How to hire a world class developer

Just like relationships, hiring is a two-way street. As a hiring manager, not only do you need to find the right fit for the position, but you need to make sure the right fit wants to join your team.

What makes a successful software engineer?

We have surveyed thousands of software engineers and have found that universally developers are motivated by both pay and social recognition. But first, let’s look at what traits to look for in your next engineer. According to the Talentoday Software Engineer Target Profile there are three stand-out personality traits developers have in common: ambition, independent mind and creativity.

 

Target Profile Technology: In green are the key traits and motivations of a software engineer.

 

Ambition

As the cliche goes, “shoot for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land amongst the stars”. By far, the most important quality to look for in your next software engineer is high ambition. As recruiters, we tend to look at the past. “What did you do?, How successful was it?” It is important however, to also pay close attention to future goals and motivation of your next developer. Software engineers are constantly innovating and creating new content. Be certain they are excited to strategize and problem solve for your company.

Creativity

Your best software engineer is an expert at innovation. They think outside of the box and don’t necessarily go by the books. How can you know if your engineer is creative? Ask them! For example…”Tell me about a time where you tried to solve a problem in an unconventional way. How did it work out for you?” Remember, it’s not so much about the result of their actions as their attitude towards creativity.

Independent Mind

Whatever you do, don’t hire the software engineer who needs to be micromanaged. You want a leader. Someone that has a clear vision for the next steps for the company and who can problem-solve. Inquire about what role he or she played on their last team and how the dynamic was.

A note on how to motivate your new engineer.

Stand out amongst other companies with your job offer Believe it or not, most software engineers generally want the same thing: social recognition and pay. So instead of wasting your time on benefits and time off, you may seal the deal with a simple bonus and fancy title. Yep, it’s as simple as that. Now go out there and get your next best software engineer!

Curious to see if your candidates have what it takes? Check out our page to send our free personality assessment to your potential new hires today. And if you like this post, please hit the ❤️ button below or give me a shout on Twitter.


6 Qualities Every Start-Up Employee Should Have

Is your start up hiring? Make sure you do your homework.

Whether your company has been around for one month or one hundred years, when you’re expanding into a new market, you have to hire with a start-up mentality. Hiring is an incredible opportunity, but it’s also a risk. As a start-up, you have fewer resources, so if a new hire doesn’t work out, it causes significant burden to the rest of the team. And if you’re managing a new team from a distance, the stakes are even higher. No pressure, but who you hire can make or break your start-up’s success!

Start-ups have a unique dynamic, and not everyone is well suited for it. It might be enticing to hire a seasoned professional from a big name company, but be careful. They may experience culture shock when they don’t have as many resources or a large team to take care of tasks for them.

Interviewing is obviously the biggest tool recruiters currently use to find the right fit for a team. Interviewing candidates is an art, both from the interviewer and the interviewee standpoints. Some candidates are great at selling themselves, others more reserved. It could be they grew up in a culture where self-promotion was considered a vice, not a virtue, and not indicative of how well they’d perform in a role. Some recruiters are better than others at bringing out the best in candidates in a conversation.

So how do you know if a candidate will fly or flounder in your company’s entrepreneurial culture? Look for these traits:

  1. Accountability: Determine how the candidate owns his or her work. Notice if he or she answers questions with “I” or “We”. It’s imperative in a start-up that employees take full responsibility for their roles, tasks and actions.
  2. Self-motivation: In a start-up you don’t have as much time for rah-rah speeches and trying to light a fire under your team. You need an employee who has an intrinsic desire to work hard and perform well.
  3. Flexibility: One day the goal might be sales, the next traffic. Mission statements and organization charts evolve quickly. To succeed in a start-up, one must be able to adapt to change.
  4. Skill/Education: Certainly, having the right skills and education for a role brings results. The closer a candidate matches the expertise you need the less time they’ll need to be trained.
  5. Passion: Believing in the mission of your company and having a passion for the work you’re doing is key for start-up company employees. It’s what will keep them going in the middle of the night before a big launch.
  6. Resourceful: An ideal start-up employee knows how to solve problems, often with little resources. Like business Macgyvers, they can make big things happen with Excel and a couple of paper clips.

You don’t have to rely on hours of subjective interviews to figure out if your candidate is “the one.” Identifying a candidate’s personality traits objectively can be done using a people analytics tool like the Talentoday Manager. Here’s an example profile of a real person who is currently successful at a start-up. As you can see, with one glance you can identify areas of strength to match the profile you need.

Talentoday further identifies her as a great start-up candidate with these insights:

Creativity 8 / 10: She likes to be innovative and find original solutions. She is not very conventional.

Stress Management 8 / 10: She finds it easy to keep her cool in stressful situations. She performs well under pressure.

Motivations — Security 1 / 10: She does not need security in her work; she likes to take risks.

Motivation — Need for Relations 9 / 10: She is motivated by teamwork and relations with others are very important.

The most important asset a start-up has is its people. When reviewing your candidates, identifying their personality traits is even more important than evaluating their skills. With the right personality traits, an employee can gain experience and move up the ladder, developing into exactly the long-term employee you need.

Allie Powers

Curious to find out your professional traits? Check out our page to take your free personality assessment today. And if you like this post, please hit the ❤️ button below or give me a shout on Twitter.


Psychometrics: unleash your superhuman talents

Psychometrics. Sounds like something out of a lab experiment, right? Someone in a hospital gown hooked up to wires that monitor brain waves?
No, it’s not a scene from Stranger Things. It’s cutting-edge technology that when mixed with a powerful algorithm, is changing the game in human resources, online advertising and customer experience.

