2018 Tech Recruiting Trends: Insights from HackerRank’s Report

Tech recruiting is always changing. Driven by the constantly evolving technological landscape and faced with a limited pool of professionals, HR teams have to be highly adaptive and creative to secure top tech talent.

To understand the challenges faced by the industry, HackRank surveyed 973 hiring managers and technical recruiters from 50 countries. Here are some insights from the HackerRank 2018 Tech Recruiting Report.

Internal Referrals Are Highly Effective

When it comes to finding potential candidates, 58.5% of managers and recruiters agreed that internal referrals were the most effective way to access top talent. Hackathons, though trendy, were deemed the least effective method for finding qualified candidates.

While internal referrals are great, they may not be the best way to build great teams. This is because it can quickly lead to homogenous teams that think and work the same way.

If you want to build highly innovative teams that make better decisions, the best approach is to find some balance by embracing a little bit of diversity.

Future of Tech Recruitment Will Be Based on Skills

When you look at the success metrics in the report, both hiring managers (33.2%) and tech recruiters (22.5%) valued the quality of skills and skill-based hiring. In fact, they both agreed that the quality of skills was the most critical indicator of a successful hire.

This makes it important for businesses to focus on evaluating proven skills to identify qualified candidates rapidly. The future performance was more important to tech recruiters than hiring managers, but that probably has something to do with their internal evaluations.

When it came to qualifications, open source contributions weren’t highly regarded, and community activities and hackathons weren’t even considered. Previous work experience is what mattered to both recruiters and managers.

Resume-Based Hiring Is Almost Extinct

As the industry focuses on skills, traditional resume-based hiring is dying out. In fact, as much as 75.4% of hiring managers and technical recruiters employed technology professionals with non-traditional resumes, solely based on proven skills.

This means that recruiting teams aren’t using a resume checklist and don’t really care about education or certifications. This makes sense as almost 70% of developers are self-taught, so when you focus on education, you might miss out on a larger pool of potential candidates.

Finding Qualified Candidates Is the Biggest Challenge

From corporate giants to small and medium-sized companies, finding qualified candidates was the most difficult and time intensive part of the whole process. This reflects the continued shortage of top tech talent in the job market. So both recruiters and hiring managers need to work on strengthening the recruitment processes.

Aligning expectations was also a challenge with 20.1% of tech recruiters and 30.3% of hiring managers stating that it was difficult to build strong partnerships with their counterpart. However, this didn’t have an impact on the recruitment process.

At the same time, both parties felt that they had a good relationship with each other (at least for the most part). As 67.1% of hiring managers and 82.6% of technical recruiters stated that they had a good relationship with their opposite number, there’s a real opportunity here to boost this sentiment.

If you need help finding top tech talent, talk to one of our recruiting experts now!