Hiring in the post-pandemic world is harder than ever. As recruiters, you would have already heard about the Great Resignation, and how tight the job market is. Given that this climate is unlikely to change anytime soon, recruiters still need a surefire way to sift through the clutter and find the right candidates. In such times, maybe it’s not a bad idea to go back to the drawing board and redefine ‘who’ you are looking for. Why? Because knowing your audience is a critical factor in any recruiting strategy, especially when it comes to tech. And we all know that the audience has changed in many ways since the Big C happened to our world. Also, writing down goals has been shown to be intrinsically linked with higher success rates, making you anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to accomplish said goals. So, if you are looking to hire the best and the brightest, writing it down in words (or candidate personas) could actually help you hire better. All on board? Let’s begin!

What is candidate persona?

A candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal job candidate. It’s developed based on a combination of data and research, encapsulating the skills, experiences, motivations, and attributes of a person who’d be a perfect fit for a specific role within your organization. Much like customer personas help marketers identify their target audience, candidate personas aid recruiters in streamlining their hiring process, ensuring that their efforts are directed towards attracting, identifying, and engaging the most suitable talent for the role.

By understanding and defining a candidate persona, companies can craft more effective job descriptions, target their recruitment advertising more accurately, and enhance the overall hiring experience to appeal to their ideal candidates.

Characteristics to include when creating candidate personas

Demographics: This includes details like age, gender, educational background, and experience level. While these aren’t definitive indicators of a candidate’s fit, they can offer general guidance about where to find potential candidates or what life stage they might be in.

Skillset: Detail the technical and soft skills that the ideal candidate would possess. This not only includes job-specific skills but also transferable skills that might be beneficial to the role.

Professional background: Outline the industries, roles, or companies where the candidate might have previously worked. This provides context to their experience and familiarity with certain work environments.

Motivations: Understand what drives the candidate—whether it’s career growth, work-life balance, a passion for a particular kind of project, or values alignment with a company’s mission.

Career goals: Highlight the aspirations or long-term objectives that the ideal candidate might have, helping to align the role’s potential with their personal and professional growth.

Cultural fit: Describe the cultural attributes or company values that resonate with the ideal candidate. This could relate to collaborative tendencies, innovation, work ethics, or other cultural facets.

Challenges & pain points: Identify common challenges or issues that might dissuade them from joining or staying in a role. This could be things like limited growth opportunities, lack of challenging projects, or a preference for remote work.

Preferred communication channels: Recognize where your ideal candidates spend their time, whether it’s on professional networks like LinkedIn, job boards, industry-specific forums, or even at offline events.

Personality traits: Delve into the softer aspects, like whether they are self-starters, how they handle feedback, their preferred work environment, or their teamwork style.

Step by Step Guide To Creating Candidate Personas

Step 1: Understanding Developer Candidate Personas

Marketing and sales divisions have been using personas to define their ideal buyer for a very long time, especially in strategies like B2B lead generation. This approach helps them understand their audience better and tailor their messaging for maximum impact. Developer personas are an off-shoot of this oft-used strategy; with a few tweaks and changes to make it engineering-friendly. Building developer candidate personas lets recruiters visualize a fictional representation of the ideal candidate for each role. Creating personas lets recruiters get into the mindset of the candidate and tailor the hiring process from the applicant’s viewpoint. This has a direct effect on enhancing the candidate experience. Mostly though, creating developer personas is a great way to understand the ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘where’ of tech hiring.

Sidebar The credit for creating ‘personas’ to identify customers rests with Alan Cooper, a noted software developer. He created ‘user personas’ to predict how different users would interact with software. Angus Jenkinson, a professor of integrated marketing, then took the concept and applied it to marketing. His technique was adopted by OglivyWorldWide and became the gold standard for defining buyer personas as we know them now.

Step 2: Why We Need Candidate Personas

Designing and understanding developer candidate personas helps you do the following:

Create tailor-made JDs: As noted above, once you understand your candidate’s mindset, it becomes easier to tailor your hiring process to attract the right talent. Beginning with the job description.

Optimize recruitment marketing and sourcing: Understanding who you are targeting for a given role will give you better insight into where you can source them. You can curate your recruitment marketing strategies better in this instance.

Integrate diversity hiring initiatives into the process: Building developer personas also helps you identify gaps in diversity hiring, and allows you to build relevant initiatives into your process.

Improve recruitment metrics: Data says that recruiters spend a minimum of 13 hours per week sourcing for a single role. When you have your developer personas mapped out, you can significantly reduce the time spent in sourcing. Over time, you will also see a marked improvement in other recruitment metrics like Time To Hire, Quality of Hire, Offer Acceptance Rate, and so on.

