How Non-Tech Managers Hire Developers — Detailed Guide

It is a fact that not every HR, and not every manager is proficient in the tech field. They should not be so. After all, their main task is to hire and manage new employees that will do their job perfectly well. They are not here to code. 

However, recruiters will need some additional knowledge and tricks to hire tech teams. After all, you have to check not their soft skills only, hard skills do matter a lot in the tech world. How do you check the quality of the code if you do not know a thing about all these complicated letters and numbers?

If you have asked yourself this question before, you have stumbled upon the right article. We will discuss tools and hacks that a non-tech HR manager can use to find good developers. With the policy of working from home , we will present online tools that you can use from any spot in the world. After the reading, you will be able to find the best candidates without stepping out of your home once. 

First Touchpoints

Let's agree that in this article we're talking about the situation when you already have your product, company website, or at least MVP. By this, we mean that you know already what skill set do you need from your new hire, you've already analyzed your competitors and understood in which direction your product should be developing in the future, you've defined your scope of work and hiring model (whether you hire in-house developer, find freelance developers, or engage an outsourcing partner) by the time you open positions.

We also assume that you've found a way to generate a constant lead flow by writing a creative job description with numerous perks, promoting your job opening on social media, paying for job ads, or organizing a system of employee referrals within your company. If not, you can read more about places to find and hire software developers on YouTeam's blog.

If you have asked yourself this question before, you have stumbled upon the right article. We will discuss tools and hacks such as a problem-solving test that a non-tech HR manager can use to find good developers.

In this article, we're going to focus only on that part of talent acquisition when you need to check and evaluate your tech candidates.

Resume and Profiles Filter

No matter if your recruiting process is online or offline, the first thing you do is screen the potential employees to cross out the most unsuitable ones. At this stage, the recruitment process is very similar to what you have in the non-tech world.

It is as usual: you either make a job posting on the job boards and get numerous emails or you go to Upwork or LinkedIn and look through CVs of your potential candidates in order to reach out to the best of them. On their resume and in the profiles, potential job candidates give summarized information about their experience, specific skills, and education. We are sure you know all of that. 

However, the tech part comes up when it comes to the skills and there are some unknown acronyms. Do not be afraid of them. As a hiring manager, you have probably got an overview of the site’s tech stack or a description of the perfect tech candidate. Just match unknown acronyms in what you have got from the boss with what you see in the profiles or CVs.

Resume Format

A resume has to be logically structured and well-organized because you do expect logic and organization skills from a developer. Additionally, if they were not able to deal with Word in a way that their CV is readable, can they really solve a complex tech task?

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Unexplained Job Gaps

Top tech talent is in high demand headhunted by different companies and recruitment agencies. Surely, it is not a hard no if your candidate has not been working for a couple of years but it is better to keep that in mind anyway. 

Duration of Stay on the Previous Jobs

Often job changes can be a red flag in a candidate's resume and definitely an area where managers should investigate more. It's possible that a candidate is looking for constant career growth. So you better be sure that your company can provide it and any other firm won't pull out your new employee with a better offer. 

It's also possible that the candidate has a bad temper which causes problems in team communication. Or even that their hard skills are not that profound as CV says. 

Think in advance about all the possible reasons for such often job switches and try to find the real one during the interview. 

Cover Letters

Cover letters are not really used in the tech world and you have to be aware of that — do not push away the job seekers just because they did not provide a cover letter. It does not mean that they are passive candidates who lack motivation. Cover letters just do work in this field.

However, there are two cases where cover letters are needed:

• junior position (if the candidate has from zero to little experience, the least they can do is to provide the cover letter)

• highly competitive branches (the more primary selection criteria you have here, the lesser people you will have to interview afterward)

Video Resumes

There are two reasons why you should ask for a video. First of all, hiring offshore software engineers is getting more and more popular and you can learn more about its benefits here. With offices closed, companies do not care if their employees are in the USA or in Eastern Europe. Since they save money in the second case, they are likely to go for international tech talents. Recruiters have to check the language skills of the candidates which would hardly ever be the case in the “normal times”.

Secondly, you will always have to communicate through video. Take a look at the video resume and see how comfortable candidates are with it and how good their communication skills are when they do not face their conversation partner. 

So, as soon as you selected top talent from the available talent pool you can move on to the next stage of the recruitment process.

Resume Builder

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Candidate’s Skills Assessment

In the second stage, it is getting harder for an HR or manager to ignore the knowledge of tech parts. Yet, this article is here to help you overcome this problem. Let’s take a look at what the technology has to offer.

Online Interview

You have two ways out here. In the first case, you make an additional effort, ask the tech departments what basic tech questions are better to ask the candidates and the answers to them. 

Yet, you can go through an interview process to evaluate the soft skills, cultural background, etc. You can assess whether they are a good fit for the existing team, their time-management and communication skills, their background. If you have questions about job gaps or durations of the stays, it is a perfect moment to ask them. If you want to know how to adjust your usual questions to a tech side, use the developer soft skills evaluation tool. 

In any case, do not ignore the interview part. They may have good coding skills but they will need to fit into the company culture, so such skills as time- and self-management are essential in this job. You can not test them in any app.

Skill Test

Unfortunately, there is no single universal standard of developers' seniority levels. Some count it with years, others with tech stack, or even with responsibilities. So it's hard to understand the candidate's level simply by the note in their CV. 

Luckily for your non-tech mindset, tech people came up with a solution that allows you to test the technical skills of the candidates in real-time. The technology allows you to get a simple report that says whether the candidate passed or failed the skills tests — no need to look at the code. 

There are some platforms to consider:

• Equip — use large Question Banks to create proctored assessments with programming challenges and quizzes in less than 2 minutes

• Codility — provides remote code tests with an evaluation of main tech skills;

• HackerRank — provides an ecosystem for developer-friendly interviews with code tests for different technology stacks;

• CodeSignal — take-home online tests based on technologies you use in your project with a certificate of success;

• ChallengeRocket — a platform where companies can create different dev challenges and compare the quality of tasks completed by their candidates;

• CodinGame — helps validate coding skills and present the results in reports.

Conclusion

A non-tech HR or manager can hire developers and developers are the ones who made it possible. While the first touch points such as resumes and cover letters do not differ much from the usual hiring process, skill tests and online interviews have their peculiarities. Test language skills during the online interview and use special skill test platforms to assess code quality.

Hiring developers is easier than ever before. Special thank you to developers for that. 

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