Retaining highly skilled tech workers is a huge challenge for recruiters in this tech-driven ultra-competitive era of recruiting. In order to do so, there are a few key insights recruiters should be aware of.

Attracting and hiring STEM workers is anything but easy in today’s recruiting climate. And with employers constantly battling each other for the best and brightest—sourcing is only a part of the equation. An equally formidable challenge is talent retention.

Currently, there’s an acute shortage of skilled developers actively looking for work. Organizations spend thousands of dollars in recruiting talent, with the HR efforts that goes into sourcing and hiring tech talent and the cost associated with onboarding and training, the costs associated with a hire gone bad are really high. 

The demand for tech talent is at an all-time high. According to the Harris Allied 2014 Tech Hiring and Retention Survey finding and hiring top tech talent is the biggest concern for hiring managers—closely followed by retaining talent. Therefore, retention should be high on the list of priorities for recruiters and talent acquisition (TA) teams. Accordingly, relevant measures should be put into place early in the tenure of new employees.

Wondering what it takes to prevent prized team members from jumping ship as soon as a better opportunity comes knocking at their door? Here are a few actionable tips to help hiring teams stay ahead of the curve and retain the talent they work so hard to attract and hire. 

1) Become Fluent in Tech Terminology

As a recruiter or hiring manager, there’s a good chance you won’t be familiar with the granular details and responsibilities of many of the positions for which you’re hiring. If you want to build a long-term relationship with tech workers, the ability to “speak their language” will pay off in spades.

Fluency in technical terminology does not entail that you need to learn programming languages yourself. You just need to cover the basics and acquire a cursory knowledge of the positions you’re looking to fill. Let’s say you’ve been tasked with finding a Java software engineer for your company. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll need to engage candidates for that position in lengthy discourse about databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle.

However, if you enter the interview with some basic understanding of those platforms and why they matter for the role, you’ll have a better idea of how to guide the conversation, learn about the candidate’s strengths and interests, and potentially their pain points or weaknesses. All of this will be useful information to include when reporting back to the hiring team.

2) Emphasize Benefits Over Compensation 

The pool of tech talent is largely comprised of millennials who, with their positive, can-do attitude, take a free-wheeling approach towards career direction and employment in general. Hiring and retaining the generation of millennial workers who have proved themselves as workplace innovators and adept at learning new technologies on the go can be a real challenge for recruiters. 

Gone are the days when stability, job security and high salaries ranked top in the list of job seekers’ desired benefits. Skilled tech workers today can already command high salaries and associated perks. To many candidates, flexible working arrangements, student loan repayment assistance, and professional/career development are factors of equal or great importance when contemplating career decisions.

In this regard, it’s absolutely necessary to be forward-thinking. Many top-tier companies already have unique, attractive benefits packages in place. Doing so is a competitive advantage. Failing to do so could be irreparably damaging to your recruiting and retention efforts.

3) Retire the College Degrees in Favor of Experience

Rejecting candidates that don’t tick the boxes of formal education is one of the easiest ways an organization can miss the boat on talent. Technical expertise is hard to find and if recruiters insist on playing by the book, it is likely that candidates who are potentially a good fit for the organization may get missed out on. 

These days a number of developers are self-taught. With options like Coursera and Udemy, candidates can easily access university-level courses and training without matriculating at an institution. According to Stack Overflow’s 2018 Global Developer Hiring Landscape report, almost 90 percent of developers said that they have learned a new language outside of their formal education. 

Furthermore, high profile companies like Google, IBM, and Apple no longer require applicants to hold a four-year degree. In fact, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook recently said that about half of Apple’s US employment last year was made up of people who didn’t have four-year degrees. Additionally, he asserted that many colleges do not teach the skills that are most needed in today’s workforce, like coding.

To that end, it’s important that recruiters begin reigning in any bias they might have against autodidacts and applicants without degrees from accredited universities.

4) Convey the Strength of Your Company Culture

Candidates are more likely to remain with a company and be engaged if their personal values match those of their employers. Therefore, it’s important to clearly communicate those values early in the recruiting process to avoid misunderstanding, disengagement, and employer dissatisfaction—all of which contribute to poor retention. 

In the US, the average employee tenure is right around four years. That’s not long. As a result, it’s now more important than ever for employers to strategically think about how they can hold onto their workforce. Few measures are as effective as a solid company culture, which is a truly binding force.

Want more insight on technical recruiting? We recommend reading the following post: 5 Technical Recruiting Insights from Over 100K Coding Tests.

Finding the right talent for your organization has become almost as difficult as saving private Ryan, luckily we know some TA Generals.

