How do you perform recruitment for your company?
When we asked this question to a few companies, a surprisingly overwhelming number of people suggested that they relied on referrals and interviews. This means that these are the two most prominent methods used for recruitment, regardless of the vacancy. When we speak about recruitment, not only do we include the staffing of in-house candidates, but also include the hiring of freelance providers or offshore companies.
So, what’s so wrong with this strategy of relying on referrals and interviews for staffing? For years, we have believed that these are the most reliable methods of hiring candidates. When a candidate/company is referred by your employee or anyone else in the network, you can have more trust on him/her. Moreover, by conducting an interview, you manage to get an answer to all your questions. So, is there anything wrong with it? Well, the answer lies in the fact that different job vacancies require different approaches. In this post, we will speak about things you need to do (over and above seeking referrals and conducting interviews) to ensure that you make the right decision. The position that we will use as example, for this post, is of ‘Ruby Web Developers’.
Following is a list of a few things that can be considered important while hiring a Ruby web developer:
Provide Information: What do you understand when I say ‘Ruby Developers needed’? Too much or too little? Unfortunately, the answer is the latter. You do not derive too much information from this. What this would do is make a wide range of people applicable for the position. This wouldn’t do much except increasing your workload. Hence, you should provide complete detail of the job requirements, the technological prowess desired and other aspects that the candidate is expected to be good at.
Receive Applications of Interested Candidates Only: How do you manage to achieve this feat? Most companies, today, have a web page (‘Careers’) where they post their requirement, and it is the same page where interested candidates/companies are expected to upload their profile. On this page, you can put up a small & simple test. The questions should be such that they could be answered by anyone who even has basic technical knowledge or information about Ruby. What this would do, though, that it will retain only those candidates/companies who are genuinely interested in the vacancy, and are willing to spend time on taking the test.
Technical Testing: Why would you want to hire a candidate without knowing the expertise that s/he has at the job? Interviews can only delve into few aspects of an individual/company’s candidature, but a test can unravel all those other details that are important. What you should note is that this isn’t the simple test that we spoke about in the previous point; instead, this one is a more exhaustive test which aims to evaluate the candidate’s expected performance at the job. You should provide actual requirement to the candidate/company representative, and look at such aspects of the performance as:
• Coding accuracy under strict timeline
• Data conversion skill
• Understanding of the requirement
• Robustness of the final deliverable
• Identifying errors in the existing code
Client/Company Conversation: How often do you tend to dial the number that has been offered as reference by the candidate? The number of times that companies call up candidates’ ex-employees or clients to check up about the candidates’ performance is surprisingly low. It is difficult to understand the reason for the same. However, when it comes to hiring a Ruby web developer, you have to appreciate that it is a niche field. Therefore, purely basing one’s decision on the candidate’s skill isn’t enough. There are various things that might get cluttered when projects are being executed in the real time. The candidate’s performance during such situations can be best assessed by the means of speaking to his/her clients or ex-employees. They will be able to tell how well did the candidate perform on the job and those areas where s/he lagged.
Candidate Research: Everything mentioned above will be successful only when you will have enough candidates, applying for your job vacancy. You have to reach out to them. There are certain forums for Ruby developers where many professionals visit and place their comments. Putting details about your job openings there can be helpful. You can look at official help-and-support forums, social networking spaces, idea sharing forums and others.
Hence, these steps can ensure that you are performing all that’s required to hire the right Ruby web developer for your project.
AUTHOR’S BIO:
Jill Elliott is a content publisher at eSiteWorld. She regularly comes across articles about companies which could not choose the right Ruby developer. She always suggests that one should perform such recruitment on the basis of the job vacancy. Therefore, she has put together some of the above tips that can be followed to successfully hire a qualified Ruby on Rails Developer.