Overview
Hiring early talent developers is vital to a company's success. Not only do they help shape your company’s culture, but as they develop skills, they help drive the future development of your company’s road map. Early Talent usually consists of recent college graduates or developers with less than two years of hands-on, real-world experience.
HackerRank has put together the following best practices process for hiring early talent developers. From resume submission to onsite interview up to the final offer, HackerRank can help streamline this process so that your team is spending as much time as possible effectively evaluating the right skills for the role.
Phase 1: Plan
Step 1: Define your hiring process
Before the role can be promoted, Talent Acquisition, Hiring Managers, and Subject Matter Experts should all work together to define what the assessment and hiring process should work.
Factors to consider:
- What role are you hiring for?
- Will they be an intern? Campus hiring? Or blast off to everyone?
- How can we reduce bias in our hiring process?
- Who will be your SME?
- Will there be an ATS integration for housing data?
Subject matter experts are vital in the planning stage. These individuals are typically experienced developers within the business. They could potentially be the hiring manager. As the SME, they ensure the most effective and efficient assessments/questions/processes are leveraged by your organization. This will be true for any role or experience level.
An SME will help you:
- Define a range of skills that you want to hire for
- Decide question randomization and cutoff scores
- Structure the processes in place for test validation
Step 2: Identify your test validator
Next, Identify your test validator. This individual is frequently a current employee that is at the same level as the role you are hiring. Create a timeline for how long the validation and test process will take. This will be a good time to send out calendar invites to secure deadlines.
You can also use this time to set up and create Interview Templates. By using Interview Templates, hiring managers and interviewers ensure that they ask the same set of questions to every candidate applying for a particular role.
These planning questions and this process are common across all levels but are most important for this level. If you need any additional help in reducing bias in your process, you can access one of our I/O psychologists.
Phase 2: Screen
Step 1: Create the test
Students will rarely be a stack match “out of the box,” so as a general rule, it’s best to incorporate a mix of core customer science questions and broader transferable skills, like knowledge of algorithms and data structures.
Below are some tips and best practices for creating university and early talent assessment:
- Length of Assessment: 60 - 90 minutes.
- Level of Difficulty: Use 1 - 2 easy questions with 1-2 medium questions.
- Question Types:
- Coding Questions: Have the candidate write programs or define logic in functions to produce the expected output.
- Multiple Choice: Candidates can choose one or more correct answers from the given list.
HackerRank has a pre-built library of over 2,500 questions for over 20+ roles. Our predefined tests take the guesswork of what to include in these tests. Watch the video below to learn how to use one of our predefined tests.
Step 2: Send test invites to candidates
Recruiters will usually send out bulk invites to take the test you created in the step above. Before sending out the invites, it's a good idea to:
- Decide what additional test settings to establish.
- Brand the invitations and customized emails
- Create a cadence to review all the candidates that will be pushed into the phone screen with the hiring manager
Step 3: Analyze candidate performance trends.
Once you have sent out your invitations and candidates have begun to submit tests, you will want to evaluate the candidate’s scores in order to analyze the Candidate performance trends. This step will help you understand which candidates to further evaluate for the initial phone screen with the recruiter. If the phone screen is a success, you will have the information needed to invite them in for a virtual onsite interview session.
Watch the video below to see how HackerRank’s Screen platform makes sending invites as easy as a 3-step process.
Phase 3: Interview
Step 1: Setup your Interview
It’s time to interview your top candidates. Now is a great time to get aligned with other interviewers. A consistent interview process reduces bias while also providing a way to benchmark and compare candidates to get the right fit.
Enable a consistent and structured interview process with our Interview Templates.
It's important that interviewers ask the same or similar set of questions to every candidate applying for a role. These templates ensure that each interviewer is asking the candidate the right questions.
A few questions to consider:
- How does the candidate react when they’re given a problem they’ve never seen?
- Are you allowing room for diversity in the approach to the problem? How many ways can you solve it?
We also created Interview Guidelines that provide recommended questions, curated specifically for interviews, that take less than 30 mins to solve. Pair this with interviewer Scorecards to keep the interview streamlined.
Additionally, HackerRank Interview keeps the interview collaborative and interactive with video and chat functionality. The fully functioning IDE allows candidates to show off their code or dive deeper into the thought process with the ability to pull in test questions.
Watch this video to see how to use HackerRank Interview.
Phase 4: Rank
It is crucial to make hiring decisions that can be backed by data. Some interviewers are easy graders than others, so benchmarking can take the subjectivity out of the decision, making the final decision easier across multiple interviews.
Access real-time data on a candidate’s performance on the test and in the interview. If you haven't already, it's a good time to discuss the protocol of where you want to review the candidate's interview information. Will you review in HackerRank or within the ATS if you have integrated one?
HackerRanks Benchmarking compares a candidate's scores on specific skills against a cohort of candidates who have been assessed on the same set of skills.
The below video shows you how to use review candidate's information within HackerRank.