Ruehie Jaiya Karri

If you are a recruiter or a hiring manager, the first thought that pops into your head when you think ‘tech hiring’ would most likely be ‘it’s complicated,’ just like the movie! What if we were to tell you that it doesn’t have to be?

Our aim of making tech hiring simple, fair, and unprejudiced began over eight years ago. Since then, we have been adding carefully designed products for each phase of the hiring lifecycle to our kitty and rounded off by launching HackerEarth for Enterprises earlier this year.

Your one-stop-shop for all things hiring is finally here.

The ‘suite’ spot of tech hiring

To make the lives of both sides of the hiring equation easy, namely, recruiters and developers, we present to you HackerEarth for Enterprises – a complete suite of products right from attracting, sourcing, interviewing to upskilling.

It’s the tech industry’s first comprehensive platform of its kind to unite every step of the employee lifecycle. Our solutions are built by developers for developers so we get a ringside view of all the possible challenges that a developer may face during the hiring process.

Let me take you through how our products benefit each step of the tech hiring employee lifecycle.

The tech behind hiring great tech teams

#1 Hackathons

The first phase of the hiring process begins with sourcing and attracting the right candidates when a job role opens up.

With our 6 million strong developer community, we put organizations in the path of one of the largest qualified candidate pools out there. Our customized virtual hackathons are well-suited to engaging the developer community as well as strengthen your employer brand. We are fully capable of conducting and managing hackathons at scale to drive business impact.

Our hiring challenges are better-equipped to standardize sourcing and finding the right developer according to your hiring needs. Tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon Alexa have utilized our hiring challenges to attract and source the best candidates for their teams.

#2 HackerEarth Assessments

With your shortlisted candidates, you now have to check for their skills. See if what they mentioned on their resumes pans out in a live coding assessment. The coding test tool should also be easy to use, offer objective evaluation, and provide detailed reports.

Check, check and check. HackerEarth Assessments offers all this and more. Our rich library of 13,000+ questions across 80+ skills enables you to create highly accurate coding assessments with very minimal technical knowledge. Our platform lets you create your own assessment for any role or skill in under 5 minutes, and you can even add your custom questions if you like!

Since our platform can seamlessly integrate with popular ATSs like LinkedIn Talent Hub, Lever, Workable, JazzHR, and more, you can sync all your candidate data with your ATS. You can directly invite candidates to take the assessment you created on our platform, see at what stage each candidate is in throughout the hiring process, and avail performance reports, all from your ATS – without switching between multiple applications.

Our advanced proctoring measures with the option to customize the stringency, insight-rich reports on each candidate’s performance, and built-in PII (Personal Identifiable Information) feature that eliminates bias from the process offer an objective, accurate, and unprejudiced screening process.

Recommended Read: Why Organizations Should Not Stop Skill Assessments Post Hiring

#3 FaceCode

Tech interviews get a bad rap from developers all around the world. Be it because of the complicated, archaic interview processes, or using whiteboards or even pen/paper. We wanted to create an interview experience that can blow away even the most critical of developers and that is how FaceCode, our intelligent remote interviewing tool came to life!

We released the updated version of our coding interview platform – FaceCode 2.0 – earlier this year in March. Following the release, we have seen a considerable spike (57%) in the number of users on our platform.

FaceCode allows you to easily invite candidates and conduct coding interviews, using a real-time, collaborative code editor with a built-in compiler. Say goodbye to whiteboards!

Enter pair programming with a panel of up to 5 interviewers who can conduct live interviews. Our tool also offers objective and standardized evaluation parameters to ensure that every candidate is evaluated based on the same parameters.

Lack of feedback post-interview is a major thorn in candidates’ side, as stated by 40% of the respondents of HackerEarth’s Developer Survey 2021. With FaceCode, that is no longer a problem. Our platform provides automated summarized reports at the end of each interview populated with AI-based behavioral insights. Isn’t that neat?

Recommended Read: Ultimate Playbook for Better Tech Hiring

#4 HackerEarth’s L&D platform and Internal Hackathons

To be future-ready is to be conscious of the steps you take in the present. Hiring your selected candidate, onboarding them, and assigning them responsibilities is not the end of the journey. As a company focused on driving innovation continuously, you have to start with your employees. Nurture them, engage them, and give them ample opportunities to learn at every stage of their career.

HackerEarth’s L&D platform helps employees to assess themselves and identify skill gaps. Once these are defined, you can then curate individual learning pathways that will help your team upskill, grow and be ready for future challenges in the ‘present’.

Ensuring your team is sufficiently engaged given that everybody is working remotely is of superior importance. Our internal hackathons bring different teams together to enhance cross-team collaboration and participate in real-world challenges to brush up on their skills.