Read More: How Engineering Managers Can Help Recruiters Hire Better

Step 3: Creating A Developer Candidate Persona

The research While you may think you know what a tech role entails, have you ever sat down and done any research to understand what exactly it is your team needs in the next hire to boost performance? Begin by sitting down with relevant stakeholders and learn the details of the role you are hiring for. Understand what a workday looks like for this specific employee, and then add it to your JD. Remember to ask questions about the following:

• • Who is our ideal candidate?
  • Where does this person operate?
  • Why would they want to work for our organization?
  • What kind of experience are we hiring for?
  • What will this employee’s typical workday look like?
  • Are there any specific skills this candidate should have? In addition, what are the core skills and the adjacent skills required for this role?
  • Are there any geographical limitations for hiring?
  • Is it necessary that this candidate have an online presence? If yes, then where should I be looking?
  • Is there a list of competitor employers?

Boost your social recruiting efforts with this cheat sheet. Get your copy today!

The skill set It is very important to understand the skill set required for any tech role. We said it above, but it begs repetition. There are some core skills that every developer must possess. Problem-solving, critical thinking, communication skills, and proficiency in the core languages like JAVA and C++ come to mind. There are adjacent skills which a developer can easily pick up on the job, provided they are adaptable and happy to learn new things. Mastering ten different languages is a prime example. It is NOT necessary that your ‘ideal candidate’ be a pro at everything. Your JD should NOT be a dump of requirements that no human can possibly fulfill. Instead, break it down into Must-Haves and Can-Learns and use this to define your personas.

The behavior When hiring someone for a role, recruiters often look at the longevity of the candidate in their company. This can be predicted (to a certain extent) by charting an ideal employee’s behavior traits. Some of these might overlap with the research you did earlier, but it’s never bad to be doubly sure! When adding these subjective elements to your developer persona, ask these questions:

• • What motivated them to apply for this role?
  • Do they have goals this role will help fulfill?
  • How do they best communicate with others?
  • What kind of work environment is best for their work style?
  • What’s most important to them (i.e., salary and benefits)?
  • What’s less important to them (something that often varies by generation)?
  • What do they want from their employer (their strengths, brand recognition)?

The PERSONA Yes! After all that research and brainstorming, it is now time to build your candidate’s persona. Below is a template for defining your candidate persona. You may not be able to answer all of these questions, but the more you answer the better you can adjust your recruiting campaigns and efforts. Click Here For Free Template

And There You Have It!

Once you get the first few personas down, creating additional personas for each new opening will become second nature. You can even get creative with the process. The more candidate personas you are able to define, the easier it will become to navigate the tech recruiting landscape. Personas help not just in terms of bettering your sourcing efforts, but also in shaping other top-of-funnel recruiting activities like advertising, employer branding, awareness, and candidate engagement. We use this persona-creating technique for all our in-house hires, and we can vouch for its effectiveness! We hope this guide helps you create developer candidate personas for your tech team, too. Happy hiring.

Spoiler alert: I’m not a coder. And I’ve never had a coding interview.

But I work for a company whose flagship product for sale is a coding interview tool. So knowing a little bit about the ABCs of conducting great coding interviews that candidates love helps me do my job better. Which is what this blog is all about. Making sure your developer talent does their best work on the job.

Let’s face it, coding interviews in 2023 are broken. And coding interviews that candidates love? That’s the equivalent of trying to find an oasis in the desert. It’s hard to come by.

At this point? We can hope that with the release of coding interview tools in the market like FaceCode, recruiters will have the means to interview candidates the right way.

But for now, in 2023, tech interviews are still extremely broken. Here are a few things that are wrong with them.

Why are coding interviews broken?

#1) The interview is nothing like the job

Here’s what a typical coding interview will look like:

The candidate walks in, and the tech recruiter presents the candidate with a coding problem. The candidate tries to solve that problem in real time in front of the recruiter.

Sounds simple enough, right?

This could work, except that most of the questions asked in these interviews rarely ever resemble the nature of the work the developer would perform on the job.

For example, developers are often asked to solve a problem using a binary tree in the solution. Most developers agree that this is not the best way to assess tech candidates in 2023. It does not allow coders to demonstrate their greater skill sets that would be more relevant to their jobs.

Instead, recruiters should focus on assessing developers on their ability to write code that does not crash, and their ability to debug and write robust code. These are ‘real’ on-the-job skills that can benefit recruiters by helping them find candidates who can do their job well. And this can benefit candidates by helping them get a taste of what a day at the job can look like for them.

Recommended read: Everything You Need To Know About Adding Job Simulations To Your Hiring Process

#2) Coding interviews are unnecessarily hard

The difficulty level of most coding interviews is high. This could work well for FAANG companies like Facebook and Google which have access to HUGE pools of highly qualified candidates. In this case, a higher difficulty level could work well to shortlist the best coders. These shortlisted candidates can then be interviewed with more specific questions and problems.

