How do recruitment platforms solve the issues of today's job market?
The IT sector is facing a huge challenge in terms of recruitment. Many industries often find that their needs are outgrowing their ability to hire developers and other specialists. Yet the world isn’t completely bare of such tech talents. The reason? Old hiring methods that are ill suited for developer recruitment.
Today’s answers need to be fast, dynamic, informative and innovative. ChallengeRocket is built around these principles, creating a recruitment platform specifically built around solving your IT skill gaps.
If you’re still struggling to solve your staff needs and haven’t considered a recruitment platform yet, isn’t it time to take action?
Why change?
If you’ve been in the developer recruitment circle long enough, you’ll notice that it’s taking more time (and, thus resources) to find top talent. In part, this is because the old method involves interviewing and assessing candidates individually. When you consider that the interview process now takes an average of 23 days - up 10 days from 4 years ago - it’s clear to see how many staff hours get sucked up per possible candidate. Add to this the limiting factors of job boards - applications that spark little interest in, highly skilled IT members and offer no appeal for those further afield - and the need for change becomes all the more clear. Plenty of big names, from Paypal to SpaceX, use hackathons and challenges to find the very best staff in a fun, engaging and cost-effective way.
What our platform offers
One of the biggest key benefits of any platform is that they can dedicated to the industry in question. ChallengeRocket is our answer for companies seeking to fulfill developer, programmer and other IT-related positions - a developer recruitment system that combines the analytical tools you would expect from a platform with intense, compelling hackathons and online coding challenges. These events draw specialists from all over the world for unique challenges. With our tools, you can quickly get an overview of the end results and see who performed the strongest. If you’re looking to hire a programmer and want to be able to draw from the biggest potential market, our solution is the best way to attract top candidates and instantly filter down, removing much of the obstacles faced by traditional means.
Our platform offers a faster process
Specialised services like ChallengeRocket help to turn the numbers in your favour. Instead of assessing candidates on an individual basis, you can instead use our tools to analyse the final results of the event, assessing everyone’s technical skills all at once. Because everything is event based, this is also a solution that scales easily.
Source: Pixabay
Time is also something that your potential employees are not willing to spare. Considering that many top IT specialists are gone within 10 days of an application, while a staggering 60% of candidates quit due to a slow recruitment process, it’s clear that endless forms and interview stages don’t meet modern demands. Let’s say you want to hire a programmer. Our approach could involve an online challenge to test people’s skills. After the competition is finished, you are free to analyse, filter and select any employees to move forward. Your team hasn’t spent hours combing through CVs and you haven’t spend resources making phone calls, initial interviews or any unnecessary prescreening routines. However many participants you proceed with after the challenge, you know they are fully capable.
Engaging recruitment through new innovations
When it comes to interviews and traditional assessment processes, there isn’t one way to hire everyone. This is a problem when you rely on traditional HR teams that are not associated or passionate about the IT sector. ChallengeRocket is a developer recruitment solution built by developers and programmers to help connect companies with similarly skilled people for engaging job positions. We’ve it based around hackathons and online challenges because this is what works. This includes numerous events for big companies, such as NVIDIA. We organised their Open Innovation Challenge, which was conducted fully on our platform. This online hackathon draw in thousands of applicants, with over a hundred completed projects and entrants from 80 countries! Our platform enables this to happen at a smooth, consistent pace that doesn’t slow down due to the wide scale, yet still enables anyone, anywhere, to actively partake.
Source: ChallengeRocket YouTube channel
In the words of Tomasz Florczak, our CTO: “Coders demonstrate their skills best when doing, not by talking. If you want to assess and hire a programmer, the best solution is to get them programming as quickly as possible. Cut the formalities and get straight to practical tests. Only then can you assess their capabilities.”
