Insights by Resource Solutions
Yes, you may be a tech business but (sounds the ‘cliché klaxon’), people are still your most important asset. The success and failure of start-ups is studied endlessly, and whilst many failures can be attributed to the wrong product or burning through cash , the reality for many start-ups is they had a decent product but their team just weren’t right. With a CB estimate that 23% failures are attributed to this reason, hiring the right team is one of the many variables that start-ups can control and improve.
Tom Lakin, Senior Innovation Manager at Resource Solutions shares tips and tech picks to help you up your hiring game.
Assessing Candidates 101 – validate your initial assessment
Over the past 15 years I have worked with start-ups across verticals, incubators, innovation labs and corporate ventures and the one common link between them all is that not one of them actually validated their assessment. Off the shelf assessment tech is sometimes amazing, but if it doesn’t accurately predict staff who will be productive and happy at your company, it’s not fit for purpose.Take the time to assess your current workforce to find your ‘fingerprint of success’ – what “good” looks like at your company could be very different to a similar start-up with similar product. Partner with a recruitment and assessment specialist to not only do the heavy lifting but to minimise bias in the process.
Get your tech assessment right
Technical assessment has evolved massively over the past ten years. Legacy technical assessment tests relied solely on multiple choice – at best, they tested a candidate’s knowledge. Tedious, clunky UX and lack of brand input resulted in little benefit to the candidate and, untrusted by tech hiring communities, they offered little more than to reassure someone’s pre-made hiring decision. Things have moved on. For example, assessments that allow you to playback and watch how a coder writes code adds enormous value – it focuses less on right/wrong answers, instead enabling you to plug gaps in your skillset or bring a fresh approach to your team. It’s a crowded landscape, though, with Codility, Hackerrank and hackerEarth, amongst hundreds of others jostling for your attention.
Combat assessment fatigue with gamified assessment
Ask any developer in the job market right now and most will grumble about the amount of time they are being asked to invest in completing assessment after assessment. The rise in quality, accuracy and decrease in cost has resulted in more and more tests being deployed. Gamified assessment (in short, applying the key principles of game playing to assessment) provides candidates with a genuinely fun yet practical experience (don’t believe me? I have lost days of my life capturing Fireflies in fireFly freedom). Gamified assessment has the benefit of not just exceptionally high completion rates but also that they can assess talent for the modern skills and traits you probably need to grow your business – curiosity, innovation, entrepreneurship and empathy.
Combat assessment fatigue with gamified assessment
Often misunderstood, cultural fit is the congruence of a candidate’s core values, behaviours and goals and your company culture. This is important even if you are a Silicon Valley tech behemoth, but it’s vital if you are a 10-person team looking to scale up while retaining the best of your current culture. Done right, culture fit assessments match candidates with the same values and preferences as your company (or the aspirational values and preferences you want your company to have in the future). The use of culture fit assessments has boomed over the past five years, with some strong vendors such as Harver emerging, but make sure you bring in a partner to strip out bias and ensure that your culture fit assessment is inclusive to all.
For more information on how Accelerate by Resource Solutions can support your growth, please contact Pete Donaldson, Head of Sales.