Before we begin, let me share a bit about our journey.

At Amadeus for Developers, we offer travel data and services to developers across the world through REST APIs. Thanks to HackerEarth’s platform, we recently hosted the Hack the Journey/Coding India Edition DevOps coding challenge and we invited all developers from India to participate. Since India is one of our main markets, our goal was to allow developers to explore our travel APIs and challenge their knowledge of travel solutions. We designed both theoretical and backend coding challenges, but in this article, we will focus only on the coding part.

The coding challenges were a combination of algorithmic problems and travel technologies. We asked developers to use data from the Amadeus for Developers REST APIs and our SDKs to solve them.

In this article, we will share with you the best practices to build successful Javascript coding challenges with APIs, based on our experience hosting such challenges for global developers.

Use these 6 best practices to design Javascript coding challenges

Let’s explore the 6 best practices that you need for designing Javascript coding challenges for developers:

#1—Define your objective

An essential first step is to define your objectives. When you have that clear in mind, you can build challenges to meet your goals. Some common objectives could be:

• Hiring: many companies use coding challenges as part of the recruitment process to identify and evaluate the technical skills of potential candidates.
• Awareness: companies build coding challenges to bring awareness to the developer community about their product.
• Testing your product: Javascript coding challenges are a great way to allow developers to play with your product. That can bring you valuable feedback and future ideas to improve your product roadmap.

#2—Choose the programming language

One of the key decisions you have to make when you build Javascript coding challenges: which programming language the participants will be required to use. There are several factors to take into consideration in order to identify the most fitting ones:

• Top languages: by choosing one of the top languages in the market such as Python, JavaScript, etc. you will attract a larger number of participants.
• Company-used languages: if your goal is hiring, you might want to evaluate the participants’ coding skills in  your company’s programming languages
• Your familiarity with the language: make sure you are familiar with the language you offer the challenge. That will help you build challenges that fit the language and also better understand the submitted solutions.

For example, in our case, we designed both a Python and Node coding challenge since these are languages we use on a daily basis, but are also the top-used languages for our SDKs. Developers were able to choose to participate in one of these.

Also read: Top 10 Programming Languages of the Future

#3—Define the challenge

The challenge definition is one of the most crucial steps when it comes to the event’s success. Below are some points to consider:

• Difficulty level: By providing developers with some warm-up tasks and later on more challenging ones, you give them the opportunity to understand your APIs gradually. Make sure you find the right balance. To ensure the Javascript coding challenges are at the level you are thinking of, it could be useful to ask a colleague to solve them. This will give you an idea of how much time and effort is required to complete the tasks, and allow you to adjust the difficulty accordingly.
• Static data: Define challenges that the APIs always return the same data. This will help you to evaluate the solution’s correctness with the unit tests. Since that’s not easy to guarantee, you can build some sandbox environments with static data and coordinate with your API development teams to ensure that the data is not refreshed during the event.

#4—Maximize the efficiency of SDKs

If you provide SDKs as part of your API, you want developers to focus on the challenge solution and use your SDK efficiently, so we would suggest the followings:

• Set up the environment: pre-install the SDKs so developers won’t spend time and effort preparing the environment.
• Make docs accessible: to make it easy for developers to make their first API call, consider giving them the necessary resources during the challenge.

#5—Ensure API stability

Ensuring the stability of your APIs is essential to let developers solve the given challenges. Here are some points to consider:

• Check API stability: If there are any known to you instabilities (eg. backend refresh on specific days) try to avoid the event on these days. If this is not possible, inform the participants about these times to avoid potential disruptions.
• Rate limits: don’t forget to consider the API rate limits when you design the Javascript coding challenges. Provide the participants with the necessary documentation or even some helper functions to help them focus on the challenge solution.

Even if instability affects some solutions, it’s not the end of the world. If the developers have hardcoded their solution, make sure you verify their algorithm and any comments they might have left to prove that they were going to arrive at the correct answers despite the instability.

#6—Conduct unit tests

The unit tests are critical to evaluate the submissions and help you find the winners. Some best practices for the unit tests are:

• Validate API usage: in order to validate that developers indeed used your API to solve the challenge, write some unit tests to identify the usage of an API key. Also in the file that developers are going to write the code, you can pre-define some variables that are expected to add the API key and secret.
• Hide unit test files: this will ensure that developers won’t be able to know what are the expected solutions. Just a tip, it is possible for participants to get through the logs of the unit tests, and in that case, make sure you encrypt them.

Comprehensive list of JavaScript coding challenges

Delving deep into JavaScript requires a mix of theoretical knowledge and hands-on coding practice. Below are various coding challenges, organized by difficulty level and specific concepts, designed to test and improve your JavaScript prowess.

