How To Generate 200 Tech Recruitment Leads In 3 weeks? A 6-Step Guide To Creating A Successful Coding Challenge

If you’re wondering whether this article is for you, ask yourself these 3 questions:

• Do you want to boost your recruitment processes?
• Do you want to reduce your cost-per-hire?
• Do you want to shorten your hiring time?

If your answer was “yes” to at least one of the above, this article will be the ideal guide for you! Read on to discover how to make data-driven hiring decisions, with the Rockwell Automation C++ Challenge as our example.

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What kind of results are we talking about here?

ChallengeRocket’s clients have managed to get up to 600 software developer recruitment leads in a single open challenge. Overall, both time-to-hire and cost-per-hire were reduced up to 54% and 80% respectively (when compared to traditional job-board recruitment campaigns).

Step 1 - Identify your recruitment needs

Standard hiring processes are often long, expensive and ineffective, all at the same time - not exactly the best combination! That is why we decided to create an alternative funnel to assess top tech talent. If you're actively seeking talented people for open tech positions, our platform is made for you.

Your needs: filling open tech positions, tech talent assessment (in a rapid unbiased way), building employer branding.

Solution: start a live coding challenge now!

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Rockwell Automation is one of the major global companies providing industrial automation and information technology, hiring about 22,000 employees. The company urgently needed to hire new, experienced C++ developers, which are a very scarce asset nowadays. However, the traditional job boards were not working effectively or efficiently enough for them. So, in the Central European region, they decided to pilot new HR methods to gain the attention of programming talent and to interest them in what the company does.

Step 2 - Create a customized challenge introduction page

Dedicated content is the key factor in engaging the tech community. To attract more top tech specialists, you need to create challenging code assignments or tests (to verify coding skills). And, if you are looking to share info about your company - a customized challenge introduction page is the answer. A stunning landing page with a fully personalized theme plus your visual brand identity will amaze your potential candidates.

This introduction page works to:

• explain what the challenge is all about
• communicate the employer brand.

Source: ChallengeRocket.com

Step 3: Prepare coding assignments to attract developers (and get a glimpse into their programming skills at the same time)

Live code challenges are a great way to attract outstanding candidates, including those who may already be currently employed and thus less responsive to traditional job adverts. On the other hand, these candidates can be very open to showing off their talent in the form of a programming tournament. Side effect: you get a chance to see their skills in action and see who displays superb coding talent!

Source: ChallengeRocket.com

Step 4 - Create customized registration forms to get to know your candidates better

To ensure that the right candidates apply, you can use a simple drag & drop builder tool. The form you create will provide you with vital information about your candidates. For example, you can ask your participants if they are students or graduates, or about their experience in a specific programming language.

Source: ChallengeRocket.com

Step 5 - Share your challenge with the community

When your code assignments are ready, you can finally start sharing information about the challenge with tech & partner communities. For the Rockwell Automation C++ Challenge, its first day generated 62 registrations and 800 landing page views!

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Step 6 - Analyze & compare the results

You can get detailed insights into each candidate’s performance. The system enables you to get to know and contact all the talent who joined the challenge. You can also see how a candidate compares with other applicants for the same job opening.

Source: ChallengeRocket.com

Final results

We attracted 639 developers (510 of whom were willing to take part in the recruitment process). Additionally, we found out quite a lot about them as we can see how they’ve completed the tests. So if we continue to process them, we can also reduce assessment costs (by an average of 80%) since the candidates are already pre-filtered, allowing us to focus on just the best ones.

Thanks to these candidate assessment challenges (with automated scoring), you can also recover valuable engineering time. By following these 6 easy steps, you will be able to increase the number of recruitment leads within an extremely short period of time. Take the example of the Rockwell Automation C++ Challenge which generated (in just 3 weeks):

• 3,491 landing page visits,
• 2,839 social media reach,
• 218 C++ developers who connected and were open to new jobs opportunities!

Let’s make tech recruitment more effective, fair and fun!

Source: Giphy