Get Almost Half A Year of Developer Time Back with One Simple Change to Your Hiring Process

March 4, 2021 • Interviewing

Time is money. And recruiting the right people takes time.

But when developers are pulled away from projects to interview and assess candidates, time is also innovation and product velocity. The hiring process is a substantial, and often unmeasured, cost to the business. That’s why leaders need to find a way to optimize the costliest part of the hiring funnel: the “onsite” interview. It’s entirely possible to streamline this process and return 20+ weeks (yes, you read that right – nearly half of a year) of a developer’s time back to the business.

Let’s look at some rough numbers. (These are reasonable approximations, of course, bear with me!). Assume that in one year, your tech company needs to hire 50 developers. Some will be needed due to attrition and others to fill new roles. That means you’ll have to go through the following exhaustive process:

INTERVIEW STAGE	NUMBER OF CANDIDATES	HOURS OF DEV TIME – TRADITIONAL	HOURS OF DEV TIME – STREAMLINED
Initial candidate screen	1800	0	0
First technical phone screen	600	900	600
Second technical phone screen	300	450	300
Onsite interview	150	1500	1050
Offers accepted	50
Total Hours Spent		2850	1950

(Assumptions are technical phone screens are 1:1; onsite interviews involve 4 rounds of interviews – half of which involve two devs, half of which are 1:1 interviews and debrief meetings. Funnel conversion rates and total comp costs based on industry averages.)

The first few stages are actually the easier part. They’re a numbers game. You’re bringing in the volume but it’s pretty low effort from the dev team (relatively speaking). Recruiting handles the initial screen and tech phone screens should be done in an hour with the right tools. Determining who should be cut and who should move to the next round moves pretty quickly, as it should.

The most cost to the business comes with the onsite interview, which pulls multiple developers in to speak with candidates and participate in the evaluation process. This is where you must optimize for speed and signal. With a technical interview platform like CoderPad, it’s entirely possible to identify the best hires much faster, saving valuable time as a result.

We know that candidates perform much more authentically in an environment that’s as close to the real world coding experience as possible. It’s easier to see their skills when they are working on an interview question – versus working on figuring out the tool. When your interview screening tool looks, feels, and behaves like what you’re used to, candidates can get down to business faster — and you can evaluate them more quickly and accurately. The same holds true for your developers: with an efficient, easy-to-use tool, they can save significant prep time.

When we switched to CoderPad from [alternative technical hiring tool], our developers were able to reduce their interview preparation time by 30min.

— Rizwan MK , Sr. Director of Engineering, Netskope

In this scenario, we know we can reduce the 90-minute phone screen to 60 minutes, save three total hours for each onsite, and slice 900 hours off the heavy investment of time into the hiring process. That represents over 20 weeks of a developer’s valuable time — and $125,000 in costs — which frees them up to do what they were hired to do: code, test, ship. That means more time spent ensuring new applications are created, new software gets released, and your business moves forward.

Ultimately, it means more time solving customer problems and strengthening your market position — while enhancing your ability to hire desperately needed technical talent.

So why aren’t you giving your candidates and dev team better tools for interviewing?

If you have questions about optimizing your technical hiring process, feel free to reach out to one of our experts: [email protected]