Tech Recruitment Blog

How to lose tech candidates and alienate recruiters

TB4HR Team

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Here at Toolbox for HR, we hire geeks. We treat every single one of our candidates as an individual while at the same time we constantly crunch data to verify any hypothesis or remove the bias. Big data helps our recruiters not to waste candidates/ interviewers/ hiring managers time.

In the last 2,5 years, we saw 500+ successfully accomplished recruitment processes. Many Software Engineers, DevOps, Data Scientists and Test Engineers got some new wind underneath their wings, moved jobs, cities, and countries. The total compensation of our hires is equivalent to the annual budget of Falkland Islands.

Today almost every company is, to some extent, a tech company. Owner of the lemonade stand at the farmer’s market needs a portable POS, ride-sharing driver needs to understand where to go to get 2.4 multipliers for his rides and the demand for the geeks making businesses smarter is not going away anytime soon.

We recently looked at the data coming from 500 recruitment processes to see what we learned.

We compared different interviewing philosophies among our clients. We grouped them into 3 categories:

a/ Friendly human – 2-3 stages of technical interviews with humans

b/ Hostile human – 3+ stages in unpredictable order and decision process with humans

c/ Talk-to-the-bot – test and/or homework followed by 2+ stages with humans

It turns out that more complex recruitment process (and test and/or homework) does not lead to better decisions. You need 2.6 tested candidates interviewing with a CTO to make a hire, but only 1.6 candidates who were previously interviewed by the engineers. Candidates who were exposed to tests are less likely to accept offers.


Source: Toolbox for HR

 

This also translates into the time invested into interviewing of tech candidates.


Source: Toolbox for HR

 

You might say that 11 hours to hire the right match is not a big investment and it’s hard to argue with that. Now, imagine growing from 20 to 100 people that is 6 months of one of the team members not coding, testing, maintaining infrastructure and not even using the bathroom and having coffee chats… just being locked up in a room with an army of candidates.

So do you still want to grow your team?

The best way to start is to invest in trained and enthusiastic interviewers, help them calibrate and have the best ambassadors of your employer brand! Side effect: more time spent on coding less time spent on the interviews.

 

Happy recruiting!

Marcin Smolinski is a tech recruiter with 20 years history of building engineering teams around the world. He is a founder of Toolbox for HR, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing focusing on tech and space.

 

Raise or the fall of the empire? Tech Talent in the UK

TB4HR Team

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Every industry (not only in the UK) is considering the impact of Brexit on the global economic landscape. For the past 2 years, the British tech industry is being impacted by a weak pound through increasing costs of services outside of the UK (like hosting, growth services, outsourced software development etc.). According to our research, ~32% of 100.000 tech professionals in London are educated overseas. ~10.000 Geeks in London work in the financial services industry and some of those jobs are to be located elsewhere soon. More and more Developers, DevOps and Data Scientists (especially non-UK born) are considering opportunities in continental Europe due to the uncertainty of their post-Brexit status and (again) weak sterling. Will the British Empire rise like a phoenix through education and innovation or will it fall due to lack of both? Our current infographic shows a landscape or current status of talent in the UK, but we’re looking forward to revisiting these numbers in the future to assess the real impact of Brexit onto Britain’s tech talent landscape.

 

Keep on recruiting – Ta ta

Marcin Smolinski
Founder @ Toolbox for HR

 


Tech Talent in Germany

TB4HR Team

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Hallo!

For the last few years, many doubted whenever Silicon Allee is a thing but with a rise of Soundcloud, Zalando or GoEuro, Berlin is becoming a strong player on the global tech scene. Berlin’s size, liberal environment, reasonably priced services and properties are attracting young entrepreneurs and VCs in large numbers. An interesting fact is that approx half of all geeks in Berlin did not graduate from German universities which is a great proof for its inclusiveness.
Klaus Wowereit (fmr. Mayor of Berlin) once said ‘Berlin ist arm, aber sexy’ (Berlin is poor but sexy) we believe that with Rocket Internet recently raising USD 1 Billion fund the only part of the message that still holds true is ‘sexy’.