1. Beginner challenges

• Basic arithmetic operations:
  • Challenge: Create a JavaScript function that takes two numbers as arguments and returns their sum, difference, product, and quotient
  • Concept: Basic functions and arithmetic operationsString reversal:
• String reversal:
  • Challenge: Write a JavaScript function that reverses a string
  • Concept: String manipulation
• Array duplication:
• Challenge: Create a function that removes duplicates from an array
• Concept: Array manipulation and iteration

2. Intermediate challenges

• Palindrome check:
• Challenge: Determine if a given string is a palindrome (reads the same backward as forward, ignoring spaces, punctuation, and capitalization).
• Concept: String manipulation and conditional logic
• Fibonacci series:
  • Challenge: Write a function that generates the first ‘n’ numbers in the Fibonacci series
  • Concept: Recursion and iterative solutions
• Find the missing number:
  • Challenge: Given an array containing n distinct numbers taken from 0, 1, 2, …, n, find the one that is missing from the array
  • Concept: Mathematical operations and array manipulation

3. Advanced challenges

• Flatten nested array:
  • Challenge: Implement a function that flattens a nested array
  • Concept: Recursion and array manipulation
• Implement bind():
  • Challenge: Replicate the functionality of the bind() function without using the built-in function
  • Concept: Advanced functions and the ‘this’ keyword
• Deep equality check:
  • Challenge: Write a function that checks if two objects (and their nested objects) are deeply equal
  • Concept: Recursion, object manipulation, and deep comparison

4. Concept-specific challenges

• Promises:
  • Challenge: Create a mock API call using JavaScript’s Promise
  • Concept: Asynchronous programming and Promises
• Closures:
  • Challenge: Design a function that generates a series of functions to add n to their argument, where n is the order in which they were generated
  • Concept: Closures and function factories
• DOM Manipulation:
  • Challenge: Build a simple JavaScript-based to-do list with add, delete, and mark as completed functionalities
  • Concept: DOM manipulation and event handling

Additional tips for solving JavaScript coding challenges

While the right logic and approach are essential for solving coding challenges, there are several other aspects that can enhance your problem-solving journey, especially when using JavaScript. Here are some additional pointers:

• Before jumping into the code, make sure you understand the problem thoroughly. It might help to write down or discuss the problem with someone else or even talk aloud to yourself. Often, solutions emerge from a deeper understanding.
• If a problem seems too complex, break it down into smaller components or steps. This modular approach can make the overall challenge more manageable and can aid in systematic problem solving.
• JavaScript has a plethora of built-in methods, especially for arrays and strings. Familiarize yourself with these, but also know when they might be overkill. Sometimes a simpler approach might be more efficient and more readable.
• When solving a challenge, think about potential edge cases. For example, consider empty strings, arrays, or the minimum and maximum possible inputs.
• Use console.log() extensively to understand the flow of your code and to pinpoint issues. Developer tools in browsers can also provide insights into the execution of your JavaScript code.
• Your first solution doesn’t always have to be the most efficient. It’s okay to arrive at a working solution first and then iterate on it to make it better.
• Like any skill, coding gets better with regular practice. Regularly engage with coding platforms, participate in coding challenges, and always strive to learn from your mistakes.
• JavaScript, like all languages, evolves. Stay updated with the latest ECMAScript specifications and new methods or features that might be introduced.
• Join coding forums or communities where you can post your solutions and receive feedback. Sometimes, there are multiple ways to solve a problem, and seeing others’ solutions can provide new perspectives.
• Frustration can be a natural part of the problem-solving process. If you’re stuck, take a break. Sometimes, stepping away and coming back with a fresh mind can make all the difference.

Also read: How to Create a Great Take-Home Coding Test?

Create Javascript coding challenges with HackerEarth

To sum up, it’s crucial to carefully consider several factors when creating challenges that require developers to use APIs to reach the problem solution. By following best practices such as ensuring API stability, building the right unit tests, and providing necessary resources, you can create successful Javascript coding challenges that allow developers to explore and test their knowledge of your APIs. Lastly, don’t hesitate to ask HackerEarth for support and advice. Thanks to them, we were able to solve many of our doubts and build a successful coding challenge together.

We hope that these tips will be useful for your own journey.

Hiring Freeze! There is nothing more frustrating to a recruiter than this phrase. It doesn’t matter if you are a human resources representative for a company or a recruitment agency. A tech hiring freeze is usually the result of efforts to cut down costs and sometimes the impact of recession or scale down of the organization. When recruiting and hiring stops, a company can save money and remain operational. Now, how can you, as a recruiter, use this time positively? The following tips will help you make the most out of your company’s hiring freeze, retain and understand employees, improve your hiring process and come up with great ideas for future hires. Before that, Let’s first understand a tech hiring freeze and the reasons for its occurrence.

What is a hiring freeze?

