Ditch the resume and attract the best developers

Can a bakery teach companies recruiting tech talents how to hire developers better? 

Going against conventional wisdom, the Sullivan Street Bakery became one of New York’s most famous bakeries, supplying restaurants citywide and winning the first-ever James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker.

Bakers have been taught that to make good bread; you need to knead it for 10-12 minutes. 

Then Jim Lahey started experimenting with making No-Knead Bread, which won the praise of food critics and made him famous. 

Celebrity chef Paul Hollywood admitted to Jim Lahey that he used to throw dough he forgot to knead in the trash instead of trying to bake it.

Being restrained by tradition and rules is why many bakers did not innovate like the Sullivan Street Bakery.

Paul Hollywood is Trying Jim’s bread during a City Bakes episode

In our experience helping companies recruit 100s of tech talents, here are a few ways tradition prevents many companies from finding and retaining the best tech talents. 

Mistake 1: Judging talents by using a resume

To illustrate this point, I'll share the story of a very talented developer that many companies and recruiters missed on hiring because they judged him based on his resume. 

We found him by ditching the resume and instead testing his abilities.

Despite over 5 years of experience and being a genius at Node.js, recruiters refused to interview him. 

His resume showed that he had been using Node.js at his previous job for only 5 months, but in reality, he had 5 years of experience building complex applications using. Node.js.

Recruiters looked at his resume and ignored the experience he gained building tools outside of work. 

He had to migrate data from multiple sources into an Elasticsearch NoSQL database; since they did not provide him with the necessary tools, he built the tools that automated the task saving him many hours of work each week.

He even built frontend and backend applications to get information from some video games to decide how to play better based on the analytics.

Luckily, FlatWorld did not care about his resume, and we helped a San Francisco-based company Clipboard Health hire him as a Full Stack Developer.

By looking at smart data ,testing a developer's technical knowledge & skills, and collecting relevant work motivations and experience, we created a process that identifies the best programmers. 

Mistake 2: Hiring only locally

As Apple demanded that their employees come back to the office, their head of machine learning left the company, with 56% of Apple staff surveyed considering resigning over the return to office policy.

Despite the resistance of some companies like Apple and Tesla, Tech remote work is becoming more popular, and many tech employees are threatening to quit if denied remote work. 

In a survey of 200 tech companies about their remote work policies, 70% of them now allow remote work, meaning companies not allowing remote work are at a disadvantage.   

Mistake 3: Not leveraging international tech talents

For tech companies, hiring remote developers is an opportunity, as they can hire great talent outside of their locations. A recent New York Times article mentioned how remote hiring helped many companies grow. 

It is also necessary, as in the US alone, there are one million open tech positions that are not getting filled, with failure to hire costing those companies $200 billion in lost revenues by 2030. 

When hiring internationally, one can save $60K-$100k per hire, which helps improve a company's cash flow and extend your financial runway. 

Multiple Studies show that companies with diverse teams outperform their non-diverse counterparts. For example, McKinsey's research shows that gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their peers financially, and ethnically-diverse companies are 35% more likely to do the same.

Here are 3 reasons hiring remote international tech talents is becoming a must. 

1) There aren’t enough computer science graduates: The USA has only 80,000 computer science graduates a year and one million open tech positions, so the education system is not even close to solving the shortage problem. 

2) Fewer tech talents are immigrating: A recent Bloomberg report mentions Visa applications for STEM having dropped the most in a decade.

Fewer international students studying in the USA, intense competition from Canada with easier immigration laws, and an ineffective bureaucracy and excessive regulation contribute to the problem. 

The Hechinger Report mentioned the story of an Indian tech worker who decided to leave the USA as he felt he was treated like a third-rate citizen. On top of bureaucracy, the increase in Asian hate crimes is making immigration less attractive for tech talents.

But even if bureaucracy disappeared overnight and it became super easy for tech talents to immigrate, immigration alone will not solve the tech talent shortage; here is why:

-As more companies allow developers to work from anywhere, companies embracing cross-border remote work will find it easier to attract top innovators, with those not embracing the trend being at a disadvantage when hiring.

We recently caught up with a Brazilian full-stack developer who we helped find a remote developer job; for him leaving the small city where his mother lives is not an option.

-Many Chinese and Indian developers stay home, where a thriving tech scene results in higher salaries, with many tech talents from those countries going back home to start their own companies. 

With 301 unicorn startups in China and 105 in India, the battle for Tech Talent is Fierce. 

3)  There are great developers out of the USA: according to HackerRank, the USA is at position 28 regarding having the best developers.

Companies not recruiting internationally are missing on attracting the best talents. 

Mistake 4: Hiring only from known or prestigious universities 

As illustrated by the story told in the 1st mistake, people can be self-taught. 

While you can assume an MIT graduate is good, there is a tech talent shortage, and candidates who did attend an unknown foreign university can be as good. Even a self-taught college dropout can be very talented.

The perfect example would be that of Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp.

Before creating WhatsApp, both Twitter and Facebook rejected him.

He never finished College, and he self-taught programming by reading used books. 

There are more fish in the sea when one does not screen based on a university name but instead uses a standardized process to test people's talents regardless of their formal education.

Of course, when hiring internationally, technical vetting of a candidate is only half the battle, but what if communication becomes difficult, or the developer is not a good fit with the company's work culture and unique DNA? 

That is where FlatWorld helps companies find remote developers who go through detailed technical vetting. And on top of that, we look at their work motivations, habits, and preferences to ensure they perfectly fit our client company's working environment and working style.

Let us match you with remote developers who are so good that you will fall in love with them as they help your company achieve its business goals.