In the case of smaller tech companies, coding interviews that are unnecessarily hard rarely work in favor of either party. We live in the times of #TheGreatResignation and good tech talent is rare. For smaller companies, that makes it twice as hard to hire talented candidates that are great for the job.

Here’s what happens for companies other than FAANG who try to copy FAANG’s ridiculously difficult interview style:

• They lose out on quality talent in a market where the supply of good coders is scarce as it is
• The coders they do hire using these methods, find out pretty quickly that the real job is NOTHING like the interview they just gave
• They end up becoming overqualified for their positions and quitting, making your attrition rates rise like the price of a certain dogecoin crypto in early 2021

Ben Awad, a Javascript coding ninja on YouTube does an excellent job of driving this point home. I highly recommend you check his video out on why coding interviews are broken.

Recommended read: Essential Questions To Ask Developers When Recruiting In 2021

#3) Most coding interviews still use word processors to write code

Go ahead, read that again.

Most jobs give their software developers access to IDE’s or Integrated Development Environments like Visual Studio so they can do all kinds of cool things with their code like write code, debug it, compile code, add integrations, and whatnot.

In the interview? The same devs are asked to write their code on Google Docs or worse, Microsoft Word. This isn’t me dissing Google Docs or Word. They are amazing pieces of software that I use to write online, every day. I’m writing this blog on Google Docs right now.

But for code? It’s just not it. It just won’t do. It’s like asking a candidate to ride a bicycle in the interview when the real job tests his skills in riding a motorcycle. It just doesn’t make sense.

#4) The “We only hire developers locally” mindset has got to go

Let’s face it. At this point, remote work is the future. Or at least a hybrid model of remote and in-office work is the road we’re heading towards. And that’s where the problem lies. Most recruiters and hiring managers are still not ready to accept this.

“By sticking to the locally sourced talent model, there’s a ton of untapped talent and potential out there. And when this talent is not engaged and considered as potential hires, it could prove to be missed opportunities.”

There’s an old saying that to catch the biggest fish, you have to cast your net far and wide. When we apply this to tech recruiting, well you get where I’m going with this.

Cast your net wide and hire all across the globe to access the best talent out there. Who knows, your next all-star developer might just be coding somewhere in a far-off land, who happened to run into your job post on LinkedIn.

Recommended read: Hiring Remote Developers Versus Relocation – What To Choose

Here’s how we fix coding interviews

What ends up happening as a result of these broken coding interviews, is you have candidates who would be PERFECT for the job but would never be able to pass these interviews. Or worse, they would never even have access to these interviews just because they aren’t from the local region they are being conducted.

The solution? We can fix coding interviews by making the interview as close as possible to the real job that the candidate is interviewing for. Simulate the exact ‘day in the job’ environment at the interview and assess the candidate(s) who excel.

Does your company use Visual Studio as its IDE of choice? Great. Give them access to VS at the interview.

Do your best developers fail at debugging their code quickly? Great, test your candidates on their ability to debug problems and the time they take to do that.

Do you give your developer team their space to finish a project within a deadline? Awesome, so stop the ‘turn up the pressure’ act on your candidates and give them enough time and space so they can demonstrate their creativity and skills and show you what they can do on the job.

Finally, the above problems are just touching the surface of the things that are wrong with coding interviews today. That being said, a majority of these problems can be solved by FaceCode– HackerEarth’s premier coding interview tool.

For instance, FaceCode’s built-in IDE ensures that you never need a word processor for coding interviews ever again. Hiring remotely? Access candidates from across the globe with FaceCode’s real-time interviewing feature. Finally, you can play around with the difficulty of the questions by choosing from the vast question library offered across 41 programming languages. Try FaceCode now, for free.

And that’s all I have to say about that. I hope you can use these tips to hire some legendary talent into your ranks in the future. Let me know if you found this article interesting and useful in the comments section.

Until next time, happy hiring!

Figuring out the ins and outs of as broad a subject as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) can be tough. You could be chasing the wrong goals too. And as someone who has worked at places that had zero education and sensitization on this subject, I know firsthand the hit their workplace culture would take.

I am passionate about creating awareness around diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is why I am very vocal about my learnings on this journey. While there never is a one-size-fits-all solution to any problem, there are some actionable hiring tips to ensure that DE&I at the workplace is a priority and also that it is done right.

Here’s my take on how best to embrace your journey with open arms. #DEI 101, let’s go!

7 step framework for DE&I at the workplace

• Breaking the stereotype for diversity equity and inclusion in the workplace

Going back to the basics, diversity refers to building a multicultural workplace with people and minorities from different backgrounds. You foster inclusion by making people feel like they belong and that they can bring their whole self to work. Simply put, diversity is the mix. Inclusion is making that mix work.

