My client is looking to hire senior backend developers with good written and verbal communication skills that can be in the office 2-3 days per week.
They’re also undergoing a “strategic workforce reshaping with global delivery partners” which means they’re hiring low-cost developers from the large outsourcing companies: Cognizant, CGI, Accenture, and Tata. I’m not privvy to the agreements that are struck with these vendors but I can speak to the strain this strategy puts on engineering teams. We’ve screened and interviewed dozens of candidates and haven’t made a single hire.
These staffing providers are resume spam bots. As soon as the agreement was signed, we started receiving dozens of unfiltered resumes per day with the expectation that we would review the them all and schedule interviews. The vast majority of these candidates are grossly unqualified for the senior developer roles we’re trying to fill so we were wasting a lot of time reading resumes.
We pushed back on the vendors asking them to filter the candidates and only provide resumes for qualified candidates but the tsunami of unqualified resumes continued. Of the few we elected to interview, none passed the first round of basic of technical questions. We were doing the agencies’ work for them.
Several candidates that we interviewed remotely seemed to be cheating as well. We would ask a question and they’d think about the answer for a few moments and then regurgitate a textbook response. It was unnatural. Their eyes betray them. Something just felt off.
We assume that they were waiting for AI to respond on another screen, or they were screensharing the Teams interview over another platform like Zoom with a professional interviewer, or there was another person in the room feeding them answers. Something wasn’t right but we felt we couldn’t accuse them of cheating without proof.
We needed a better process.
I inquired whether my client had subscriptions to a platform like Codility but it became clear that online tech screening was not an option so we’re trialling a low-tech process.
We have booked a meeting room for 1-hour once a week and we will administer a written technical screening test in person with pen and paper. The room only holds 10 people so the agencies get to send their 9 best candidates each week and we’ll have one person supervise the process. We’re not going to review resumes until the candidates pass the screening test.
The test will be short and straightforward. All candidates in a cohort will get the same 3-5 questions. No gotchas. No leetcode. We will use a different set of questions each week. The candidates will leave after completing the test, we’ll review the answers the same day, and schedule second round in-person interviews for those that performed well.
I hate that we’ve had to resort to such draconian measures but it helps us screen candidates in an unbiased way, and it filters for our non-technical needs such as the in-office requirement and language skills. It should also eliminate cheating.
I was shocked by the strong resistance from the agencies when we announced the new process. They said it was unreasonable to expect people to attend interviews in person, and that 9 candidates per week is not enough. But now they need to actually filter and screen the candidates before proposing them to us because there are limited openings. They went through all the stages of grief in a single 30-minute conversation.
I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to find qualified candidates to grow our team while continuing to deliver high-quality software.