Evolving Role of Data Professionals in Artifici al Intelligence Era (2024-03-04)

Creating Candidate Interest

It can be hard to find candidates for positions these days. I know there are a lot of people looking for jobs, but are they the ones you want? Are they a good fit for your team? Those are hard questions to answer when culling through resumes, conducting phone screens, and sitting in interview rooms asking questions from a template. What can be even harder is to compare different candidates when multiple people may interview the candidates. Even if you do all the work yourself, you're busy. Can you make good comparisons of different individuals that you've spoken to across a few weeks, in between all the real work you're trying to get done?

I know I've struggled to do this, no matter how many notes I take or how long the discussions are with other team members. I have had a very mixed bag of success in hiring.

What if you had more qualified, more talented candidates applying who were interested in the work your organization does? What if you gave candidates a chance to impress you with actual work that's related to what you do? It's an interesting idea, and I saw this in action from an organization recently. Verizon has built a repo that has a bunch of docker files to show how they build, test, and deploy database changes.

They make this available to anyone, but certainly to candidates who are looking for work. A candidate can experiment with this, play around, and make some decisions about if this is the type of environment in which they want to work. This repo is limited to database changes, with testing, linting, and more, but I could certainly see some sample challenging query problems added in here, perhaps just as tests (similar to exercism.org) with the opportunity for candidates to solve them. I would even take these from internal teachings/learnings that current employees use. Surely, you're leveling up and teaching your staff how to write better code.

I don't know if this is hugely scalable as candidates might not have time to work through 10 repos from 10 companies, but I do think that asking those who pass a phone screen to look through here makes some sense. Walking them through some of this in an interview and having them ask questions or explain something could help you better understand how someone works. They might even suggest improvements. This should give you a better idea of whether a candidate is someone who fits in your environment, can do (some of) the work, and works in a way that meshes with your team.

I know some companies have tried some of this in the past, often with a standard test or code quiz, but having a repo gives more time for someone to delve in and learn a bit in advance. It also gives you the chance to showcase some tech that your org uses, which might get a higher caliber of candidates applying because they want to work the way you do. Maybe you'll even get some experts who want to leave their current job to work with your org.

There is no perfect way to find and hire successful candidates, but I think this is an approach that has some merit and could potentially help create interest from candidates that might not otherwise apply.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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