisis says a lot about its overall culture. About 90% of the developers from HackerEarth’s community say that they would look at layoff measures as a reflection of the brand’s EQ. On the other hand, about 21% of the recruiters polled on our LinkedIn handle said that they think there’s ‘not much’ that can be done about layoffs. They are part and parcel of the job and should be treated as such.

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When Gartner surveyed more than 3,500 employees around the world in October 2021, about 65% said the pandemic had made them rethink the place that work should have in their life, and look for personal value and purpose at work. It stands to reason then that employees who think their bosses do not value them would want to look for opportunities elsewhere.

This is precisely the message you send to your employees – and the larger developer community – when you announce a mass layoff willy-nilly, and sans any support systems in place. That you don’t care. And that’s got to hurt your employer brand for sure.

Research shows that job cuts rarely help leaders achieve their goals. More often than not, layoffs are good only for short-term gain, and the cost savings are generally overshadowed by negative employer branding, loss of knowledge, reduced employee engagement, higher voluntary attrition, and reduced innovation. You might save in the short term, but most probably you will see a dip in profits, and your employee engagement, in the long run.

Here’s your chance to be a better employer and prove that the values of empathy and compassion we all talked about so much during COVID were not a ‘black swan’ event unto themselves. Here’s hoping you handle the storm differently than how everyone else is.

In the third edition of HackerEarth’s flagship tech conference – Hire 10(1), our keynote speaker from Adobe, Mr. Mino Thomas, used a word I hadn’t heard before in tech recruiting circles.

Sanguine, he said. And then Choleric. Melancholic. Phlegmatic.

I almost wondered if I had been teleported to a physician’s office. Or to the home of a literati. Fragments flashed past my eyes: Keats’ Ode on Melancholy, even the title of Garcia Marquez’s ‘Love In The Times Of Cholera’.

Until my overthinking brain stopped at the memory of Hippocrates and his theory of human humors, or personalities.

Two and a half millennia later, we were now using the ancient basis for illness to describe employee personalities, and what we could do to better team culture in the workplace.

Hippocrates, who?

The Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460 BCE–370 BCE), also known as the Father of Modern Medicine, is often credited with developing the theory of the four humors which manifest as different personality types. These personality types were dependent on four bodily fluids – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – and their influence on the body and its emotions. Along with the fluids, Hippocrates also postulated that humoral makeup and the resultant personality could also be influenced by geography in his treatise on Airs, Waters, and Places.

Also, read: Keeping Culture Alive: What Recruiters Can Do While Hiring Remotely

Interesting, hmmm….

Hippocrates’ work builds on Plato’s theories of human temperament that bridge modern personality psychology and philosophy. The vast repertoire of literature on modern psychology underlines one truth that Plato espoused: the human psyche is not unitary, but plural. Simultaneously, each of us has an innate set of values that form our core belief system. The interplay between our plural psyches or sub-egos, and our core set of values is what forms our individual personalities, and forms the basis of our neurodiversity in the community.

This is, of course, an overly simplified explanation of what philosophers both modern and old have struggled to understand. From Myers Briggs to the DISC system, there are numerous ways and tools to distill a personality into easily identifiable metrics.

Funnily enough, Hippocrates wasn’t even trying to understand personality types when he formed his theory. He was looking at the reasons behind human illness when he postulated that there are four different body fluids or ‘humors’ which govern how and when we fall sick. As a corollary to each, he also told us how each humor affected the psyche or temperament of a person.

Let’s understand these in detail.

Traits: Sanguine are known to be supremely energetic and excited and are usually highly interested in staying on the go. They are usually the most social of the lot and tend to make a lot of friends easily. On the flip side; they also tend to lose interest abruptly.

Traits: Think bull-headed and strong. Think hot-tempered, demanding, and authoritative. Choleric individuals are great at motivating co-workers but tend to do things their way. They are not easy to give instructions to, because they already have a plan mapped out and they think that is the best!

Traits: If there’s one thing phlegmatic individuals are coughing up, it’s pearls of wisdom in the face of conflict! This personality type is loyal, focused, good at long-term projects, and the one that moves the team forward amidst small differences.