When a company decides to halt hiring for new positions, it is called a hiring freeze. Though the company may continue to hire candidates for essential jobs, it stops all efforts to fill non-essential jobs and prohibits creating new positions. Tech hiring freezes typically begin with a halt to these actions: sourcing\screening, interviewing, and hiring.

Main reasons behind a hiring freeze

Every business aims to maintain long-term financial viability. Fears of a recession, a pandemic, and supply chain disruptions force companies to halt hiring during difficult market conditions. When these circumstances arise, management may freeze hiring. Here are some examples of situations where a company might consider a hiring freeze:

1. Uncertain market conditions:

Market volatility and fluctuation can significantly affect revenue generation and profitability.

2. Global crisis:

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every business in some way to a certain extent. These crises have negatively impacted businesses worldwide. Moreover, layoffs and tech hiring freezes were the only way for companies to sustain themselves then.

Also, read: 4 Images That Show What Developers Think Of Layoffs In Tech

3. Emerging liquidity concerns:

Companies may postpone recruitment processes if liquid assets decline. Thus, they may opt to deploy funds from the pay budget to finance current assets to increase liquidity.

4. Budget deficit:

When a company anticipates that hiring new employees will lead to a budget deficit, it will postpone hiring new employees until its financial position improves.

Effects of a tech hiring freeze on current employees

A hiring freeze can also be stressful for current employees owing to increased resource utilization to meet the deadlines and workload allocation within the available workforce. In addition, the workloads of departing employees are distributed among the remaining staff. In turn, this can negatively affect staff productivity, causing more employees to leave the company. So, during the hiring freeze, if recruiters are not hiring, then what do they do? Here are some best practices a recruiter (or a company) can use to motivate and retain current employees and smooth future hiring processes.

Things recruiters can do during a hiring freeze

Improve your hiring process for the future

During the hiring freeze, you have plenty of time to look into hiring gaps and plan for better future recruitment. For instance, you can check your existing hiring metrics and data to know what area to focus on to improve the hiring process. You can also review previous recruiting reports and methods provided by your ATS. You can then conclude,

• how much does hiring for a particular role cost
• what are the best sources/channels to find the right candidate
• what is the job acceptance rate for your company
• why candidates might drop off during an assessment phase
• what does the candidate interview experience look like

This exercise will give you a grasp of what needs to be fixed in your hiring process.

Also, read: Streamline Your Recruitment Process With These 7 Tips

Furthermore, you can discuss key points with managers and team leaders to better understand their current objectives and future goals. This way, you can obtain a preview of the competencies and potential positions your company may require in the future. Also, you can create more crisp and clear job descriptions. In a nutshell, the more time you spend closing process gaps, the easier it will be to recruit again.

Build your employer’s brand

A strong employer brand always stands out and attracts talent. Amidst a tech hiring freeze, you can focus on building an impactful employer brand. Showcase your company’s work culture, ethics, and perks because it affects the candidate’s decision to join your company. Consider using video content, as this format makes it much easier for you to showcase your company’s culture and values. Furthermore, building an employer brand is not just for hiring new candidates; it is also suitable for existing employees. Employees who feel valued and appreciated will stay with the company for a long time. To improve your employer brand both from an employee’s and a candidate’s perspective, follow these tips:

For employees:

Employees are your biggest asset, and retaining the best candidates is essential. It is more likely to happen when your employees are happy working for you and feel valued and recognized for their efforts. You might have already provided your employees with all the perks. But always look to see if there is anything else you can do to increase their productivity at the workplace or improve their mental and physical health. Moreover, you can keep them engaged in fun activities or sports, take their feedback, or conduct some counseling sessions for employees for better work-life balance or mental health awareness. Also, employees love it when a company recognizes their hard work and loyalty and rewards them with appraisals, incentives, and bonuses. You can also send them personalized emails and gift cards to keep them motivated.

Also, read: 7 Employee Engagement Strategies For WFH Tech Teams

For candidates:

Before applying or accepting the offer, applicants tend to go through social media, Glassdoor, or Google reviews to learn more about the company’s culture. It means you can leverage the power of social media to showcase your company’s culture and the working lives of your current employees, for example,

• Appreciate your current employees on LinkedIn, tag them, and rework your career pages.
• Work on Glassdoor and google reviews of your company. You can’t stop negative reviews on these platforms, but you can humbly reply.
• Show behind the scenes of your office, celebrating birthdays, festivals, etc.
• Take feedback from your current employees, ask about their experience in your company, make a video, and share it on social media.
• Always check the tonality of your social media posts. It should be gender-neutral and easy to understand.

Companies that embrace and practice diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are more likely to outperform their competitors in terms of profitability and value creation. You can also make a plan for reverting or giving feedback to each applicant applying for a job opening at your company. Note: Do not ghost any applicant when you reject any candidate. It can create a bad image for your organization.

