How Tech Is Changing the Hiring Process in 2022 and Beyond with Alex Svinov

The sole focus on experience and professional skills is no longer the typical approach when it comes to how employers evaluate job candidates with technology. The change to using skill-based talent assessment tools is what businesses are after for. It's not a question of if technology is changing the employment environment anymore; rather, it's a question of how. What does the significant change in the hiring procedure imply for prospective developers and staffing industries? In this week’s episode, Insquad Co-Founder and CEO Alex Svinov tackles us with his platform that helps from small to large tech business to save time on finding developers, software engineers, and programmers. Insquad is an IT services company with a focus on offering excellent remote software developers from all over the world to United States and Europe companies. Insquad runs coding exercises and coding tests to prove their skills which is vital in hiring a developer. If you are looking to hire remote software-developers, listen to this podcast on Actions-Antidote. --- Listen to the podcast here: How Tech Is Changing the Hiring Process in 2022 and Beyond with Alex Svinov Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all know the workforce is changing and some of the concepts around hiring, retaining, and developing a good talent team is also changing quite a bit and one frustration that I think a lot of people have experienced over the past several years, in particular, even though that may be changing a bit in more recent times, is the challenge that often comes with trying to find good development talent. As you know, nearly every business, nearly every company, anyone that’s trying to do anything, needs to have a functioning website, needs to have some kind of a web presence, and a lot of other businesses are increasingly using data, data analytics, artificial intelligence, everything that comes from these development teams so development has become a really highly sought after talent base, especially senior developers, developers with certain expert level expertise, experience that can really jump in and solve your problem. My guest today, Alex Svinov, has a platform that helps small- to medium-sized businesses from startup to the mid-sized find remote senior development talent, something that I think we can all appreciate being a little bit easier. --- Alex, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen, thanks for inviting me, great to be here. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining. And let’s start out with what goes on, I think a lot of people are familiar with but maybe some aren’t, the challenge in finding development talent, whether it be a person to just build and maintain your website or a several-member team that has certain areas of expertise, like certain programming languages or domain expertise. Yeah, I think the challenge in finding a great developer or building development team primarily lies in the part of evaluating and finding the right talents for your team, because everybody who’s been doing software development knows that there are no two identical developers out there. Even though they may be having the same stack, having the same experience, they will still be different type of person, actually different type of code writing pattern, and so on and so forth, and I guess the key problem there is that, to be successful in each and every team, you need a different type of developer. Some teams need somebody who’s doing a lot of coding, some of them do somebody who is very good in architecture, and so on and so forth. And then, essentially, what ends up with technical teams spending a lot of time interviewing candidates just to find the right person. This is what essentially we at Insquad are doing is that we’re trying to shorten this period so that the technical team spend less time interviewing candidates. We do that before them. We do have the initial screening process so that, ultimately, the developers that will land on our platform are already halfway through and, that way, we’re helping the existing teams save more time on the interviewing process and do actually what they love doing most. And it’s no secret that developers love to write code. They love to build something. They don’t love to interview other people. That’s definitely a common theme that I’ve observed as well. Now, on your website, what I see is that we have options to find developers by a domain as well as a specific skill, and with skill, I think usually it’s talking about specific coding languages or specific cloud platforms. Does other factors such as what industry you have experience in or even a developer’s personality, given that I’ve observed some developers that have said to me, “My ideal day is one where I just put my headphones on and code from seven in the morning until 4:15 In the afternoon with just nothing but task number 3526 is the first priority, then 3791, then 4478,” or something like that, and then there are some other developers that have wanted to be, say, a little bit more involved in the overall system architecture and some of those other things, does that ever come into play in how people search for the talents? The main purpose of this platform is actually to help the developer and the team to find each other.”Share on X So, our goal is to collect as much data as possible about the developer so whenever the customer comes to try to find somebody, they have a lot of information beforehand so they don’t need to do interviews with the guys, they know they are not just fit to this team. So, yeah, we do have filters that you can always search by domain, meaning that they’re experienced in fintech or or in blockchain or in healthtech or advertising, whatever, and we do collect all that data. And as for programming language, we’re actually collecting a lot of technical stuff, like how well they do know the basic principles of software engineering, do they do algorithms and data structures, and so on and so forth, and objective programming. A developer can confirm all the skills on the platform and then you as a client can review his profile and see, “Hey, this guy knows not only Python, or PyTorch, he also knows a whole bunch of these frameworks.” He knows that not because he said he knows that but because he has confirmed that in coding and quizzes and also you can see a video interview with him, and to get back to your question, we do work with every developer to find out what is his ideal day like and what are his aspirations in terms of the team he wants to join, whether it’s like he’s more accustomed to larger teams, smaller teams, does he have any business acumen so that he also wants to go a little bit more into product side of the development, because, again, there are teams that really need this particular skill and, this way, we are certain that we can establish more fruitful relationship for both parties and have people spend less time talking to each other to find out the right person but doing more time actually producing something. That’s where we see our motivation. And so it sounds like there’s two elements, there’s two aspects to this. One is the amount of time it takes to hire someone, which I’ve seen so many teams go through exactly what you’re talking about, that video coding exercise to prove that you actually have the skill that’s listed on the resume, which is something that you’re automating or providing ahead of time for clients. And then there’s the other thing, which is when the person is hired, having them be the right fit, having them be in the right place at the right time so that everybody’s more happy and there’s way less of that friction that we often see in so many work environments when someone’s either in the wrong place or the wrong role or their personality, their motivations, even some of their values are just not a match for the particular organization that happened to hire them. Yeah, absolutely. And the reason why we are actually able to have these developers in our vetted pool is because we went outside US, where in US, there’s a lot of competition. Even though these days we hear about people being laid off and the market is definitely not as red hot as it was like a year ago, but still, the prices are crazy high and still the demand for quality developers is always out there. There is always a need for new software engineering, there is always a need for qualified engineers. So what we did ourselves, we went outside, we went to offshore, we went to near shore, to Latin America, Eastern Europe, India, and so on and so forth and, there, we found a lot of talent that is actually is very keen to try something in US market because everybody sees US as the most competitive market, the most interesting projects out there and that’s what a lot of software engineers are looking for, to find an interesting project, not to be just a screw in this big machine but actually do something great and that’s how we are able to find the guys and to actually get all this data from them and have them actually waiting for these kind of projects. Does any kind of language barrier ever get into play with kind of working across different markets, different countries where they speak different languages? Well, I’d say that language barrier, I mean, obviously, there is one but we work with every developer who wants to work with US projects obviously has to be able to communicate English clearly. There is no need to perfect natural speaker. Actually, there are some clients who are like, “Hey, you know what, we want somebody who is probably not as good communicator but he can chat well,” and what we found that a lot of developers, even though they rarely speak fluent English, they chat ideally. Yeah. That’s their way of communication. And,...