HR in the IT market: how to search and find the best programmers

IT HR in Google

In this regard, the experience of Google is interesting. Previously, she was known for intricate, sometimes funny, but challenging Olympian-style quick wits and abstract thinking tasks. This continued until one of the HRs read Fisher's study, in which various methods of selecting employees were considered through the prism of predicting their effectiveness. Then Google realized that they used to do cool things that worked for the company's image, but did not predict the same efficiency of future employees at all.

What is most interesting, in this corporation, soft skills are much more important than hard skills! Many employees come to Google from MIT and other major universities, which means they are already strong in mathematics, Computer Science and other important areas of knowledge. Therefore, it is much more correct to look at how they apply knowledge in a broad context, work with uncertainty, communicate, and even dream.

As a result, Google reduced the selection technique to a structured interview combined with specific tasks and reduced the selection from 12 to 4 stages, since the remaining 8 were useless.

Skills aren't everything

The selection of candidates does not end with the assessment of soft skills and hard skills (often using staffing agencies for engineers
 like https://employa.com/product/employa-agency/). An experienced HR also evaluates cultural compliance: sometimes a person who fits all the criteria does not take root in the company due to a mismatch of values. It also happens vice versa: a person fits the values, but he lacks skills or knowledge. Here the HR makes a decision, weighs the pros and cons.

In addition to values, motivation is important, the ability to burn with a project. There are experienced specialists, but already burnt out, it is better not to hire them. And there are inexperienced, but with burning eyes, who want to do a lot and try. They need a mentor to keep them from making critical mistakes, but overall they are good candidates.

If not an ordinary specialist comes to the company, but a manager, additional requirements appear. For him, experience, solved cases in the past and behavioral competencies are important. It is also necessary to be able to manage people, set tasks for them, motivate individual employees and entire teams, resolve conflicts and conduct complex negotiations.

Systemic education in 2022: to be or not to be?

HR examines the resume and sees what education the employee has received. But it is important in medicine to go through “all the circles of hell” - from sleepless nights for textbooks at the university to residency. Where professions have changed a lot or they are new, there is often no fundamental education. In universities, they only teach how to be organized, plan and search for the necessary information to achieve a result. But they don’t teach how to work at all - for this, a graduate comes to the company, and it’s good if it has special programs for new personnel.

This does not negate the fact that a number of IT professions require fundamental training. For example, it is impossible to learn mathematics in six months if a person is far from this science, that is, without a higher education in any way. Even technology will not help: a specialist must go through certain stages of training. Perhaps, thanks to technology, formats will change, training will go faster, but it will not work without education at all.

Probably, the segregation of specialists will further increase: someone will go to fundamental education, study for a long time, do complex tasks, in parallel there will be many technologized roles where this is not needed. The value of education for a particular specialist depends on what he wants to do in life.

Also, now universities are assigned a new role - they are becoming an indicator for the employer that the graduate is able to achieve results and achieve goals. This is partly because it takes effort to get into a good university and pass the final exams. If a person studied well, then he also works responsibly: education is a kind of simulation of the work process.

Checklist

What to remember about HR and the labor market in IT:

• The real work of an HR is more than hiring, firing, and a motivation system.
• A good HR is one who is not seen or heard, and personnel problems are solved.
• The probability of choosing the right employee at the interview is no more than 65%.
• Without cultural alignment, there is nothing to do in a company where it is customary to burn with projects.
• The labor market is unfair as long as there are professions where demand exceeds supply.
• To get into a big company with corporate values, you first need to show soft skills, and then hard skills.
• The value of fundamental education in IT professions is declining.