This means you’re faced with lots of choices millions of developers, dozens of programming languages and countless developer specialties. And this says nothing of soft skills, which play a major role when building a development team. A brief examination of the numbers makes it abundantly clear that you need to carefully evaluate a developer’s skills in order to ensure you’ve found the right person for your project.

The top development teams tend to have a broad collective skill set, with a high degree of redundancy or overlap among individual skill sets. While many focus on technical skills, it’s also important to place great emphasis on soft skills, such as leadership tendencies and strong collaborative capabilities.

If you’re a hiring manager or team leader who’s tasked with assembling the ideal development team, you must have an accurate and effective developer skill assessment strategy. So where do you begin?

Performing a Soft Skill Assessment

Assessing soft skills is a bit more subjective than the evaluation process for technical skills, which tend to be far more black and white. This makes soft skill evaluations a bit more challenging in some ways, especially when you consider that soft skills are difficult to evaluate.

Soft skill assessment should examine a number of areas, including the following:

• Team player skills in a large group and small group setting;
• Leadership and self-motivation capabilities;
• Comfort level when working independently;
• Organizational skills;
• Problem solving and analytical capabilities;
• Adaptability and flexibility;
• Conflict resolution skills; and
• Communication skills (online, over the phone and in person).

There’s no simple, straightforward test for soft skills and often, the most effective evaluations are performed over an extended period of time. For this reason, peer reviews and recommendations from former employers can offer lots of useful insight into an individual’s soft skills. Others may opt to simply ask the candidate about their strengths and weaknesses.

As a hiring manager or team leader, the objective is to ensure that your group has a diverse set of soft skill strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if you pair a group of strong leaders with under-developed conflict resolution skills, then you’re apt to see clashes. Team members should possess skill sets that are complementary of each other, with teammates counterbalancing each others’ strengths and weaknesses.

Performing a Developer Skill Assessment for Technical Capabilities

Evaluating an individual’s tech skills can be rather complex, as most hiring managers and recruiters have found that traditional programming tests are very limited in terms of their usefulness. And for developers who work as part of a large agile development team, work samples may be hard to come by. That’s because a single person may not be able to say they’re solely responsible for a particular element or aspect of the project.

So how do you perform a tech skill assessment for developers? Well, it can be beneficial to begin by asking the talent about their skills and proficiencies in various programming languages. This provides you with a good starting point. It can be beneficial to create a standardized form, with a list of skills and programming languages, with tick boxes that allow the individual to rank their skill level for each line item.

From there, it’s most effective to assign test projects which allow the candidate to demonstrate their skills in a tangible, easy-to-evaluate manner. It’s generally best to give all candidates the same project or assignment so as to make the evaluation process more uniform (and subsequently, a bit easier.)

Ideally, you should have a development team leader or other tech-savvy expert evaluating developers, as a typical recruiter or hiring manager will lack the insight required to perform an effective assessment. This is one area where you can benefit from working with an IT staffing firm such as iTech, since our team specializes in sourcing and placing developers and other tech talent with companies across the nation.

At iTech, we know how to assess talent. We can form a new team or supplement an existing team with individuals who are apt to be complementary. And you won’t need to divert valuable resources away from current projects (as is commonly required, since you need someone with programming expertise to effectively evaluate a developer.) We are available to provide consulting and staffing services for clients who are in search of the ideal team of developers. We make sure the team is well-suited to your unique project and its specs. And with our temporary staffing services, there’s no long-term commitment, which is ideal for companies that require help on a one-time or periodic basis. We invite you to contact iTech today to find IT staff for your next project.

The post The Importance of Developer Skill Assessment first appeared on iTech.

Today’s tech industry is very collaborative and cooperative, with entire teams, not individuals, taking ownership of a given project. In most cases involving medium to large scale projects and enterprise level projects, it’s impossible for a developer to say, single-handedly wrote the script for this functionality, or I developed the entire front end of this app. What’s more, technology is rapidly evolving, so any work samples older than a year or two offer little insight into the person’s ability relative to today’s standards.

This makes it very challenging to assess and evaluate technical and development skills, while increasing the chances of costly hiring mistakes. Fortunately, HR professionals in search of IT talent can leverage a number of software staffing strategies to accurately evaluate skills and abilities.

The Anatomy and Cost of a Bad Hiring Decision

When hiring IT staff, app and software developers or other tech professionals, an individual’s capabilities could easily be misrepresented, exaggerated or misconstrued. Sure, you can review a person’s CV, LinkedIn profile and recommendations. You can interview the candidate in person and speak with references. But it’s rare to find a clear, true testament to one’s capabilities. This makes staffing decisions far more challenging. And the stakes are significant.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once indicated that his company has lost well over $100 million to bad hiring decisions. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that bad hiring decisions have a price tag of at least 30 percent of the individual’s annual salary. The cost is even higher for industries, including the tech industry with complex onboarding processes, which according to recruiter Jorgen Sundberg, carry an average cost of $240,000. These figures will make any company leader cringe, impressing upon them the necessity of hiring the right talent.

IT and Software Staffing Strategies to Maximize Your Chances of Making the Right Hiring Decisions

Strategic staffing approaches allow companies to evaluate talent in effective and accurate ways, and often include the following strategies.

Involve team leaders in the interviewing process. As a HR professional or company executive, you may lack the on-the-ground insight that’s required to determine if an individual will be well-suited to the company. Many major corporations, including Google (which is well-known for its hiring successes), now involve a person’s prospective supervisors in the interview process. Supervisors and other front lines staff are best-positioned to spot subtle signs that an individual’s tech skills don’t align with your company’s needs.

Let them show you their talent. With the rapid rate of technological evolution and the widespread usage of collaborative, team-based approaches, work samples just don’t work for most candidates. Instead, ask the individual to complete a test project. According to a study examining over 85 years worth of data, work sample test performance is the single best indicator of a good hire. Many believe that it’s best to include a timed element with the work sample test, as this adds an element of stress. The theory is that if someone can perform well under pressure, then they’ll perform well under other circumstances, too.

Take the time to call past employers and references. While a CV, LinkedIn recommendations and written references are useful, they only scrape the surface. What’s worse, they can sometimes be deceptive. So take the time to speak with a candidate’s past employers or clients to get a feel for their prior work experience and their skill level and range. You’ll also get insight into soft skills, such as reliability and communicativeness.

Test the waters in terms of interpersonal dynamics. In some cases, you may even ask the individual to join your team for a brief trial period. This allows you to evaluate tech skills, soft skills (like communication abilities) and their overall dynamics with your team. This is an opportunity to gather useful feedback that will help you determine whether they’re apt to be a good fit for your company culture. Tech skills matter little if the individual can’t mesh with your team in a productive way.

Another tech staffing strategy is a bit outside the box: Don’t hire anyone at all. Companies are often hesitant to outsource, and for good reason, as this model has numerous downsides. But another option is to turn to a company like iTech, which offers insourcing IT staffing solutions.

Instead of hiring new talent or sending a project off-site, insourcing entails calling in a qualified, pre-vetted team to work alongside your staff to complete the project in-house. Once complete, the team departs and moves on to their next endeavor. This innovative HR practice ensures you pay for resources only when you need them. We handle all aspects of the staff augmentation process, allowing clients like you to avoid the expense and hassle that’s associated with the hiring process. Contact iTech today to learn more about insourcing, consulting and our high-tech and IT staffing solutions.

The post Software Project Staffing Strategies: How to Avoid Bad Hiring Decisions By Evaluating Tech Skills Effectively first appeared on iTech.