Equity recognizes that the needs of different people are different and focuses on providing opportunities and resources for equal participation without bias, harassment, or discrimination of any kind.

In 2021, it is high time we break the stereotype that hiring for diversity where there is a visible representation of minority groups will naturally ensure that inclusion will follow. My personal learning – don’t run behind the mix. Make your workplace culture inclusive for the people inside your organization. It’s basically about providing a space of ‘psychological safety’ for people. Diversity of thought will organically follow.

• Embedding inclusion into the DNA of your company

The first step in your DEI journey is to understand if your company needs it or not. And then go on to the ‘how’ of it. Some food for thought –

1. Why are you doing this: What makes you want to be diverse & inclusive?
2. Inclusion is personal: What does I&D mean personally to you, as a company?
3. Analyze your I&D growth so far: Where do you stand today?
4. The desired goal of your strategy: Where do you want to be? Visualize the end outcome & state.
5. Final question: Ah, do you still want to do it?

Recommended read: Talking #BlackLinkedIn and DEI with Patricia Gatlin

I think the message that I’m trying to leave you with, is that it’s important to spend time on exactly why you want to do this. And to check in with the above questions and see if you still want to do this. If you’re choosing to be inclusive, then make it impactful, genuinely, not just for the sake of it. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

• HackerEarth’s DE&I strategy is a must-have. Not a to-do

At HackerEarth, we believe inclusion is personal and start the dialogue from there. It’s not something we do as a one-off on special days – we invest in giving our people the correct language to use; we ask them to call out behaviors that are not ok, and educate and sensitize others towards these behaviors. We believe in educating people on ally-ship and support – and not educating them only on the marginalized groups.

In this company, inclusion is everyone’s responsibility – not just a mandate for HRs, or the top management. With my experience, I can tell you that it is possible to build such inclusive workplaces, but it needs heart. And a lot of effort. And nope, there is no one size that fits all.

Recommended read: How To Build Safe And ‘PROUD’ Workplaces – A Personal Story

• Measuring your DE&I efforts at the workplace

Targets and metrics for your DEI journey can make for great indicators of progress if used wisely. The minute you look upon them as your be-all and end-all, your journey can become severely crippled.

I’ve personally seen metrics limit people from creating a larger impact. People get hung up only on meeting those numbers. What you end up doing then – creating a diverse team, on the short term and miss creating an inclusive culture, for the long term.

• Key to an inclusive leadership

What is the role of a CEO and any company’s management team on this journey? They play a significant role in making their employees feel like they belong. That they are respected and treated fairly.

According to the Harvard Business Review, a leader’s awareness of personal and organizational biases is the most important trait in generating a sense of inclusiveness in the workplace. Read more about the signature traits of inclusive leadership and how leaders can put these traits into practice in this insightful article.

I’ve been a firm believer of not holding only the ‘leaders’ responsible for anything and everything in a company. I strongly believe that inclusion is something that will fall flat if the CEO/leaders/ of a company do not visibly and authentically commit to and be a role model for their employee to follow suit.

HackerEarth has an inherently non-judgemental culture, which appears as if it is entirely natural without too much work going into it. That is not the case of course. Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do as a company; we have expanded our umbrella over time to touch upon topics that most of us were taught to shy away from.

It is not a one-time activity to do and then dust your hands off but more of a process that needs to be carefully woven into the threads of your company.

What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace?

Diversity in the workplace

Diversity in the workplace refers to the presence of individuals from various backgrounds, demographics, and perspectives within an organization. It encompasses differences in race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, abilities, and more. Diversity recognizes that each employee brings unique experiences and talents to the table, enriching the collective knowledge and creativity of the workforce.

Equity in the workplace

Equity in the workplace is the commitment to fairness and impartiality in all employment practices. It ensures that everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources, regardless of their background or circumstances. Equity strives to rectify historical and systemic disparities by addressing biases and leveling the playing field, ultimately fostering a more just and inclusive work environment.

Inclusion in the workplace

Inclusion is the active effort to create a work culture where all employees feel valued, respected, and empowered to contribute their best. It goes beyond mere diversity by fostering an environment where diverse perspectives are not only welcomed but also integrated into decision-making processes and daily operations. Inclusion is essential for harnessing the full potential of a diverse workforce and promoting a sense of belonging among employees.

This is one of the reasons why I decided to keep an open dialogue going to exchange thoughts, opinions, and ideas from different perspectives on my LinkedIn channel. Now that you have an initial framework for your DE&I strategy to work with, let’s talk about positive discrimination next. Watch this space for the second part of this blog series.