How to Screen Candidates for Your Tech Startup Interview

Every startup’s second-biggest challenge is hiring. The first one is, of course, funding. Though some founders disagree with me on that — they are firm believers that hiring is the most difficult challenge.

The fact is, at the startup stage, your company’s existence depends upon its every employee. Not just developers, even secretaries and reception staff matters.

Competent and reliable developers are any tech startup’s founding stones.

Candidate Screening is the Most Crucial Step in Hiring:

This post is the first in a series of hiring the best talent for your startup — it will cover how to screen candidates for the interview.

Bad screening of CVs results in a waste of interviewers’ time and startup money. When your samples aren’t good enough, you are likely to:

• Cancel the job position and restructure your requirements (waste of product life cycle time)
• Hold interviews and not hire anyone (waste of interviewers’ time)
• Hire the 5th interviewed candidate because we are now bored and already paid so much to the recruiter (waste of $$$ + waste of your startup’s mission to hire the best)

Having established it’s importance, let’s go through some ideas on how to get the screening right.

#1 — Avoid Tech Recruiters:

Recruiters (the good ones) are great because of their candidate database. But your ultimate takeaway is: how many of them they can bring to you?

Good recruiters are transparent ones. They will utilize their experience to bring to you their most relevant candidates.

Yet, you must not forget that their job is to present to you the most number of candidates — whichever is available on the market. It is inevitable for them to extrapolate your job requirement onto the current availability, and just bring something to you, relevance notwithstanding. In your mind, you have cast a very wide net around your location, but recruiters will cover most of its holes.

Many a time, recruiters might favor other employers with deeper pockets. At the end of the day, they are there to make money, just like you and your dream candidate. That will further narrow the funnel available to you.

The best approach is to avoid tech recruiters unless you are on the growth stage and mass hiring is your chosen way of growing.

#2 — Advertise the Position(s):

Publishing advertisements on job portals and LinkedIn is a task usually assigned to human resources. But it is not something that someone can’t do at the beginning stage. You can generously use copy-paste from other advertisements, modify it to your needs, and publish it in your networks.

Many tech startups put up geeky advertisements to attract tech wizards. The ones found on StackOverflow or competitive programming job boards have made rounds of the internet. Sometimes, they involve challenges such as “Don’t bother to apply if you cannot solve this”. While this may be an ego-boost for smarter minds, it could drive off potentially useful candidates too. The adverse effect of these advertisements is that solutions to cliche challenges can be googled, and you will end up attracting smart quick-fixers, not coders that persevere.

List out technical skills in their order of importance. Do not overstuff the nice-to-haves, as it may discourage many potential candidates.

Also, be generic/specific enough depending upon your skillset requirement: If javascript is a requirement, you may be over-flooded with CVs with just ‘javascript’ in the job advertisement. It would be better to write a specific framework name (Node.js) to narrow down the funnel. On the other hand, if you are writing optical character recognition software, citing Tesseract as a required skill will result in very few or no CVs at all.

Advertising your tech positions has one distinct advantage: Apart from bringing you candidates, it may also advertise your presence to your potential customers. You could smartly circulate your job advertisement into circles where both your candidates and customers hang out. Expect to speak about what your startup does, and where exactly it needs talent.

Lastly, if you have an investor, a job link is the best way to convince him you are spending their dollars on the right path.

#3 — Screen Them Wisely — the 3-Scan Rule:

Finding the right candidate to interview out of a million CVs — wasn’t that the problem you had approached the recruiter for?

However, with more determination and a few techniques, this problem can be solved.

The first rule of thumb is: CVs must be processed in 3-scans.

The second rule of thumb is: They must be scanned by a tech person, not a recruiter/talent acquisition / human resources person. You can take their assistance though, in non-tech matters.

After the job advertisement, you must wait until you receive a critical mass of CVs to process. If your startup is based in a commercial city hub, you must expect at least 40+ CVs before you even begin to consider interviewing them. (That figure was for general programmers. There could be exceptions for rare and advanced technical skills) Targeting anything less would be a waste of your interviewing time.

• In the first scan, remove the chaff. To begin with, strike out all CVs without Github or any other code sample link. Developer with words maybe your great asset, but the one without any work to show off is a sure no-no. Also avoid the ones having too long, useless project/company descriptions. Being concise is a quality you should admire in code, and CVs must reflect it too.
• You must allocate a full day for the second scan because it is the most important phase in selecting the right material. In the second scan, carefully go through whatever is left. Make a worksheet with their code sample links, prominent skills, and contact details. In a separate worksheet column, also list out anything that stands out (she is a mountaineer and a self-taught programmer / ours is a parenting app and he has a parenting blog). The notes must be yours. If you copy-paste from their project descriptions, this whole exercise will be useless. Sleep on the results of your 2nd scan.
• Perform the third scan on the next morning. Reason? Because you slept on it, you may be able to make some quick, thoughtful edits to your second scan. In the third scan, you will be in a position to tick off the ones you would like to spend your interview time. Bring up your email client / grab your phone and start shooting off interview invitations.

Conclusion:

While hiring software talent, wisely screening the CVs is the best thing you could do, as it saves your startup’s most crucial asset: Competent developers (interviewers) time. Having separated wheat from the chaff, you are well-poised to the interaction with the smartest sample available at the time and location.

Time invested in CV screening will pay handsome returns when you hire your most competent talent after the interview.