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

Build Candidate Relationships

A tech hiring freeze is the best time to expand your candidate pools with skilled candidates. Use this downtime to nurture relationships with passive candidates via social recruiting. Take advantage of recruiting tools. These tools help you connect with freshers and professionals and build relationships that will come in handy for future hiring. Keep your talent pipelines warm by sending them regular company updates, content that showcases your company culture, relevant articles, and webinars that may interest your prospective candidates. When the time comes to hire again, you wouldn’t have to start from scratch! You have your trusty candidate pool to fall back on.

Brush up on your recruiting skills

Although HR teams are constantly busy, a hiring freeze gives the recruitment team time to update their skills. The organization’s human resources department can enhance the whole company’s performance. As a result, in the HR position, you must always keep abreast of new industry regulations, technological advancements, and other human resource management techniques. Moreover, many HR training programs are available over the internet, like HackerEarth’s Learning and Development for HR, so you can better utilize your time to understand the HR ecosystem.

Also, read: Spend A Day With A Tech Recruiter

We’ve gone one step further and reached out to our Senior TA, Shalini Chandra to spill the beans on how to navigate this hiring freeze and become a better recruiter. Watch the video to get tips straight from the horse’s mouth!

FAQs related to hiring freeze

How to keep candidates engaged during a hiring freeze?

• Stay in touch with candidates; provide timely responses to any emails
• Share company updates and other relevant information like PR releases, blogs, and podcasts to keep candidates interested
• Work on establishing an employer brand

How long does a hiring freeze usually last?

Depending on the reason, a hiring freeze usually lasts for 3-6 months but can last up to weeks, months, or years.

What are the advantages of a tech hiring freeze?

• A hiring freeze reduces hiring costs; reducing these expenses can result in the return of financial stability.
• Hiring freezes allow management to condense staff and reorganize workgroups to produce necessary products and services for consumers more efficiently.
• It also strengthens teamwork and allows the company to review its growth plans and operational procedures.

Conclusion

A tech hiring freeze gives the organization and recruitment team time to focus on other essential things and prepare for future hiring. Use the methods mentioned above during the hiring freeze to rework the overall hiring process, increase the productivity of current employees, and retain employees. This time can be fruitful for organizations if used correctly.

When a company allows writers to contribute guest blog posts, their goal is not just to get an in-depth researched article for free on their blog. They focus on:

• Getting backlinks
• Encouraging writers to share their work

Result? To increase their website’s traffic, be seen by their target audience, and increase brand awareness. The same is true for companies that organize hackathons.

However, many companies still don’t understand how online hackathons can help improve a product’s development.

Let’s break the ice and understand:

• How participating in hackathons can improve automation by re-using code.

• The common mistakes companies make while hosting, which you can avoid.

What is a hackathon?

According to Techopedia, a hackathon is a gathering where programmers collaboratively code in an extreme manner over a short period. In simple words, a hackathon organized by companies brings experts together from different domains to drive innovations.

Modern-day hackathons include:

• Sponsors
• Partners
• Recruiters

They engage with participants through interactive workshops and presentations.

For example, HackerEarth organized a global hackathon called Web3athon. It was a 2-month long event sponsored by 16 crypto and web3 brands with different themes and multiple prizes for the winners.

There are two types of hackathons that you can host:

• Internal hackathons: They give companies’ employees a chance to experiment with upcoming technology and stay up-to-date with technology.

• External hackathons: They are organized by the company where they engage with people outside the company to change company culture, improve customer experience, and find new talent and revenue opportunities.

How can participating in an online hackathon improve the development of new solutions?

Participants in hackathons develop code based on the problem statement provided by the company.

Hackathon prototypes and coding solutions can be used by the company hosting the event to create a new solution in the future-either partially or fully functional. Ensure to have a clause in the terms mentioning that the IP belongs to the company, which means it owns all the code created at that event. You can then store all these coded solutions in a common repository and later re-use them to automate any existing or new processes. This way automation becomes easy and you do not have to build a product from scratch, making the code more efficient.

For example, a 36-hour hackathon was conducted to address 6 IoT-based challenges. For this, each team was provided with an educational IoT kit that consisted of cloud computing services and IoT templates that the participants could access and represent the specific architecture for digital solutions. When the results of the event rolled out, one of the sponsoring companies decided to use the digital solution to upgrade their legacy refrigerators making hackathons a cost-effective and innovative asset

Another option to use online hackathons to your advantage would be to organize internal hackathons within your company. This would foster creativity, produce new solutions that are stored for future use, and when needed, tap into your common repository of code to further create a different solution.

However, you need to be mindful of what code you are planning to re-use as directly copying code snippets from public forums like GitHub or StackOverflow is considered unethical.

