Everything you need to know about locating, evaluating, recruiting, and keeping skilled junior developers in one place.
According to a recent forecast from the Computing Technology Business Association, the IT industry will be worth $5 trillion in 2019. Every year, the IT industry gains traction, creating a demand for more technical skills.
Junior developer roles are many and varied, and the procedures for evaluating these applicants reflect this. Hiring a junior front-end developer differs from hiring a junior mobile developer. Recruiters will also want to ensure that after all the effort of acquiring and onboarding a junior developer, the applicant stays with the organization for a long period. It needs strategic preparation and effort to maintain these highly talented and in-demand employees.
With so many variables to consider, we felt it would be helpful to guide you through the four essential stages of junior developer recruiting, providing practical advice and step-by-step instruction.
1. Purposeful Sources
Your hiring strategy should try to broaden sourcing efforts and naturally reach out to high-quality individuals.
Use a variety of efficient approaches to locate excellent junior devs. Let’s have a look at our top five strategies:
- Because it is more personal than sending an email, on-campus recruitment improves the applicant experience. Concentrate your search on a few universities. Career fairs, meetings, and industry speeches are all good methods to meet new graduates.
- Hackathons allow junior coders to demonstrate their problem-solving abilities. Use platforms like Codility to benchmark people’s code.
- To reach a large number of candidates, job boards are employed. To reduce the number of unqualified leads, look for a job board that has a pre-qualification feature.
- Coding boot camps may be a good way to find bright, diverse junior developers who don’t necessarily have a degree in computer science.
- Internships allow younger applicants to put their abilities to the test in a real-world setting, and they also allow you to examine prospective new developers before making a formal employment offer.
Use each of these strategies to assemble a pool of skilled candidates to fill future job openings, often known as a talent pipeline. Maintain an open channel of communication with candidates who appeared like a strong cultural fit but didn’t make the final cut, and assure them that they’ll be considered for future job vacancies. Trust, open communication, and solid sourcing are the ingredients for a successful talent pipeline.
2. Early detection is key.
A vital stage in the recruiting process is screening prospects before asking them to an onsite interview. Because you have the most prospects at this time, the filter you have in place must be effective. Always have a strategy for what you want to talk about throughout the screening phase:
- Expectations in terms of pay range
- Coding experience (professional and/or recreational)
- Is there any competition for the candidate’s services?
- Soft skills in the beginning
- Technical knowledge in general
Early in the recruiting funnel, effective screening provides a clearer view of candidates’ skills. Use technical evaluation methodologies to distinguish proficient junior developers from those who are unable to execute at the required level.
3. Interviews with Experts
After you’ve completed your first screening, check into the candidate’s behavioral fit, technical competency, and career prospects. The purpose of an interview is to see if this individual share your company’s basic principles.
To determine applicant fit, use the following interview tactics and tricks:
- Inquire about your actions.
- Use code assessment tools to quantify technical talents and compare them to other applicants.
- Pair programming may be used to assess communication skills and establish a relaxed setting for Q&A.
- Request that applicants express their short- and long-term objectives; this will allow them to reflect on their own strengths and future possibilities.
- If you’re hiring a React Developer, for example, you can ask the candidate react js interview questions.
4. Consider long-term growth.
Consider what you can do to keep great junior talent once you’ve hired them. According to our Developer Report, younger developers value mentorship above everything else, and professional growth is more desirable than a higher wage. Use this information to guide your plan; for example, mentoring programs can assist applicants in achieving their professional objectives while also exposing mentors to fresh ideas.
Here are a few additional ideas for long-term talent retention:
- Give both positive and negative constructive comments to younger developers to ensure that they are learning and improving.
- Encourage senior teams to field questions and be mentors to help candidates reach their full professional potential – they’ll open themselves up to new ideas too
- Establish a consistent method of evaluating people—tools like Codility can quantify technical capabilities, making it easy to rate them.
Important Points to Remember
Junior developers who have early exposure to strong management and meaningful work may add a lot of value to your company. By establishing a dependable and scalable recruitment process, you can position yourself and junior talent up for success.
We’ve spent a lot of time considering how to enhance junior developer recruiting and the many tools hiring teams require to obtain high-quality insights without hurting the candidate’s experience.