How do companies recruit high-quality programmers? Ask for answers

Are you surprised by this? But there are certainly people who call themselves programmers who can barely program. To this day, recruiters tell me that they always encounter candidates who cannot pass the most basic programming test.

There are now services that can help you solve the problem of testing candidates online, such as Interview Zen and codility.

Look at developer profiles on the Internet. Any developer worth their salt should have a resume about their work history. It doesn’t have to be perfect, I just focus on the little bits and pieces the candidate has left on the internet by helping others. Show me your profile on Stack Overflow so I can understand what technical information you focus on and what technical problems you solve; give me a link to an open source code base that you have been involved in; give me your Professional blog address? Tumblr? Twitter? Or some other name I've never heard of? Yes, I can take a good look. Show me the apps you've designed, the websites you've worked on, and what role you played in them.

Hire people who fit the company culture Just like GitHub, I have found that being well integrated into the company culture is more likely to lead to success than working hard all day long.

We will discuss philosophy with candidates during the interview process, and we take this process very seriously. We want employees who come to work at GitHub to understand the company they are entering and make sure they can adapt well to the company's environment. This process includes eating together and talking about corporate culture, philosophy, mistakes we have made, future plans and other topics.

In the early days, our recruitment only focused on the skills of the candidates, but not much on whether they fit into the corporate culture and whether they understood philosophy. Naturally, these recruitment efforts did not go over well. So now we not only focus on the skills of the candidates, but whether they can integrate into us is also an important part of our investigation.

As far as I know, not all business areas have corresponding technical circles, but if there are, recruiters must try their best to recruit people from the technical circles. Because the technical staff in this circle will naturally be interested in what your company does, and will easily integrate into companies that are consistent with their wishes. The likelihood that these candidates will adapt well to the corporate culture is exceptionally high. This is exactly what recruiters like to see.

The content of telephone communications with candidates needs to be clearly structured. You have completed the above mentioned things, and now it is time to make a call to the candidate. Remember this call is not for chatting, but for screening applicants. Therefore, the content of the call is about technical topics, and the structure level must be clear. If the content is inappropriate, both you and the candidate will be taken away from the purpose of the call. The content should cover the technical basics. In summary, the following points are:

Quick programming. For example: programming to find the largest Int type data from an Int array; some basic designs. Scripting languages ??and regular expressions. For example: Please extract a list of text files containing phone numbers from this directory and output it in a specific format. Data structures such as when would you use a hash table instead of an array? Bits and Bytes, as in: Why programmers ask jokes like "oct (31) == dec (25)". The purpose of this measure is to save applicants and recruiters more time after going to the next process. You must stick to your position and abandon the interview process as soon as possible if you find that the applicant is inconsistent with the situation.

Invite candidates to participate in actual projects. The candidate has successfully passed the four levels mentioned above. Is it time for a face-to-face interview? Now is not the time.

I have seen some candidates who successfully passed the tests mentioned above, but in the end they were not able to complete the actual tasks well in actual work.

If you want to know for sure whether he is a good candidate, give him an actual project to work on. I'm not talking about general, abstract programming tasks, but an actual development module of a product that your company is currently working on - a task that you originally planned to assign to actual employees of the company.

Choose a test project that can be completed in a few days, ideally, or in a week or two at most.

Candidates can complete this at the company or work remotely. I know that not every company can break their projects into some small projects like this and assign them to candidates to complete outside the company - but you can try your best to let candidates complete them within the company. I personally think that if you are unable to assign such a micro-project to a good candidate, it probably means that the tasks you are assigning to current employees are unreasonable.

If the candidate has completed the assigned test project with excellence. Congratulations, you've found a highly qualified candidate who's proven to do the job well. So far, all the candidates I have seen who have passed this test are able to complete the tasks very well in actual work. To be precise, it's not 100% guaranteed, but I think this test is very important because you can see the candidate's performance in actual projects up close before he is hired. If the test project doesn't work out, consider the cost of the project an "exit fee", which is much cheaper than having 4 or 5 people from the company go through an expensive interview process. Worst case scenario, use the project for the next great candidate.

It’s Time to Meet the Candidate Finally, you should choose a time to meet with the interviewer. This is inevitable, but through a series of tests you have conducted before, you should be 95% sure that this candidate is a good candidate for employment before meeting with him.

I'm not an interview expert, but I don't like asking difficult questions, just in moderation.

Nothing is absolutely guaranteed. Please keep the recruitment process listed above in perspective. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they fail. Adapt these suggestions to your own unique situation and omit certain steps (although I strongly recommend that you skip even the first step). Recruiting talent can be difficult even in the best of circumstances. Obtaining a job opportunity will be affected by many factors, often beyond a person's control. As they say, people are inherently complex.

If you think of work as a relationship, a relationship that requires spending more than 40 hours a week, then both the company and the recruiter should have a belief and work hard to find the right person for them. Our purpose is not just to find a job or hire someone, but to have fun in life and to create a loving relationship.