The most common problems when recruiting developers

In the previous article, we wrote about how the recruitment process work in a model situation. Unfortunately, not always everything goes according to plan and various problems may arise.

When can the process of recruiting developers fail?

Below are the most common problems in developer recruitment for IT positions.

Lack of experts on the market?

If a specialist in quite rarely used technology is looked for, it may be somewhat of a problem (this topic is discussed in the article about unusual problems). This doesn’t just concern highly specialized technologies, but also technologies which are slowly becoming obsolete. If companies have difficulties finding someone for a long time, and we lose already at the stage of collecting CVs and can assume that there are no appropriate candidates on the labor market. Similar conclusions can be reached if companies are looking for people with advanced skills.

In such situation, companies often lower expectations or completely give up their search.

Candidates without experience

It may also turn out that candidates apply for a job requiring knowledge of a given technology but they have little experience or none at all. This happens especially when the company is looking for experts in a relatively new technology, which is quickly gaining popularity but exists too short for developers to have gained much experience in it.

The solution may be to hire a fresh but novice developer and train him/her within your own team.

Experts only on paper

It may happen that despite declaring extensive experience in the CV, the candidate doesn’t have the expected level of expertise in a given technology. This may not be a serious problem if it concerns specialist issues, with which they might not have come into contact their previous work. It is worse if the deficiencies concern skills or knowledge related to fundamental issues. As we mentioned earlier, some candidates have a tendency to "tweak" their CVs.

And this is what competence tests are for. Unfortunately, such tests are not always enough.

Test experts

Some candidates do well on practice tests even though they have no real skills. With popular online testing platforms, the correct solutions are often easy to find online. Paper tests and even interview questions are also often repetitive and after just a few interviews in different companies candidate knows the right answers. Unfortunately, such test “experts” frequently pass the screen and get hired.

Employees below expectations

This is the worst option. Some candidates manage to slip through the verification process and after some time it turns out that their skills are much lower than expected. In addition, this type of clever employee masks their incompetence very well and remains undetected for a long time. Such an employee lowers the quality of work in the project, and also usually negatively affects the functioning of the entire team.

How to recruit well

In the next articles we will tell you about the most important sources of such problems and how to deal with them.