Ways and possibilities of verifying the candidate's technical skills
25.11.2020
Ways and possibilities of verifying the candidate's technical skills
When deciding to recruit a technical person, in addition to the ‘soft’ interview, we should check the technical skills of the candidate for the position. Omitting this issue may have far-reaching negative consequences for our business, especially when it comes to operational issues. So what are the ways to verify the technical aspects of our applicant's resume?
1. Telephone conversation with a technical person
If in our team we have, for example, a Lead Developer or a programmer with competences higher than those of the candidate, we can organize the so-called technical phone screening. Our technical guru will ask the candidate a few questions after which he will be able to initially assess whether what was entered in the candidate's CV is not too ‘far-fetched’.
2. Live coding
Another possibility to test technical skills is the so-called Live coding, which we can organize, for example, using Google Docs. The task that our candidate will receive can be tracked on an ongoing basis by a technical person in the doc, thanks to which he can see how efficiently and quickly a given task is solved. This will allow you to assess not only the candidate's skills, but also his effectiveness.
3. Codility and similar tests
An interesting solution for verifying IT skills is also the technical competence test, e.g. the quite well-known Codility. The way the application itself works is trivial and consists in the recruiter gaining access to a set of tasks (internal database of various issues) and on this basis he can create a test for candidates. Then, the recruiter must send the generated link to the test to specific candidates, e.g. by e-mail and, based on the results obtained, he can arrange a meeting with the best candidates.
4. Homework
Another and quite easy way to check what a candidate can do is to create a test based on common issues/problems that are programmed in your organization on a daily basis, and on this basis, create a short task that can be solved in several different ways. If the candidate is engaged and motivated, we should always receive such a task on time. In addition, the way the task is performed (the candidate's choice of the fastest solution to the problem, the simplest algorithm) can show us that the candidate knows what efficiency is and is looking for simple ways to solve a given problem.
5. Github
An insight into the candidate's code is also a helpful solution when assessing the candidate's competencies. The well-known Github service, which is a collection of private repositories of candidates, can help us with this. If the profile of a candidate on Github is updated quite often (commit frequency), it can give us a nice picture of the person we are going to recruit. With this type of verification, it is important what skills we care about - in the case of a Senior Developer, a simple calculator code will not be an indicator that we are dealing with a professional in his field.
6. Trial day
A very interesting solution is to offer the candidate one trial day in our organization. This has a number of advantages because it allows us to assess not only the technical skills themselves, but also cooperation with the candidate in a typical working day. Thanks to the use of the trial day, we will have a better idea of whether the candidate fits into the culture of our organization and whether he is "on the same wavelength" with other team members. Such a day, of course, should usually be a paid day, settled on the basis of a specific, short contract.
Summary: there are many different methods of testing a candidate on a "live organism" or verifying his technical skills. Undoubtedly, one of the most interesting is the trial day, which allows you to build better relations with the candidate from the very beginning, and additionally shows whether the person fits into the organizational culture of our company. However, this method is not always possible for organizational reasons, so there are also other, equally interesting methods such as homework, live coding or even Codility tests.
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