 

Munich, Ruhr region, Hamburg and Frankfurt are, since a couple of generations, home to German industrial, media and financial sector behemoths. There are more and more Developers, DevOps Engineers, Data Scientists in those cities moving away from 9 to 5 jobs into innovative products that have a global scale outreach.

 

We checked Germany’s talent pool, their skills, and experience to share it with you. Enjoy our Germany tech talent infographic.

 

Keep on recruiting – Tschüss
Marcin Smolinski
Founder @ Toolbox for HR

 



Tech Talent in FinTech Industry

Marcin Smolinski

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FinTech is gaining a momentum but there is still a long way to go.

We’re still walking around with our cards, our money is laying around in our current accounts not being invested when we don’t need it and currency exchanges can be found at every airport. At the same time, we see fraud detection or mortgage credit scoring being nearly 100% dependent on machine learning. There are still plenty of opportunities for FinTech companies to change the way we and businesses earn, pay, transfer, borrow and invest money.

Hiring talents for the FinTech industry is an arms race. The more skilled developers, data scientists and product managers companies can hire the more of the technology edge they have over competitors working on tackling the exactly same challenge. William Mougayar in his book The Business Blockchain says that by mid 2016 there were only “5,000 developers dedicated to writing software for the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, or blockchain in general. The good news is that Java, C++, JavaScript, Python, Golang and Haskell developers are out there to be hired!

We looked at the most popular tech stack among FinTech companies and checked how deep are the talent markets for those technologies in several countries. Enjoy our first infographics of 2017!

Marcin Smolinski
Founder @ Toolbox for HR

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Tech Talent in E-commerce Industry

TB4HR Team

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HO HO HO e-commerCO!

With all holiday shopping madness, we looked up what is the most popular tech stack used by major e-commerce platform. Then we looked up how does it translate into geek talent market in several countries.

Happy Festivus, Hannukah, Christmas, days with limited food deliveries, days with slow internet at your parents, anything else you will be observing in coming days.

Keep on recruiting in 2017!

Marcin Smolinski
Founder @ Toolbox for HR

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Tech Talent in EduTech Industry

TB4HR Team

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Since famous TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, we see education market moving the needle on disruption. At the same time, the costs of education were soaring over the last 40 years.

Platforms such as Elearning, Videos, Online Classrooms, Mobile Apps, Social Media blended with IoT, VR, 3DPrinting are creating new learning opportunities for students and teachers as well as developers and product managers. There is a bit of technology in kindergarten and K12 Education. Even countries with relatively low GDP believe that tablet and e-schoolbooks are money better spent than another central committee for education.

EduTech is working its way to make sure that education is accessible, affordable and exciting. How many solar system models have we made over last few decades? Now we can zoom out on our iPhone to show 6 years old distance between the galaxies to explain why Voyager is pretty lonely in intergalactic travels. Don’t get me wrong – building stuff together with kids is still fun!
Another exciting industry and another talent market research delivered by #TB4HRLabs – enjoy!

Keep on hiring!

Marcin Smolinski
Founder @ Toolbox for HR

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Finding Tech Talent on Meetup

TB4HR Team

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Meetup is a unique platform for finding tech talent. There is an opportunity to reach members who are extremely active in Tech community and are willing to go an extra mile to learn more about technology and develop their skills. The profiles of these members could range from designers to developers, Data scientists to Analysts and more. The list of topics is big based on which members join groups, create local communities and eventually meetup to discuss or brainstorm ideas, latest trends around these topics.

 

So if you are looking for networking or learn some new tricks about a particular programming language or technology then Meetup is your platform, not to mention finding someone on meetup gives you an opportunity for personalizing the pitch and opens another communication channel. Check out the following presentation to see what more you can do on Meetup.

 

Hiring Frontend Developers

Marcin Smolinski

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The moment users open websites or apps on the desktop, smartphone or tablet we see beautiful work of Frontend Developers. Frontend Developers code in programming languages such as CSS, HTML and JavaScript with different frameworks so that websites, apps look great and are easy to use…

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Hiring Ruby Developers

TB4HR Team

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Ruby is a general-purpose programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto in 1995. It is easily readable (reads like English), has unsurprising syntax and was created with an idea to ‘keep programmers happy’. It allows for higher productivity and efficiency and for getting product ideas up and running quickly…

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