Building future-ready tech teams begins here

Hiring in tech, especially in the aftermath of a pandemic, has become extremely competitive. To keep up with the rapidly changing trends and landscape, you need to make your hiring process seamless, empathetic, and flexible for your candidates – to attract the most qualified talent.

At HackerEarth, that is what we deliver on a silver platter! A robust, easy-to-use, remote-ready platform that caters to your every hiring need along with providing a positive interview experience for your developers.

Are you ready to begin building your dream tech team? Go on then, take HackerEarth for Enterprises for a quick spin to know more.

This article has been updated on April 7th, 2023.

The pandemic-led era opened an entirely different world to us: tech companies transitioned to working on-site to working remotely.

With this came the shift in hiring processes too. While it’s been exciting for candidates to get hired virtually, it’s an ongoing battle for tech companies to create an engaging, remote-first candidate experience.

Companies like Docusign and Twilio have created an interactive virtual candidate experience for their candidates and so can you.

Wondering how? Well, this article will breakdown the 5 steps you need to take to create an interactive virtual candidate experience.

Keep reading.

What is candidate experience?

Candidate experience refers to how candidates feel about your company once they’ve been through the wringer, in terms of your hiring process. And these candidate ‘feelings’, whether good, bad or ugly, influence candidates in their decision to apply to your company or accept your job offer.

A good candidate experience will encourage candidates to think about working for your company after they see how you treat them. A better candidate experience might make them want to spread goodwill about your company, helping build up your brand.

Source

On the other hand, a bad candidate experiencewill make candidates lose respect for you, both as an employer and as abrand.

Why is a positive candidate experience important?

Probably, there shouldn’t be the ‘why’ for developing a positive candidate experience. Like your company wants to serve your customers better for them to turn into repeat buyers, you need to develop a positive candidate experience for the following reasons:

Attract and recruit better talent

A lengthy and complicated recruitment process results in higher attrition, with candidates dropping off midway due to poor experience. A strong candidate experience strategy identifies such gaps and helps you tweak the process to ensure more talented candidates stick it out till the end. Now you have a bigger and better talent pool to choose from.

Recommended Read: Ultimate Playbook for Better Tech Hiring

Improves your company’s bottom line

A stronger candidate experience is a direct reflection of how streamlined your hiring is. Investing in creating a positive candidate experience adds a lot more to the bottom line than all the other resources that you invest in your hiring process.

Enhances your employer brand

Your employer branding, especially in 2021, is directly related to candidate experience. Bad reviews on social media and Glassdoor will adversely affect hiring new talent, with newer candidates becoming discouraged from applying for a position at your company. If you want to hire the best candidates in the market, you have to take special care of them at every step in the hiring process.

The impact of bad candidate experience

63% of job seekers will likely reject a job offer because of a bad candidate experience, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.Be it through social media, word of mouth, or employer review sites, any negative connotations associated with your organization will spread like wildfire and it can be hard to discourage or control.

You check multiple reviews of a restaurant before ordering food from that place. How many reviews would a candidate go through before deciding not to work with your company?

One review of a negative experience is enough to create a far-reaching ripple effect; top talent will be deterred from applying for your company, candidates will drop off midway through the application process, or getting candidates to say yes to your offer letter becomes harder than it should be. This directly leads to a decline in profitability.

Recommended read: 5 Reasons For Bad Candidate Experience In Tech Interviews

5 steps to improve candidate interview experience

Good candidate experience is a package. It starts right from the time a candidate applies to your organization up until the candidate accepts your offer letter. How to improve candidate experience in recruitment?

Here are 5 steps you can take to get your candidate experience from good to great in recruitment.

Step #1—Understand the candidate journey better

A candidate’s journey starts right from the point they start looking for a job. But how are they going to land to your advertised role, apply for it, and most of all—how are you going to keep them engaged through the entire cycle?

You see? Candidate journey is a multi-step process which includes:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Interest
• Application
• Selection
• Hire
• Onboarding

If we break down these steps into a basic cycle, here’s what it looks like:

Alex, a Front-end Developer is looking for a new role. He gets to know about HackerEarth hiring for the Front-end Developer role from one of his colleagues; scrolls through the company’s website, their social media, and their Glassdoor reviews.

He is interested in working with the company. So, he fills out the job application.

This is the pre-selection phase. Now, the role of the organization comes into play to make the candidate’s experience positive and nurturing.

The company sends the email to Alex about his selection and what the next selection steps would look like. He has to complete an assessment—the first qualification step in his selection criteria.

Once Alex submits his assessment, the recruiter emails him about the next steps that will take place in both the scenarios—whether he gets selected or not.

Case 1: Alex gets selected

Alex will receive an email invite to join the Facecode’s call where the HRs will ask him their questions, and give live feedback on the code he submitted in his assessment.