Common mistakes to avoid when hosting coding hackathons

While conducting hackathons is the gateway to developing the prototype of your product, hosting the event requires a lot more effort—which sometimes leads to certain mistakes.

Here are 5 mistakes you should be aware of and prepare yourself for before hosting a hackathon.

Mistake #1: Not setting hackathon goals

Without a goal in place, you cannot expect your online hackathon to be successful. Before you host the hackathon, it’s critical to be clear on your goals and your expectations of the event.

• To build brand awareness

• To keep your developer community engaged

• To help developers keep their skills polished

• Is it to hire candidates?

Decide what you want to achieve with this hackathon. Then, outline every detail of the hackathon: time frame of the event, sponsors, guests, type of event (internal or open; virtual or physical), and specialty of the project.

Mistake #2: Lack of extended support for participants

Because participants are working on comprehensive projects that require brainstorming, ideation, and execution, you need to provide developers with well-aligned team support.

This could be as simple as conducting a workshop or a virtual webinar before the hackathon. This will give them an overview of the rules and the relevant resources that you can offer them.

For example, for the Web3athon hosted by HackerEarth, participants were provided a Web3athon toolkit inside which a detailed set of guidelines was shared with them on how to register for the hackathon, how to form a team, and how to submit their idea. Images and videos were used to help participants understand each step.

Mistake #3: Using multiple tools for online hackathon management

Imagine using 5 different tools for managing a hackathon. One for chatting with developers, another for managing teams, and the other for rules and instructions and presenting the pitch. Developers working on product development may have to jump from one tool to another. This may leave them confused and frustrated. If you don’t want that to happen, choose a single tool where you can organize every task—a win-win for both you and the developers participating in the hackathon.

We at HackerEarth have conducted countless hackathons in the past decade. And can confidently say, we offer an advanced platform for organizing hackathons. From end-to-end management of the event to getting your company in front of 7M+ qualified developers, we enable you to increase engagement and foster innovation through these events. Go on, try it out for yourself here!

Mistake #4: Set the hackathon time frame based on your expectations

Your expectations of the hackathon are directly proportional to the event’s time frame. If you expect to get a full-fledged product from the hackathon, know this: you can see such results in hackathons with a longer time frame i.e.,1-3 months.

Take a look at this timeline map by IBM which showcases the exact time frame (and dates) based on the stages of the event—gives participants ample time to understand each phase in advance and prepare accordingly.

Mistake #5: Not choosing a realistic online hackathon theme and problem-solving statement

If you want your hackathons to lead in a specific direction and aim for projects that bring you results, you need to decide on two things:

• The theme of the hackathon

• A problem-solving statement you want a solution for

Theme: Select a broad theme since a narrow theme requires much digging and restricts the participants.

Problem-solving statement: To find a real problem-solving statement, ask the organizer to understand the business’ daily struggles and pain points, and come up with a real-time problem-solving statement.

For example, Connecting the Arctic Hackathon by Cassini had the theme “Sustainability” with three different challenges (problem-solving statement).

How do online hackathons benefit developers and help them stay creative?

Helps validate their product

Hackathons help developers gain confidence by giving them a platform to test their product. In an article by YourStory, Ramesh Logathanan, Professor of Practice in Co-innovations at IIT Hyderabad says,

A hackathon gives participants a very good chance to validate their ideas, give it some initial shape, and get some mentor eyeballs on the idea.

Helps them upskill

For most developers, a hackathon is an opportunity to learn and upskill themselves by both trying out new code solutions and interacting with like-minded teams. Since the companies invite experts and conduct workshops and webinars, developers get a chance to learn about various topics—which is an add-on to their learning experience.

Helps connect like-minded people

Hackathons allow developers with diverse backgrounds to share and exchange ideas, which shape their thinking and lead to innovative solutions. In the same article by YourStory, Kolla Krishna Madhavi, Head of Alliances and Strategic Partnerships, School of Accelerated Learning adds,

Hackathons help diverse individuals with varying skills come together as teams to interact, ideate, and collaborate while coming up with disruptive solutions.

Ready to enhance your product development with hackathons?

No doubt why hackathons can feel so much like a battle. From coming up with a theme, to defining the problem-solving statement, to inviting partners and sponsors, everything feels like a daunting task.

But, once you organize each phase, the expectations for the hackathon will make sense. Decide on the themes and problem-solving statements and have the participants build prototypes of the software.

Picture this: You are sitting in the conference room with the leadership team. The team asks you about the roadmap for the company’s hybrid campus recruitment strategy. It’s been weeks since you have been talking to your recruiter friends from other organizations to pull off the strategy but haven’t been able to do it. And now, you have no answer and no strategy!

You stay quiet. And confused.

