Talk to any software engineer who has applied for a job at a big technology company, and they’ll tell you stories of the absurdity of recruitment in the tech space. Whether it’s being asked to code solutions to complex problems under strict time pressure or being barraged with dozens of questions about tiny technical details that almost no one needs to know (and that everyone could Google if they did need to know), tech interviews have become the stuff of nightmares. Even worse, they often don’t do what they’re supposed to do: find the one employee who is worth investing in out of hundreds of applicants.
The excessive focus on hard skills — technical knowledge, memorized algorithms, degrees — isn’t a great way to optimize for the sort of employees most companies want. Of course, hard skills are necessary. But they’re not sufficient: The most intelligent and knowledgeable applicant may well be a terrible employee. The applicant who didn’t do quite so well on provable hard skills could turn out to be the best hire you never made.
How can you tell the difference? By paying attention to both hard and soft skills, and by giving soft skills the influence they deserve in the hiring process. Businesses looking for long-term, dedicated employees can turn an adequate coder into a great coder with training, and develop an engineer to her full potential with mentoring. But soft skills are much more difficult to teach than technical skills.
Read the Full Article by Vik Patel on Forbes HERE.
The excessive focus on hard skills — technical knowledge, memorized algorithms, degrees — isn’t a great way to optimize for the sort of employees most companies want. Of course, hard skills are necessary. But they’re not sufficient: The most intelligent and knowledgeable applicant may well be a terrible employee. The applicant who didn’t do quite so well on provable hard skills could turn out to be the best hire you never made.
How can you tell the difference? By paying attention to both hard and soft skills, and by giving soft skills the influence they deserve in the hiring process. Businesses looking for long-term, dedicated employees can turn an adequate coder into a great coder with training, and develop an engineer to her full potential with mentoring. But soft skills are much more difficult to teach than technical skills.
Read the Full Article by Vik Patel on Forbes HERE.