There is an unmentioned dread among tech leaders – including VPs, CTOs, and Directors of Product and Engineering. Albeit scaling a team is a positive sign, it often means endless candidate screening. Precious time and effort are spent on something important, but not at all fun.

If you’ve ever been through the process of filling a tech position, you know how hard it can be.

  • For HR recruiters, assessing tech skills in-depth is more than challenging. More often than not, large amounts of resumes are passed on to product teams so the vetting can be done there;
  • For tech leadership, it’s another ordeal. Not only do you have to find the best-skilled talent for your project, but you also have to identify the best cultural fit.

Bringing them on board is tough enough, and you don’t want to lose them to the competition shortly after. 

No wonder going through a long hiring process only to lose your candidate shortly after can bring you awful consequences. Missed roadmap deadlines, money loss, and, ultimately, you will lose face with execs and end-users.

With such a competitive market, the only way to count with them long term on your team is to have a rigorous screening and hiring process. In other words, knowing that you’re getting not only the best people out there. You need to find the ones with the best fit to grow with your company.

We’ve gathered here the main elements and attributes you should be looking for. They are the ones that Ubiminds screens when looking for tech talent. We believe these are fundamental for any candidate that wants to succeed with our clients.

Candidate screening: what are the basics that companies are looking for when doing it?

There are three levels of analysis that come into play.

  1. Basic ‘must-have’ requirements. Knowing the basic skills and traits the candidate needs to even be considered for the position. For tech, that can be their proficiency with operating systems, programming languages, development frameworks, or platforms.
  2. Preferred/“good to have”. Skills that are not absolutely necessary, but will set candidates apart. This helps negotiations by prioritizing who gets the best offers.
  3. “Between the lines”. Extras that you haven’t identified as part of the job outline, but will bring you benefits in the long run. It can be something that isn’t foreseen in the roadmap but can add to team performance, for example.

→ If you’re a candidate, here is what your stack should be like when looking for a job. 

→ If you’re the recruiting party, there are best practices on hiring (and retaining) tech talent you should look into.

How can you make the most of your candidate screening process?

There aren’t big secrets of the trade, but some practices are important to ensure candidate screening is effective.

  1. Have a clear job briefing. Knowing exactly what you’re going for avoids you from getting sidetracked.
  2. Build a persona. Have in mind what the ideal candidate profile looks like. Strive for perfection.
  3. Get everyone on the same page. Criteria set, make sure everyone doing the screening has the same understanding.
  4. Be aware of personal biases. There is a fair share of subjectivity involved, and it impacts decision-making. Especially if you’re not aware.
  5. Look for the essentials. Previous companies, referrals, side projects, shared network. There might even be portfolios worth looking at.
  6. Call in the specialists. Be it your internal HR team or service providers such as Ubiminds. Traditional staffing firms do know how to pick up on subtle signals, not only the red flags. Yet, they are often not fully prepared to check tech skills.

This video by Toronto’s MaRS has awesome advice on candidate screening:

 

Why is Ubiminds’ candidate screening process different?

Ubiminds strongly believes that it goes beyond the basic requirements. It might be what you look for when bringing people in, but it won’t keep them with you. 

We work with a white-glove service, and that means we have a business partner approach.

Ubiminds looks for other key factors that can assure you’re getting true partners who are aligned with your culture and ideals. And that will stick with you in the long run.

Besides the required and good-to-haves, here are some behavioral traits we identify:

  • Diversity of ideas: a good collaborator is opinionated but data-driven. They’ll bring innovation and are problem-solvers, not code monkeys.
  • Teamwork mindset: deliveries are met with full collaboration to boost efficiency and quality.
  • Proactiveness and sense of purpose: they’re there to add, not just for the paycheck.

Engineers hired by us, the Ubiminders, actively work for our clients as full-time employees. However, they do share our company’s vision as well. That’s what we call #OneTeam. 

Here you should know Ubiminds brings much more to the table. We are passionate about people, fostering a unified environment of trustful relationships. That means we apply ongoing improvement practices on a daily basis, always striving better — thus, create and reinforce freedom with accountability.

In fact, we have found key traits for their performance and success with our customers. In fact, we have translated them into our business values:

  • People First
    We advocate for environments rich in trust, respect, and empathy. Everyone matters.
  • Better Together
    We empathize and share, collaborating towards personal and organizational growth.
  • Keep it Real
    We are mature enough to practice respectful honesty. This helps us thrive and inspire!
  • Challenge Yourself
    Problem-solving excites us. Creativity drives our passion and growth.
  • Make it happen
    We are capable and believe in ourselves. We are protagonists!
  • Average on awesome
    We’re the outlier. We continuously evolve to excel and surpass expectations.

Ubiminds equals time and quality

We take pride in the fact that we send finalists, not unfit resumes. Ubiminds is client-centric, not company-centric. We do need to know – and more importantly, want to know -, your culture and career prospects so we can positively affect attrition in your company.

This means that instead of you having to adapt to our standardized practices, we tailor our process to your needs instead. Our staffing service operates as a part of your own team, not as an external contractor. Take the word of Alberto Silveira, Vice President of Software Engineering at PowerSchool: 

“What Ubiminds offered at the time was unique and different from traditional recruiting companies. We gave them our standards, interview process, the bar of engineers we wanted, and our budget, and Ubiminds actually went to the market and found those kinds of people.”

After candidate screening for the job requirements, the preferred traits, and all the cultural characteristics that will set candidates apart, we end up only with the very best!

Our process is about saving our tech leaders time and resources. How? By doing what we’re best at (finding awesome people). The point? So they can do what they’re best at – focusing on product innovation. Here are some numbers:

Get to know Ubiminds' process
Ubiminds helps companies in hiring the best tech pros and building tight-knit digital product teams. It’s all about building intellectual equity over the relation between the client and the engineer. 

Do you need some help finding badass tech teams? Let us know! You’ll get introduced to most suitable professionals in just over a week. Fill the form below and we’ll get back to you asap!

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