This picture can be quite startling, especially when everybody’s eyes are on you.

To make sure you don’t land in this situation, we have made a list of 5 effective hybrid campus recruiting strategies you can use.

Let’s get started.

What is hybrid campus recruitment?

Hybrid campus recruitment is a strategy companies use to source, engage and hire candidates for internships and entry-level jobs. Earlier, this form of recruitment was done on campus, hence called campus recruitment. But, with the fusion of in-person and virtual recruitment strategies, it is termed hybrid campus recruitment.

With campus recruiting, you need 4 key players:

1. Employers
2. Campus recruiters
3. University career development centers
4. College students

But, with hybrid campus hiring, you need extra key players— virtual phone system or campus recruitment software that connects candidates and recruiters, improves candidate engagement, and conducts virtual interviews.

Types of hybrid campus hiring:

The three types of hybrid campus recruiting methods or approaches include:

Blended approach

It uses both online and offline methods of hiring. Like, conducting interviews via video calls at the beginning of the selection process and face-to-face meetings with the top candidates during the last interview phase.

Composite approach

With a composite approach, companies host virtual job fairs and in-person recruiting events. By doing so, they run a parallel collaboration to expand the scope of their recruitment drive.

Synchronous approach

Chances are not every student can participate in the on-campus recruitment event. That’s where the students who are not present on campus can benefit and participate in the virtual fair.

With a synchronous approach, students can choose between on-campus and virtual events. This helps companies reach out to more students and widen their recruitment drive.

How Do You Build an Effective Hybrid Campus recruitment Strategy?

It’s hard for companies to transition from an offline recruiting strategy and build an empire of hybrid recruitment. So, we have curated 5 effective hybrid campus recruitment strategies to help you create the roadmap.

Strategy #1—Communicate the new campus recruitment strategy with campus coordinators

Communicate and coordinate with the campus coordinator on the dates and the transition in the hiring process.

Plan the execution of events and activities, whether they will take place in person or online. The majority of pre-placement conversations, employer branding, and coordination with colleges and institutions are now conducted in person, while screenings, assessments, and the early rounds of interviews are conducted online.

Best practices to adopt when shifting to hybrid campus recruiting:

• Use a good online assessment tool to avoid plagiarism during the shortlisting phase.
• Interview the leadership team and get them to talk about how their organization empowers young talent.

Strategy #2—Create a streamlined recruiting process for students

In an offline campus recruiting setup, you’d reach out to campus coordinators, help them understand the company and job role, share resources (JD/ ECP), and decide on the entire process—placement, assessment, interview, and final selection—all done on the same day.

But, with hybrid campus hiring, you are focusing on both online and on-campus hiring. So, your recruiting strategy looks something like this:

Once the candidate is selected virtually, the onboarding process can have physical training sessions where employees educate the students about the company’s values and how each department operates.

Best practices to make the hybrid campus recruiting seamless

• Make your written communication via emails stronger
• Use virtual meeting tools like Zoom and G-Meet to communicate with college coordinators and students
• Create online forms and questionnaires for job applications using tools like Google Forms, Jotform or Typeform
• Send the JD to college recruiters in PDF format

Strategy #3—Opt for hybrid campus recruitment software

Automation is the joining dots of a hybrid campus recruitment strategy. Why? Because they make your process smooth and keep the candidates engaged with you in a virtual setup.

For example,

If you are hiring software developers virtually, you’ll need technical assessment software to understand the student’s language and programming expertise.

HackerEarth Assessment helps you generate the assessment instantly and select the top candidate based on the leaderboard score. Once you select the candidate, invite them for a video interview using FaceCode.

To keep your hybrid recruiting engine running, make sure your company uses these tools:

• Assessments: Use assessment software to create a questionnaire and send it out to the candidates as part of the screening process.
• Email software: With automated emails, you can keep the conversation who have applied for the emails consistent. Create email sequences for each phase from screening to interview.
• Video conferencing platform: Use video conferencing platforms like Zoom or G-meet to communicate with candidates virtually.

Also Read: Importance of Online Proctoring in University Hiring

Strategy #4—Cross-promote your hybrid campus recruiting event

Do you think informing students about the hybrid campus recruiting event happening at their university is the finishing line when promoting the hiring spree?

It’s not. Once the students get to know about the placements happening at the university, they are likely to go through the process and find out more about the company.

That’s where you need to be strategic.

GenZ is constantly scrolling through social media—mostly, Instagram and YouTube. And these days, students are active on platforms like Linked too.

So, along with the billboards and posters on campus, share about the hiring event online:

• Share a post on LinkedIn, Whatsapp, and Discord communities where college students are active
• Ask your employees who are active on social media to share about the hiring event on their socials channels
• Create a video with your leadership team talking about the perks of working with you and share it across social media

Strategy #5—Showcase your employer’s brand

The big question: why should students work with you? And to nail down the response, you need to build credibility. Gen Z today is smarter than you think. They don’t work *only* for the paycheck anymore.