Real tests uncover hidden talents
People shine best in their natural environments. A formal recruitment process, however, is anything but natural. The best secret to hiring developers and coders is to create challenges and tasks that simulates conditions they might face at your company. It’s here that you can see all the additional talents that you might not see otherwise. For example, online code challenges showcase how specialists work in a given timeframe, while their final solutions will show how they address unique problems. Similarly, hackathons can demonstrate how they work in teams and larger challenges. Companies all around the world use such events to determine unique skills that otherwise don’t come through on a CV or interview. We’re respected by big names, such as Facebook for Developers, who highly recommend ChallengeRocket as the “world’s best solution for software developers and engineers to assess and improve their technical skills”, while we’ve also worked with the likes of Mercari and AccorHotels for challenges as well!
Recruitment that can generate new ideas
When people are faced with real challenges and problems, they respond with real solutions. If you’re looking to hire a programmer or coding expert, you want someone who can respond to new situations, right? The only way to find these people is to offer realistic situations and see how they thrive, rather than relying on textbook interview examples and hand-written code.
Source: Max Pixel
Hackathons and coding challenges do not typically a singular solution. Businesses can use these events to simulate their own, real difficulties and see how people adapt. This is actually two benefits in one. On one hand, it showcases how well potential team members perform when faced with new tasks and unknown solutions. On the other hand, it might just generate some key answers for you - along with a tech specialist ready to lead the charge for your company.
A method that attracts passive candidates
Passive candidates - those that aren’t actively looking for work, but are considering interesting offers - make up most of the market at around 60%. In other words, your typical job offer and advertisement isn’t even attracting the majority of the potential recruitment pool out there. Most other methods and platforms don’t do this either. Agencies and headhunters will still only be able to find those that are active; in other words, they’ve made it public they are looking for a new role. Even then, having an external agency do this for you simply don’t work. IT staff want creative work environments and a passionate employer that will drive them forward into new areas of the industry. This is the critical value of employer branding and it’s something no third party headhunter can ever provide. Our platform, however, does this perfectly. Everything integrates under your own brand. You have the power to choose the nature of the challenge, picking an appealing topic that reflects your company’s area of expertise, draws in a large crowd and gives you a positive, first introduction to a wealth of potential employees, partners are future references. This is also especially true for brands that aren’t synonymous with IT. Did you know the NBA actively engages in developer recruiting? Their hackathons attract new, college talent to the company (to develop analytic solutions) that might not otherwise be aware of the association’s involvement with digital technology.
We provide a positive experience
Another aspect of strong employer branding is generating a positive experience. If you’re looking to hire developers, a creative, fun experience is vital. Otherwise, how will they know your company is better than any other offers out there? On the other hand, a negative experience can be detrimental. Surveys suggest 64% of applicants say they share negative experiences online, while over a quarter warn others not to apply.
Source: Pixabay
A strong platform based on hackathons and challenges, however, solves all of this. Our system puts your brand at the forefront of everything. Not only do we provide positive experiences that encourage innovation and personal growth for developers, we make sure they know exactly who’s behind it all. From the employee perspective, they are taking part in interesting and engaging events, driving directly by your brand. You’ve demonstrated an active communication with the industry and, for those you choose to further talk with, hearing from you after such an event only serves to prove you are listening. As an added aside, it’s also worth noting that hackathons and events can also help solve any problems you’ve encountered in previous recruitment attempts. Spotify, for instance, created a specific “Diversify” event to directly challenge gender inequality. Through active promotion, 43% of participants were female - a much higher number than before - helping to showcase the company at the forefront of gender equality in IT.
How to get started
You don’t need to be a large corporation to benefit from hackathons and online coding challenges. Through our event planning experience and analytical tools, ChallengeRocket is the perfect partner for recruiting developers, top level coders and anyone else you may need! We can create custom challenges, engage with our existing community and drive people towards your company - people that may not have previously considered engaging with your brand. Want to discuss some ideas for a potential new challenge? Contact us and let’s think of a new, innovative way to bridge the recruitment gap.