Coined by McKinsey’s Steven Hankin in 1997, the term ‘war for talent’ has become synonymous with the market conditions that have led to fierce competition between companies to attract and retain talented employees. This phenomenon will only increase at a time when too few workers are available to replace the baby boomers now departing the workforce in advanced economies.

A whopping 82 percent of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people. For companies that do, only seven percent think they can keep them.

For tech companies like Devoteam, a French IT service company, they are the ones storming the beaches in search of top talent to bring into their organizations. Spread out over 18 countries across Europe, they have developed specific strategies to gain ground in the cutthroat world of Talent Acquisition (TA) where 73 percent of candidates are passive and top candidates only stay available on the market for 10 days.

One of the people spearheading these endeavors is Matthieu Rivière the TA director for Devoteam. He has seen first-hand the fight to recruit talented individuals for his international teams and the importance of having the right firepower like candidate engagement and experience.

We caught up with Matthieu Rivière at  Hiring Success 19, where this TA general shared with us some of his experiences in the trenches of TA and how he thinks his company can win the War for Talent.

If you want to learn more about Hiring Success EU – Amsterdam, September 10-11, 2019, check out our agenda here!

What is it like on the frontlines of the War for Talent?

As a tech company, we understand that it is a war and that means competing for highly skilled technical people with all other types of companies. 

The struggle to attract people becomes even more difficult because we specialize in consulting, so most people would rather work in a startup or one of the well-known tech brands. Therefore our main challenges boil down to being able to engage with passive candidates, start conversations with them, and then create a preference in their minds to choose us as an employer. 

Then, on top of all that, our recruitment volume requires more than 2000 people a year and our average employee turnover is two to four years. In general, it is a very difficult environment to succeed in.

How does your team confront these challenges?

As a service company, providing the best customer experience is our main priority. This idea translates to recruitment in the form of candidate experience. And, at the end of the day, creating a top of the line candidate experience is good for us as well as it allows us to be more selective and acquire the best talent.

As far as the specifics of our recruiting function, each country is specialized in a particular type of candidate profile. Half of our IT specialists are in France so the team there will be made up solely of IT recruiters. In other locations, we have TA  teams focused on finding project managers or Java developers.

In general, everybody is involved – even the sales teams are committed to sourcing candidates and engaging them in the recruitment process – working closely with the recruitment team for sourcing and employer branding.

How do you expect to win the War for Talent?

The strategies to ‘win’ are becoming more and more based on marketing. We have to engage as many people as we can and convert them into candidates – much the same way you would convert a lead into a client. 

Candidate experience will continue to be paramount, and for that, we will continue to use a mix of digital and physical components. From our point of view, everyone who works here is an ambassador of our employee brand, and having everyone involved really makes a difference.

The tools we use and our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are crucial to our success. Without the system capabilities such as candidate feedback on the hiring process, texting options, and easy integration to social media platforms like LinkedIn, I don’t know where we would be. 

We are lucky to have a tool with such a great user experience that anyone can pick up because, as I mentioned before, even the sales team may source some candidates or hire them for a job. This aspect and a truly flexible solution made it easy to implement the SmartRecruiters technology in each country despite the different offices or recruiting team structures. 

In the end, we are positioning ourselves to succeed with our candidate marketing techniques and having technology that’s adaptable to any situation.

See more from leaders like Matthieu in the next part of the blog series – 10 Things I learned at Hiring Success – where we find out what it is like maintaining a brick and mortar store against the waves of digitalization.

Sometimes it’s hard to discern which benefits are trendy and which will actually improve employee quality of life. We talk with PayScale to learn the difference.

This year Seattle Business Magazine named PayScale the top place to work in Seattle. No easy feat in the Emerald city with competition from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, and the siren call of San Francisco and Silicon Valley constantly ringing up the coast. Tech talent is scarce and flighty, but also most crucial to a company’s success, according to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So how do you not only attract, but keep, this sought-after talent?

The answer for PayScale is work-life balance. “We see our employees as whole people,” says Caitlin Williams, the company’s senior talent acquisition partner. “All our benefits are designed to benefit people as people, not people as workers.”

“Yes!” agrees Chris Stiemert, director of talent acquisition. “Most of what we do is listen to our employees and learn what they need and want.”

For PayScale, employee empowerment is the north star, and they are relentlessly experimenting to see what works. Almost more interesting than the benefits they keep are the ones they leave out – and why!

How do you make sure your programs are meaningful, and not just trendy?

Chris

I’ve worked at companies that had free soda, food, you name it, but you start to realize that the underlying purpose of these perks is to keep people in the office, working. We try to focus on what will actually move the needle in terms of retention and quality of life.