Students now work with companies that:

• Align with their values
• Encourage mental health and work-life balance
• Focus on their employees’ development

And to make sure you check all these boxes, you need to build your employer brand and show the students “why” they should work with you. Here’s how you can do it:

• Get the leadership team to engage with students through seminars and workshops. These can either be physical events or can be conducted virtually.

For example, you can organize a LinkedIn event where the leadership team sits down and discusses the importance of diversity and how their company empowers it.

• Interview the employees from your organization. Ask them about their experience working with the company and share it on social channels. This helps the students understand the employees’ POV and take the decision.
• Showcase the social proof of your credibility via employees talking about you on review websites like Glassdoor.

Take a look at HackerEarth’s profile on Glassdoor, 82% of people say they will recommend the company to their friends, and 87% of people say they approve of the company’s CEO—a commendable social proof for candidates to work with the company and amplifies employer branding.

Also Read: Create an Employer Brand That Sticks

Ready to pull off your hybrid campus recruiting strategy?

True. Transitioning from offline hiring to hybrid campus hiring can be tedious. The recruitment drive that used to take a day gets divided into phases that keep on going for several days. But once you understand how the offline and hybrid interview stages differ, create the strategy and gather resources to use. With the 5 hybrid campus hiring strategies we have shared above, you can get started and see the results for yourself.

Indeed it’s true that 2020 was a tough year for the whole world to handle. However, the adverse effect of the pandemic also created new opportunities for people. It changed the way companies work. Remote working suddenly became the talk of the town. Even after the pandemic, the craze of remote working only kept growing. There are plenty of benefits and flexibility that remote work provides employees and companies with.

Employers started to use online management tech to efficiently manage their employees who were working remotely. Furthermore, remote hiring or online recruitment has also grown simultaneously with remote working. It has become a priority for recruiters and the HR team, but mainly, it has become a priority for job seekers. To land talented candidates, you need to offer them the flexibility of working from home. This is where tools like applicant tracking systems, online coding assessments, recruiting CRM software, and so on step in to make hiring easier and quicker.

Also, good talent acquisition software provides a recruitment marketing platform for your recruiting team to efficiently source, attract, engage, and hire the best suitable candidates.

Hiring top-tech talent is the highest priority of companies nowadays. In addition, the two factors, tech recruiters and online recruitment software have become an indispensable part of the process. Let’s understand what tech recruitment is and how to market it.

What is tech recruitment?

Tech recruitment is the process of sourcing, attracting, screening, engaging, and hiring talent for IT and technical roles. Recruiters need to have the technical knowledge and the ability to deal with technical people to interact with them.

Generally, tech recruiters approach recruitment by discovering and assessing suitable candidates and presenting them to hiring managers to reach realistic technical recruitment goals.

AI-powered recruiting software, such as applicant tracking systems, remote coding interview tools, and recruiting CRMs, has become a boon for recruiters and hiring teams. This recruitment automation software also helps in recruitment marketing.

Also read: How To Hire Tech Talent When You Don’t Have A Technical Background

What is tech recruitment marketing?

Tech recruitment marketing is practiced by tech recruiters to prepare to source, attract, engage, and hire candidates for tech roles. Following are the top tech recruitment marketing practices that you can implement to hire qualified talent.

Top tech recruitment marketing strategies for 2025

Tech recruiters need to have two essential skills, technical knowledge of the particular role and people skills. These skills are vital for tech recruiters who want to hire the best talent. Besides these two vital skills, recruiters must know the strategic approach to market their tech recruitment to hire top-notch talent.

1. A tech-savvy career page makes a difference

Nowadays, almost every candidate goes through the website of a company before applying to it. A survey by HR Dive found that 61% of job seekers visit company sites before applying. It is essential for recruiters to put compelling content on the career page of the website.

Recruiters can creatively produce and post videos of current employees talking about the positive work culture of the company, or they can put refreshing memories of company outings or a trip. A career site is a great way to convey the company’s culture. Additionally, visual elements such as creating a logo that reflects the company’s mission and culture can help build a stronger identity that resonates with prospective candidates.

The structure of the site is essential to attract tech talent. The blog page of the company could be a great help in giving an overview of the company’s values. Recruiters can send those blog articles to the applicants to show what the company really made of.

2. Effectively promote your employer’s brand

A survey by Glassdoor found that 69% of job seekers say that a company’s reputation is a vital factor, and they would not accept a job offer from a company with a bad reputation. Also, shockingly, 84% would consider leaving their current jobs if offered another role with a company with an excellent reputation. Hence, it is incredibly important for every organization to showcase a positive image to attract and retain top talent. Recruiters can encourage current employees to add a good review about your firm on a review platform as candidates look at it while applying for a job.

