How to Hire Top-Notch Technical Talent

It has always been difficult to hire the best of the best – especially when you’re looking for those extraordinary individuals who are not just devoted to mastering their craft, but who also share your company’s values.

The shortage of talent has made recruitment challenging. But there is a way to succeed in attracting top-notch technical talent: through your company’s reputation. Make a proposal they can’t refuse and put in place a recruitment process that will highlight rock star skills.

Pentalog’s recruitment is a rigorous selection process.

Employee Value Proposition vs. Employer Value Proposition

For technology companies looking to hire top-tier professionals, competition is fierce. You can’t win the recruitment battle unless you do things differently and show your high-caliber candidates the acknowledgment they need, by understanding their approach to work.

Highly skilled professionals look for environments where they can put their talents to work, continue to develop and learn, and share the feeling of belonging with other talented specialists.

At Pentalog, we take employer branding very seriously and we are committed to building a productive work environment, focusing on:

• Making our best employees even better by investing in them and assigning them the projects where they can perfect their skills and learn new ones
• Building a strong company culture oriented around high performance and career advancement
• Bringing together professionals with similar values: trust, transparency, collaboration, balance, empathy, and excellence
• Providing interaction with peers who are doing their best work on challenging projects
• Offering a personalized, competitive package of benefits that confers elite status on employees
• Putting in place a recruitment process that was designed to spot the prototype of modern-day craftsmen – people that produce exceptional work

A Closer Look Inside

Pentalog has many high-performance specialists who play a critical role in their teams. They are technically gifted, have a growth mindset, are able to grasp not-so-obvious product development strategies, and invest a lot of effort in obtaining the best results.

Share your passion for coding with Pentalog!

However, many activities in our internal processes remain unseen by clients and we’re thinking of ways of making them visible by offering a detailed presentation through talent descriptions available on our website. Together with a technical assessment, this type of overview, based on hard data, would broaden clients’ perspective when making the profile selection. We’re thinking of activities like evaluations, estimations, audits, mentorship programs, onboarding processes, technical guidance, and more.

These high performing profiles are not only what clients need in their projects; they’re also what we‘re looking to hire in our company. If we meet candidates’ requirements, then we also have a set of procedures to ensure the quality of our work.

Pentalog’s Recruitment Process Ensures Clients’ Access to Qualified Profiles

Through a rigorous selection process, Pentalog’s talent acquisition aims to perfectly match the most qualified profiles with the needs of the project. This process applies to all future Pentalog employees and even to our long-term colleagues:

1. Candidates take a SkillValue test based on the technology and the level we need to assess. SkillValue is Pentalog’s HR wing that enables free tech assessment using specific quizzes and coding exercises.
2. A second round of tests from an independent platform may be required by the client as proof of the candidate’s tech stack.
3. Technical evaluation of the candidate’s abilities using the Dreyfus model. Unlike other models or assessments that rate the whole person, this one is applicable per skill. (The model proposes that a person passes through five levels when acquiring a skill: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert.)
4. A technical interview conducted by the recruiter and either the Customer Success Manager or the Scrum Master.
5. Foreign language tests as needed.
6. Soft skills assessment: communication, collaboration, adaptability, creativity, and problem-solving are essential for a successful IT career. A gap in soft skills may produce team friction and even problems in delivering the best results to our clients.

To ensure the highest level of excellence, all Pentalog employees periodically undergo this type of test.

The Future of Recruiting – from the Clients’ Perspective

Outsourcing companies like Pentalog provide a pool of highly skilled resources by catering to customers’ needs around the globe. Our purpose is to support companies in achieving their business objectives while quickly ramping up the best development teams at competitive rates.

Based on our 25 years of working with clients from different industries, we can say that the recruitment and assessment processes continue to develop to keep pace with the organizational challenges.

Here’s what we’ve noticed so far:

1. Clients want to be part of the recruitment process and select their own team members. Even with our detailed profile offering, sometimes they want to reevaluate candidates with their own tests and even conduct face-to-face interviews.
2. Clients are also interested in assessing candidates’ soft skills, often through psychometric tests. These tests evaluate the capacity to work with others, process information, cope with stress, and many more. For some clients, these tests weigh heavily in the decision to hire or not to hire a specific profile.
3. Clients want to hire quickly. To reduce time invested in the recruitment process, we use a wide range of tests, so we can better respond to their expectations and deliver highly skilled developers with a proven track record. For most clients, a thorough assessment process acts as insurance for their projects’ success.
4. Clients want to cut costs when outsourcing. Although it’s not easy to get the most skilled developers who are highly proficient in more than one technology while still paying a competitive price, everything is possible when working with the right offshore/ nearshore team.

In conclusion: innovative companies need the right employees. And vice-versa. Achieving this requires finding the right balance between what the company can provide and what the candidates need. A customized recruitment process may unleash your employees’ special talents and skyrocket your business.