How we help HR departments with tech hiring

Tech hiring? Hire smarter, not harder.

The problem with HR

For much of my professional career, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder when it comes to HR departments. 

• As a developer, it felt like their entire purpose seemed to be to keep me from doing the things I knew I needed to in order to do my job.
• As a manager, it seemed that their entire purpose was to keep me from hiring the people I needed to hire.
• As a human, I firmly believe that people are not corporate resources and should not be treated like them (and it’s RIGHT THERE IN THEIR TITLE).

Notwithstanding the last point, I have come around to the fact that HR does serve a useful purpose. If it seems that their purpose is to stop me from doing things–maybe I didn’t really need to be doing those things. 

As a manager, my greatest frustration with HR was always in the area of hiring. Many HR departments want to be the gatekeepers of the process, and that’s where the trouble starts.

I am always happy to have their help in getting job descriptions published. They are very helpful in processing the initial rush of candidate resumes and organizing them for me. The problem I had was with the HR departments that wanted to filter the resumes that I saw. 

For the most part, HR professionals are very good at their jobs, but they’re not software developers. They may be good at matching keywords, but since they don’t understand the underlying concepts of software development, pattern matching is all they can do to help hiring managers review resumes. Many times, quality candidates didn’t make it to my desk, because their resumes didn’t exactly match the keywords that the HR professional was looking for. 

Developers have to be involved in hiring developers

The biggest disconnect I’ve had with HR professionals in the hiring process is that they can’t see equivalencies. For instance, if on the job description for a new developer, I specify “experience with framework A”, and a candidate has “experience with framework B” on their resume, HR won’t pass that resume on to me. What they are missing is that for programmers, the underlying skill is “can work with a framework”. That’s the skill that we’re really looking for.

Yes, we could put “can work with a framework” on the job description, but the best way to see that in action is to ask for the framework we work with and still review those that don’t have that exact framework. 

A senior developer can read a resume between the lines to determine if it describes a viable candidate or not. They can match equivalencies and see potential in a candidate that an HR screener or bot cannot. 

The problem we all run into is that this is not an easy task. It is a time intensive task to review a resume properly. Yeah, I’ve worked my way through a stack of 100 resumes in 10 minutes or so, but honestly, the quality of my review was no better than using a keyword matching bot. To do it right, you have to invest the time to read for understanding–and reading for understanding requires someone who understands in the first place.

Wrap up

If you are the only developer at a company looking to hire another developer, it falls on you to screen the candidates, because you are the expert in the skills needed to complete the job. You can either do that job, or spend time wading through the stack of resumes. Either way, your project is going to fall behind unless you can get some help–some professional help.

That is exactly what Gun.io does. We work with HR teams and developers. 

• We don’t just post your job blindly to job boards, hoping that the right candidate will see it. We build and maintain our database of vetted developers looking for work. 
• We review each developer joining our platform to make sure they are legitimate and can do the things they claim to be able to do.
• We post your job requirements to our database and further screen the candidates that apply. 
• We wade through the stack of resumes and present you with only the candidates that actually meet your criteria.

The difference is that our talent team is made up exclusively of active developers whose talents span a broad spectrum of technologies. They know how to find just the right candidates for you to review. We save you from reviewing hundreds of resumes, and we save your HR department from having to screen and vet candidates.

You’ll get quality candidates for review in days, not weeks. You’ll find the developer you need to move your project to the next phase quickly. You’ll spend less time working the job and more time solving the problem you really care about.

Let Gun.io help you and your HR department find your next developer. 

And manager, don’t forget: If you call your developers resources, they get to call you overhead.