In addition, there are many ways to enhance employer branding. The following are the ways to create a powerful employer brand.

1. Create a strong onboarding and personalized training process for new hires.
2. Focus on improving the company’s values, vision, and culture.
3. Build a strong diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative.
4. Leveraging social media to promote the values and unique beneficial points your firm offers.
5. Share videos on social media platforms and job boards of your current employees talking about your amazing work culture.
6. Engage and interact with the candidates often while hiring and provide a positive candidate experience.
7. Offer the opportunity to learn new skills and development programs.

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

3. Take part in local and online tech communities

Companies must participate in local social events that tech talent is known to attend. This way, the company can increase its brand visibility and build better relationships with its target audience.

On the other hand, online communities like GitHub are hotbeds of talent, and tech recruiters should spend some time scouting for suitable candidates here.

According to a StackOverflow survey, over 90% of developers use GitHub and recommend that it is a profound tool for developers. You need to increase engagement and interaction on such platforms to source and hire top-quality talent.

4. Organize in-person or virtual tech events

Recruiters can also arrange local and virtual tech fairs and invite tech talent to join these informative and educational events. These virtual or local events are essential for tech recruiters and companies to build and strengthen their network, which they could use in the future to hire the best people for growth. To enhance attendee interaction and simplify event access, recruiters can integrate The QR Code Generator (TQRCG) into their event strategy by providing scannable codes for registration, resources, or follow-up links.

Tech recruiters can use online tools such as vFAIRS to organize online or hybrid career events to connect with tech talent.

5. Create exciting employee referral programs

Indeed, it’s true that skilled people know skilled people. According to a survey by Recruiter – an employer solution providing web found Employee referral programs can save companies $3,000 or more per hire! Recruiters or employers must set up employee referral programs by providing benefits and perks to those who recommend suitable candidates to the company. Also, one thing employers must keep in mind is that they must keep the employee referral transparent for the employees.

6. Build practical social recruiting strategies

Social recruiting has become the talk of the town because almost everyone uses social media nowadays. According to CareerArc, 86% of job seekers use social media in their job search to search for relevant jobs, apply to jobs directly from social sites, and engage with job-related content. Hence, recruiters must build practical strategies for social media and job boards to reach diverse candidates. A key aspect of social recruiting is ensuring compliance with communication regulations while engaging with potential candidates. Implementing FCC lead generation strategies can help recruiters connect with job seekers through consent-based outreaches while staying compliant with FCC guidelines. This approach ensures ethical recruitment practices while improving engagement rates.

Following are some key strategies recruiters and HRs can apply to get the maximum advantages to advertising tech recruitment.

1. Increase the visibility (traffic) of your website
2. Post content on your site to attract the relevant audience. In this case, tech-related content can attract more people who are curious and passionate about technology.
3. Build strong relationships with candidates on social media platforms
4. Arrange educational and informative virtual or local events for job seekers
5. Indeed, it’s true that skilled people know skilled people. Thus, you must use your employee network wisely to find and hire the most suitable people.

For you: Get your copy of the social recruiting checklist today!

7. Run ads to increase brand awareness

Recruiters can reach a new relevant audience through social media and advertising campaigns on platforms such as Facebook touch and Instagram to raise the company’s awareness. They can run Ads and target users based on the factors such as their current job titles, education level, interests, and location. This Ad campaign helps the hiring teams to target the prospects they want to attract in that specific location and can also include engaging content created through motion graphics video production to improve overall visibility.

8. Develop and nurture a strong talent pool

Recruiters actively discover and engage with suitable candidates even if the company is not hiring at the moment. Recruiters add the data of potential candidates to the talent pool database. When a specific requirement or a post is open, they can easily reach those candidates. Also, it allows them to engage with prospects who are passive candidates. Recruiters and HR teams can use recruitment software such as an Applicant Tracking System.

To manage the talent pool efficiently. Also, they can add candidates to the talent from employee referral portals in ATS. This way, recruiters can effectively manage the talent pool.

Also read: 10 Tech Recruiting Strategies To Find The Best Tech Talent

Final thoughts on tech recruitment marketing

With the rising evolution of technology, the hiring industry has transformed exponentially. Indeed, it’s true that leveraging the right strategy to advertise your job efficiently is incredibly important. It provides you with plenty of benefits for your company. For example, it allows you to hire top candidates and stay ahead of cut-throat competition. Recruitment marketing will enable you to attract a diverse range of candidates.

In this article, we’ve covered key marketing strategies that will be immensely helpful to recruiters in marketing their open positions to candidates far and wide. These strategies will enable them to attract, hire, and retain quality candidates within the company.