By definition, psychometrics is the science of measuring mental capacities and processes. Algorithms and predictive analytics are used everywhere from Facebook to Amazon measuring behavior as an indicator of content preferences and buying habits. But now we are seeing this technology used in a brand new way.

Talentoday’s personality questionnaire and underlying algorithm leverage psychology and data science to discover someone’s unique personality traits and motivations. What makes this test unique? Talentoday was born out of in depth research done by top psychologists and will not place you into a Myers Briggs box — it is the only one of its kind in HR.

Talentoday for Hiring Managers & Recruiters:

The real psychometric magic happens when the behind the scenes computing is combined with a simple (& free) online questionnaire that was designed with busy professionals, like you, in mind. It can be accessed on any device, includes short and easy to comprehend questions, and takes an average of 11 minutes to finish.

While the questionnaire goes in depth, you do not need a Ph.D to understand the results. Assessment information is presented in an easy to read format, allowing hiring managers to make data-driven decisions about potential employees rather than relying solely on gut instincts developed during interviews.

Talentoday Questionnaire Results: Motivation & Personality Radars

To get even more out of the reports, Talentoday offers a certification program that will show you how to review results at a deeper level. One member of a hiring team or HR office can become an expert and share their knowledge with the rest of the team.

With a deeper understanding of a candidate’s personality, companies can more accurately know how a candidate will fit the job description and office culture, which will lead to a higher rate of a successful hire and increased employee retention long term.

 

Job Matching Technology: Get your Free Trial

HR offices and staffing agencies can also use the target profiles created from Talentoday’s growing database to match their incoming candidates to. The job matching system (above) shows managers if the candidates meet the essential criteria — reducing the risk of hiring a bad fit and saving time in the process.

The whole thing is built to scale, and can be customized to fit any organization’s needs.

Talentoday for the average joe

On the other side of the house, candidates now have full access to their superpowers. Score a 9 in creativity? Time to play up your best qualities in your next interview and land the job you have been eyeing the first time around. The company also offers career recommendations in a comprehensive PDF report and includes interview questions to help you prepare.

Want to learn more? Try the free personality assessment for yourself. You’ve got nothing to lose and only insight and data to gain. Unleash those super powers folks!

Allie Powers

Curious to hear more HR & Recruiting tips? Check out additional articles. And if you like this post, please hit the ❤️ button below or give me a shout on Twitter.


Hit a Hiring Road Block?

3 Powerful Tools for Recruiting the New Generation

This is the era of the Millennials, a generation that, according to the United States Census Bureau, represents more than one quarter of the United States population and is the largest population in the United States today. Take Google’s headquarters, for example. When you walk onto the campus the first thing you see are young adults bustling between the buildings. It looks almost like a busy college campus.

As more of today’s students graduate and enter the job market, recruiters must learn how to attract them and HR teams want to be sure their new recruits will stay motivated when joining their company’s workforce. If companies want to compete with the Googleplex, they need to make their hiring process more effective and their job offerings more alluring to new hot candidates. The challenge is creating a process that is enticing to the interviewee and informative to the company while still remaining bias free. Hiring a millennial will look much different than hiring from previous generations but luckily there a few nimble start-ups dedicated to making this process a success.

Three Powerhouse Recruitment Tools

While it is the era of Millenials, it is also the era of new tech tools. As the candidate pool has evolved so has the technology. HR teams have adapted the following hiring solutions to their recruitment process to help them make more informed decisions.

  1. Greenhouse companies like AirBnb, Pinterest & Vimeo have successfully implemented this new software that optimizes the entire recruiting process. With Greenhouse, you can find better candidates, conduct more focused interviews, and organize the recruiting process from start to finish. Experienced interviewers don’t wing it. The interview process should be a powerful marketing tool. You want every candidate to walk out of their interview feeling impressed by your team and excited about your company. Greenhouse provides all the tools you need for powerful, structured interviewing.
  2. Talentoday is a HR portal where people seeking jobs can take a simple & informative questionnaire that analyzes people’s personality and motivation at work The psychometric technology leverages Talentoday’s growing 3.5 million global database of detailed personality assessments. The companies secret weapon is their job matching platform which allows you to match candidates to Job Profiles in the industry to quickly see if you have a good fit. It has a slick, modern interface and is integrated with social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, making it very appealing to this new generation.
  3. Interviewing.io on the other side of the house is this quickly growing company that allows engineers to skip the bullsh** and get right to the technical stuff. Hiring engineers? You can now talk directly to engineers who’ve been killing it in technical interviews. With their unique approach candidates who do well in practice, get invites to interview anonymously with great companies. That means Millennials can skip right to the technical screen without talking to recruiters, touching their resume, or worrying about bias. If you have the skills you get the job, it is as simple as that.

With these tools, a the recruitment team will be one step ahead for their candidates, providing them job opportunities that better fulfill their needs and life goals, while saving the company precious time with a more effective recruitment process.

 

Embracing These Modern, Powerful HR Recruitment Software

The population of job applicants is continuously changing and a new generation is entering the workforce with very different expectations and attitudes. HR teams will become better at understanding this evolution and select candidates that better fit their company, or lose top candidates to other companies who are catching on.

 

“Digitization, social networks, big data, and machine learning are disrupting the staffing and recruitment industry and the future of professionals hinges on the ability to understand, interpret and embrace data” — Alberding Group

Adapting new tools that combine recruitment planning, people analytics, machine learning and the latest advancements in psychology will allow companies to attract new generations of job applicants who will remain productive and committed to their job.

Curious to hear more HR & Recruiting tips? Check out additional articles. And if you like this post, please hit the ❤️ button below or give me a shout on Twitter.