Case 2: Alex does not get selected

If Alex fails to pass the assessment, he will receive the email from recruiter about his application not moving forward.

In both the cases, Alex knows he’ll not be left hanging in the middle of the process—and that’s a relief!

Step #2—Master the basic remote interview etiquette

#1 Use online skill assessment tools as the first step of your remote interview process to screen candidates from a high volume of applicants. This cuts down the actual number who progress to the video interview stage, allowing you to spend more time on creating a better candidate experience.

#2 Be accessible to your candidate. With everything operating remotely they will be bound to have plenty of questions, and they need to feel connected to you. Keep them engaged with personalized communication like sending them emails with pointers on what equipment they will need for the interview, and how to create a distraction-free environment.

#3 Send candidates useful resources to help prepare for their interview. Give them references of questions they might be asked, and other similar tips.

Recommended read: Essential Questions To Ask When Recruiting Developers

Step #3—Showcase company culture

A successful recruitment process builds excitement about working for your company. It highlights company culture, values, mission and gives a glimpse into a candidate’s future work environment.

While it’s often easier to show them your company’s culture in person, it’s limited in the remote setup. Here’s what you can do instead:

• Show them the fun team building activities your company does to keep the entire team bonded.
• Show them instances of how the managers interact and take care of their team members.
• Set up informal video calls with the rest of the team for the candidate to get a sense of who they’ll be working with.

Step #4—Don’t leave candidates hanging

In a remote setting, regular communication is key. Set expectations on:

• How and when you will communicate?
• What the interview process will be?
• How long it will take?

Describe each stage of the remote interview along with what tools you will be using. Proactively communicating changes to your hiring process and any hiring delays will help avoid confusion and improve the candidate experience.

Source

Lack of feedback post interview is a major peeve of candidates as stated by 40% of the respondents of HackerEarth’s Developer Survey 2021. Send out timely feedback after each phase of the process.

And if the candidate was not selected for the role, that needs to be communicated too. Ghosting candidates as a form of rejection is an absolute NO. Tell them what they did well and give actionable tips on how to do better the next time. Candidates will appreciate that you took the time out to inform them personally.

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Recommended read: How You Can Leverage Candidate Experience To Attract Top Talent

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Step #5—Use remote interviewing tools

When you integrate intelligent remote interviewing tools into your hiring process, it’s easy for hiring managers in all departments and locations to replicate the same experience for each candidate, ensuring consistency.For example, use collaborative coding tools for your developer candidates like FaceCode to see the candidate's code in-action, give them live updates, send automated summaries and recordings.

Reinvent your remote candidate experience

Candidates and recruiters alike are dealing with unprecedented circumstances and anxieties that were unimaginable just over a year ago. A rethink in your remote hiring process to provide candidates a favorable experience is necessary at this point. Doing so, you showcase them the value of empathy.

There's no time like the present to fight the good fight! Invest in candidate-first practices to create a positive candidate experience that is rivaled by none and most importantly, stay empathetic.

Since the pandemic first hit in 2020, it has shuttered offices and industries had to adapt on the fly to continue working remotely. The tech industry needed to throw out ancient processes and discover newer avenues, especially in the field of tech recruiting. If you guessed where I’m heading with this, then you are on the right track!

Yes, I am talking about social media, its massive reach, and one form of recruiting that has shot into the limelight – Social Recruiting. Tapping into brand new spheres of talent while adopting creative recruiting strategies is the crux of social recruiting.

Although social recruiting has been around since 2008, it has become the need of the hour and a weapon to have in your corner with the pandemic rendering everything to a remote workspace. A study by Pew Research Centre found that a whopping 72% of Americans surveyed use social media heavily. This should put into perspective the large number of promising candidates you as a recruiter are not considering by failing to source candidates through social media.

Here are our 2 cents on everything you need to knowabout social recruiting and how to kill it #likeapro, true social media style!

What is social recruiting?

Social recruiting or social media recruiting is a talent acquisition strategy that refers to the use of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to source and hire candidates. You can narrow down your target audience to quickly and effectively find candidates who are the right fit for your company.

Why traditional recruiting methods will no longer cut it

The global talent, mainly Gen Z do not spend time scouring newspapers for job vacancies, rather they are busy switching between Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram on their phone. Posting job ads on social media is easy, attracts a wider, more diverse pool of candidates, and is cheaper. “Some companies use tools to post to Instagram from PC, schedule content, and complete other tasks.”

Bidding adios to the old ways of recruitment has become necessary to stay competitive in these fast-paced, digital-forward times. It has been proven multiple times that the traditional approach towards recruiting brings no diversity to the company, stagnates growth, eliminates a large pool of passive candidates, and lowers profits in the long run.