Traits: If someday you hear Frank Sinatra in the office on a Monday morning, best believe your Plato-nically melancholic teamster is in their thinking zone. This personality type is usually placid and thoughtful and good at analyzing situations and thinking matters through. On the flip side, they can also be depressed and moody.

Woof! That’s good information. Now how does it help people managers exactly?

A person’s temperament is their permanent psychological nature which determines how they think, feel, and interact. It reflects in their decisions and behavior, so knowing these abilities and characteristics can help HR professionals – or engineering managers – when they are building teams, or creating policies for retention and robust team culture.

If you’re dealing with a Sanguine:

Sanguines are exuberant personalities with high energy and creative excellence. As an HR Manager, you can utilize these individuals to carry out tasks that require more creativity. Sanguines tend to become the heart of the crowd, which can make them good leaders and trendsetters. They also love new things and can be delegated with new short-term projects or assigned to work on cultivating team culture changes.

Dos: Sanguines can lose interest easily. Check in frequently to measure their level of investment in a project. Fuel them with constant appreciation.

Don’ts: Tasks that require organizing can be tough for sanguines. So can open-ended long-term projects. Make sure they are not setting their personal bar very high, and feeling disinterested as a result of not achieving more than their expectations.

Also, read: What Leadership Means To Us At HackerEarth

If you’re dealing with a Choleric:

Choleric personalities usually demonstrate a fair ability to work well around people and are open to taking challenges. Choleric can prove to be good leaders, too. They have the energy and motivation to take the task to completion and usually like to motivate their peers as well.

Dos: Be careful of their my-way-or-highway approach, especially when it comes to positioning cholerics in leadership positions. This personality type usually makes for dedicated employees, who like to see the job getting done regardless of teething issues. Hand them a management job that involves delegation and watch them flourish.

Don’ts: Cholerics are result oriented and meticulous, so don’t give them open-ended projects that will never convert into something actionable. Employees who fall under the choleric personality type can also come across as rude or brash since they like productive discussions instead of beating around the bush. Never set meetings without agendas 🙂

If you’re dealing with a Phlegmatic:

People with a phlegmatic personality can seem to be slower-paced when compared with other types. They are usually introverts, with very stable energy who do not seek adventure or the limelight. They can be observant but are usually hesitant to speak up, and generally avoid conflict or arguments.

Dos: Phlegmatics will not proactively take up leadership positions, so it’s up to people managers to push them toward glory. Otherwise, this personality type runs the risk of stagnating in the same role. Their stable energy is good for running long-term projects which they will not get bored of easily.

Don’ts: Phlegmatics tend to overlook small disputes in favor of the positive forward movement. This makes it easy to think they have no issues or complaints, so don’t fall into that trap. They also like to take frequent breaks and recharge, so don’t envy their ‘me’ time.

If you’re dealing with a Melancholic:

Despite what the name suggests, this personality type is not all doom and gloom! They are placid and thoughtful; analyzing everything and getting down to the brass tacks when need be. Their introverted behavior can make it hard for them to show up as leaders or ‘fun’ people, but make no mistake – they are team players and loyal to a fault.

Dos: Melancholics are very process-oriented and love details. They might find things a bit hard to handle if structure is not followed. Help the melancholics in your team build processes, and structure their projects so that they can excel in their roles.

Don’ts: Don’t leave them behind because they are introverted and love quiet. Also, do not mistake their loyalty for a lack of ambition and drive. These personality types can be slow, but they are definitely value-driven and a keeper!

The role of people managers in getting different personalities to work together

Post the pandemic, people managers have been facing new challenges in managing teams and team culture in remote settings. In this situation, it is even more vital that HR and Engineering managers understand different personality types and the temperaments of their teammates better than before. Doing so can open great avenues of resource management and building out a great team culture.

If you know your workforce well, it becomes easier to identify their strengths and weaknesses and create a plan to improve on them. Whether it is about improving productivity, team culture, or retaining an individual, understanding the whys of their personality can go a long way in helping people managers create stronger teams in the future.