With the shortage of software developers in the workforce, many organizations are struggling to find workers. However, there is a way to fill your pipeline fast: recruiting early-career software developers. Here’s how you can identify and recruit gritty and talented individuals.
Be mindful of how you can screen in, rather than screen out.
The first step is identifying the characteristics of early-career software developers. Be mindful of how you can screen in, rather than screen out. Gather the real requirements for the skills it takes to be a great employee and make that a focus of the talent. The hard-to-master skills of great communication, diligence, accountability, curiosity, and teamwork may be more important to your engineering teams than technical skills alone.
Ideal candidates are typically high school graduates and have less than five years of professional work experience on their resumes. This candidate pool may include some graduates with a Bachelors’s degree or community college coursework but they have decided to make a change and are seeking a technology role. Candidates may also include STARs (those that are Skilled Through Alternative Routes). They may be learning to code on their own or have taken a short course and been inspired to work on passion projects. These folks are excited about a new collar career, passionate about their work, and want to learn and grow.
Talk to your team. Explain your strategy and ask for support. In nearly every organization I have been a part of, when we try something new that includes opening new doors for underrepresented folks, the team gets excited. People want to do good and often can relate to how hard it was to land that first job coding.
Next, develop a strategy for recruiting these individuals. Traditional methods such as job postings and networking are still effective, but you’ll also want to consider reaching out to coding bootcamps and community-based organizations. Find multiple quality training programs that help individuals gain the twenty-first-century job skills that you can use as a foundation for the on-the-job training that you will provide.
Look for diversity in your applicant pool. Are you missing gems because you are not thinking differently about where you go to recruit. What are your competitors with developed DEI programs and ERGs doing? Organizations that are committed to diversity and equity inclusion are more likely to have a robust early-career recruitment program.
Finally, create a development environment that will help new developers grow and be successful. This includes providing mentorship, training, and opportunities for growth. Give someone a chance and help them launch a career in tech.
In our next issue, we will tackle best practices in selecting early-career candidates. Until then if you know anyone that you think would be interested in starting a career as a software engineer or data engineer please send them to https://cccareers.org. Creating Coding Careers is recruiting and hiring early-career software engineers.