Software Developers Need to Prepare for Rigorous Recruiting Process
It's a software developer's job market, but IT hiring managers still act like it's an employer's market where they can put candidates through the paces.
Last week I spoke with Adriana Ganos, a senior consultant with staffing firm Winter Wyman's New England-area software engineering permanent division. She places software developers in full-time, permanent positions with her clients.
Ganos and I talked about the market for software development jobs in the Boston area and about the job interview questions that dog developers. She said that software developers, particularly with Java for Linux, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and Perl expertise, are a hot commodity in her neck of the woods.
At the same time that Ganos's clients are jockeying to hire programmers, they're putting candidates for these jobs through the paces. Specifically, they're giving candidates lengthy programming problems to solve.
Programming problems and algorithmic exercises have long been part of the job interview process for software developers. "It's a way for clients to figure out what they're getting and their best way to test drive potential employees," says Ganos.
That's all fine and dandy. After all, it's part of a hiring manager's due diligence. But this practice poses problems when employers ask candidates to complete exercises that require four or more hours of work. According to Ganos's experience with her clients, that's increasingly becoming the case.
One problem in requiring candidates to devote a chunk of time to what is essentially an academic exercise is that employers risk alienating the top talent they're trying to recruit. The other obstacle this practice introduces is that it effectively limits an employer's pool of candidates. Ganos notes that software developers who are currently employed don't have time to solve a four-hour programming problem.
It's odd (to say the least) that in a "developers job market" like Boston, more employers are making candidates jump through these hoops.
Ganos says she often has to explain to her more demanding clients that they can't expect passive job seekers to spend "eight hours on a job opportunity they know nothing about."
She adds that these programming problems and exercises take place at various stages in the recruiting process, depending on the employer. Usually, hiring managers ask candidates to do them after the candidate has passed an initial phone screen, she says.
Software developers: Are you experiencing this trend? Are you finding more employers asking you to work on elaborate programming problems during the recruitment process?
IT hiring managers: When it comes to recruiting developers, how do you strike a balance between keeping top talent interested in your organization and getting a good sense of the "human capital" you're recruiting?
Previous Post: Obama Jobs Plan: How IT Workers Will BenefitNext Post: The 7 Dumbest Things Job Seekers Write on Their Resumes
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
