Here’s why it doesn’t make sense to pay 8.33% fee for your next hire.
By: Nilesh Agarwal
Tags: Recruitment, Hiring, Techhire

Finding and attracting excellent candidates is never simple. Tech recruitment, especially, represents a challenging task. Talking about hiring mid-level tech talent, it is largely a function of funnel and filtering. Having hired over 50+ engineers, I have consolidated my observations on the nuances of tech hiring over time and I’ll take you through a summary of these observations in this article.

As we go along, I’ll highlight two crucial problems affiliated with this. If you wish to draw tech talent, first, you have to look for them in the right places i.e build your talent pipeline. Secondly, you need a tech hiring process that is efficient enough to filter the right candidates from this talent pool.

1) How do you find a list of candidates: (Cost: 1–2%)

There’s no doubt that finding candidates is the starting point of your recruiting process. Your filter will most certainly fail if you don’t have the right funnel to start with. While most companies pay 8.33% fee for junior level roles and over 12% for senior roles to get this optimised, you can also find some cheap alternatives to get this done by leveraging the right portals by using:

1) Professional Networks.

2) Job Boards

Looking for niche job boards that are specialised in one industry or business function is a way to find the right candidates. Another important thing is Employer Branding. It’s simple: A players love working with other A players. What you need to do is get the word about your engineering team, work culture and candidate experience.

Here are some things that you can do to shape your employer branding (3-hour effort):

1) Create an amazing landing page

2) Talk more about your tech and culture

3) State the mission and vision of your company

4) Talk about the founding team

Alternatively, you can also use databases from different platforms to get a list of candidates if you have efficient filtering. On an average, you need to have about 100 candidates per role so that your filter can have a critical threshold to have an efficient hiring pipeline.

2) How do you filter candidates: (Cost: 1%)

Once you have a talent pipeline, now you need a tool to filter candidates accurately and with speed. If you have an efficient filtering tool and an even greater talent pool, you will still be able to find the right candidate.

I’ve often come across people who’d show their apprehension towards having a tool to filter candidates. One of the big worries is that if there is a filtering tool, their candidates run away. But wait, won’t your candidates run away even after if they get your offer? All that a filtering tool will do is that it will do away with candidates who would anyway not take your offer before you get your engineering team to interview them.

When it comes to understanding how you want to filter this tech talent, you want to keep it short and progressive. While it’s important to hire someone who understands fundamental algorithms and data structures, it does not demonstrate the candidate’s ability to solve real product challenges.

There are 3 levels for filtering- MCQs, Programming questions, Project-based assessments.

For early-stage companies, I would recommend the first 2 levels so that the companies can get rid of the candidates that have zero coding experience. For later-stage companies, we recommend the third level that is Project-Based Filtering.

The usual hire ratio after filtering with the assessment will be 10–20 candidates with high intent. Moreover, there will be less need to do tech screening which is better than any candidates that the recruiters will source. Unfortunately, this is the secret sauce used by recruitment companies to run their business, charge you 8.33% hiring fees and you’d still not be equipped enough to gauge a candidate’s skills until the candidate has started working.

The solution lies in building a recruiting system that goes beyond brokerage fees and enables companies to build a tech hiring system that empowers recruiting to make powerful hiring decisions faster and with more accuracy at lower costs.

The answer can be found in the automated use of modern SaaS-based platforms to find and filter tech talent. Discover how you can transition into automated tech hiring with Codejudge.