Providing relief to time-consuming, archaic hiring practices is the new age social recruiting approach that is considerably cost-effective with a greater chance of bridging the ever-widening gap between recruiters and talented job seekers.

What do the numbers look like for social recruiting?

Still not convinced to make the switch? Here are the current statistics of the social media recruiting landscape in 2021.

✔️A Career Profiles study shows that 91% of companies rely on social media when recruiting.

✔️86% of job seekers use social media in their job search, according to CareerArc.

✔️35% of employers increased their social recruiting efforts from last year to now, according to CareerArc.

✔️A report by PostBeyond shows that 82% of companies attract passive candidates via social media.

✔️49% of professionals use Linkedin to scout for job opportunities, as stated by HackerEarth Developer Survey, 2021.

Pitfalls of social media recruiting

Now that you’re sold on the awesomeness of social recruiting, there are some DON’Ts that you need to take note of before you kickstart your social hiring journey.

• Don’t jump headlong into social media without a cohesive plan in place. Nobody is interested in being bombarded with generic content across different social media platforms. Identify your goals, tailor your strategy according to each platform, and measure ROI periodically to see what is working.
• Not creating quality content to best showcase your brand, company values, workplace culture, etc., and simply posting job vacancies will never attract or engage potential candidates. Bring the personal factor to your hiring strategy, nurture relationships via your content, and maintain consistency in your efforts.
• Don’t forget to take stock of your efforts regularly. Choose key metrics like reach, engagement, and conversion to measure activity; the results should guide your way forward.

What makes for a good social media recruiting strategy?

Social recruiting takes a little work to get right, but when well executed it represents a robust advantage. Tips to kickstart your social media recruiting strategy the right way.

#1 Put together candidate personas

Speaking to the right people is of the utmost importance. It helps you narrow down who you’re looking for. Establishing candidate personas enables you to have a targeted approach on social media.

Know what kind of profiles will be a good culture-fit and balance that with the skills necessary to be successful in the role.

#2 Choose the right social media platform

The role you’re hiring for, the industry you’re in and the persona you are trying to reach out to, dictates the platform you need to use.

Some roles may require digging deep into more niche social media platforms rather than the popular ones. You may even need to use a social media management tool to keep everything organized.

#3 Track metrics to create your pipeline of candidates

Every social network has its set of metrics that need to be monitored. For example, the best time to post on Instagram may be different than on Facebook or LinkedIn. Don’t get too engrossed in the likes and follows; make sure you’re tracking suitable recruitment metrics.

Depending on your platform and social media strategy, evaluate the given metrics monthly or quaterly to see where you stand, which platforms and strategies yield the highest quality candidates and what needs to be tweaked in your approach.

#4 Optimize your social media profiles

Most recruits consider a company based on its social media presence, which is why it is important to maintain a cohesive voice across all platforms being used. Maintain consistency in messaging that potrays the true reflection of your company’s brand and mission. Adjust settings to protect social media accounts. So you wouldn’t have to deal with the Facebook security issues or report Instagram account for getting hacked.

#5 Rope in your employees to be your ambassadors

Your existing workforce is your biggest ambassador. Leverage this at every opportunity by creating some guidelines so that employees understand the goal at hand and will create content with that in mind.

You can also create readily shareable content to make it easy for everyone to re-share, repurpose, and post on their personal social media profiles.

#6 Make use of video content

There are a lot of companies competing for top tier talent right now. The last thing you want to have happen is to get lost in the mix and lose out on a rockstar new hire.

Cut through the noise by using videos to portray the day-to-day life at your company is an effective way to reach prospective candidates.

#7 Measure how well your strategy is working

Speaking in numbers may not come naturally to recruiters but this is how you convince your stakeholders that your social hiring efforts are paying off.

Review the KPIs, goals and impacts of your social media recruiting strategy. From there, you can find your strengths and weaknesses to better adjust your resources and efforts.

Further Reading

Boost your social recruiting efforts with this CHEAT SHEET. Download your exclusive copy to take offline and distribute to your team.

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We have further distilled tried and tested strategies that work for social recruiting into a cheatsheet, to simplify the process for you. Go through the step-by-step breakdown on how to approach each of the 7 tips given above to better your social media recruiting strategy.

There is a bonus takeaway included in the guide as well that helps you tailor your strategy for popular social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Leverage social recruiting like a pro

Social media recruiting is fast becoming the most effective hiring tactic in 2021. It enables you to showcase your company culture, reach a larger talent pool, be authentic and connect with your ideal candidates. As Gen Z and millennials make up more and more of the workforce, social media dictates the hiring strategies for recruiters to leverage upon.

Are your potential candidates on social media? Then your recruiting efforts should be, too.