Caitlin

I totally agree. I think a lot of companies focus on things that are really fun to hear about at the outset but, in the end, aren’t about genuine care for employees, or long-term productivity and wellbeing. “We Hire Whole People” isn’t just a tagline for us, and we try to carve out benefits that speak to “a person” rather than an “employee”.

Caitlin, what makes PayScale the top place to work in Seattle?

I’ve worked in several different areas of the tech industry – biotech, ecommerce, software as a service, etc. What stands out to me after three years at PayScale is how it invests in its employees in two essential ways: career/professional development, and overall health/well-being.

• Professional/Career Development: We offer an array of development courses, and we also employ leadership and career coaches that help our employees uplevel both hard and soft skills.
• Health and Wellness: This last year we opened a gym on the basement level of our building for PayScale employees. We host free weekly yoga classes and stock the office with fresh fruits and sparkling waters. The other piece of this health and wellness initiative is “Independence week”, where this year we experimented with shutting down the office for the entire week of July 4th to give folks a great mid-year reset that most workers only get during the winter holidays.  

Chris, why does PayScale take employee happiness so seriously?

We start from a place of believing that happy employees ultimately means better business. All these things—happy hours, decorating the office for Halloween, providing snacks, and offering workout facilities follow naturally from this idea and create an environment where employees feel safe and happy so we can have transparent conversations around all aspects of work.

There’s always going to be a new opportunity in this tech market. We’re competing with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Snapchat, and many others. So, of course, we need something unique, but it’s more than that – we really feel that treating employees well is the right way to run a business. Our ability to source and retain talent just proves that point further.

Don’t be fooled by their cutesy graphic design. This job platform means business, and in just a few years, has flipped the script on traditional steps of recruiting.

When a Colombian software developer decided he wanted to live abroad, he turned to a newfangled job platform called Honeypot, a Berlin startup that’s turning tech-recruiting on its head by asking companies to apply to candidates. We take a look into the process with the company’s co-founder, to find out what it’s all about.

“Living abroad, learning new languages, getting to know new cultures – these are all things I had imagined for my life,” says Andres Visbal, recalling what first led him to Honeypot. “So I started looking for a job abroad, but it was surprisingly frustrating.”

Andres is a backend software developer with eight years’ experience in an industry projected to grow by 24 percent by 2026. His skills are in high demand, so it wasn’t so much a lack of offers, it just seemed like the companies were clueless.

“Most ads I saw seemed like amalgams of Google searches for the term ‘software developer skills’,” he says. “I would see lists of requirements impossible for anyone to live up to, and sometimes I would even start the interview process only to realize the company had completely different needs from the description. Finally, a recruiter recommended Honeypot.”

Andres liked the “companies apply to candidates” model of matching developers with work they love across the EU, and so he thought, “Why not?”

“A few clicks later I had a profile,” he says. “I just imported my LinkedIn info and tweaked a few minor things. Once I was finished, the platform surfaced me to the first batch of a dozen or so companies, so I could begin interviewing with the ones I liked. The process was staggered, so I was never inundated with emails, but I still had consistent interest, and I had a talent representative from Honeypot assigned to my case, to advocate for me through the process, like if a company didn’t respond. Later, they even helped me and my partner obtain the right visas. And all the inquiries I received were actually relevant to my skills.”

Andreas moved to Hamburg at the end of June of this year to start his dream job with Xing, a German language competitor of LinkedIn, and he’s just one of 36,000 success stories. So how does this whole thing really work, and why do so many companies already have their paws in the Honeypot?

For this, we spoke to Honeypot co-founder Emma Tracey, who took home the title of Recruiting Startup of the Year at the Hiring Success Conference in San Francisco last March, and who’ll return as a judge in the RSOTY competition at Hiring Success Europe, September 19-20th, in Berlin.

What was the hardest moment for Honeypot in the midst of this rapid growth?

There are hard moments for every founding team, anyone who is taking on a startup should be prepared for that. For us, we thought our platform would be much, much more automated than it turned out to be. Our algorithm does all the matching, don’t get me wrong, but we still needed a human element. Honeypot experienced rapid growth once we doubled down on support for the candidates. You can’t deny that people need help with big decisions, and we can provide that expertise and guidance via our talent reps.

What was the most transformational moment for Honeypot?

It may sound basic, but for me, it was when we started to do in-depth user-interviews, and take them seriously when considering product development. It’s something so obvious, right? Of course you should talk to the people navigating your solution, yet it’s so easily overlooked. It hit me when I was having a casual conversation with one of our users at an event, I was like “Wow, why aren’t we doing this all the time? Let’s institutionalize this kind of feedback.”

What stands out about your company culture?

When I think of our team, three words come to mind: curious, caring, and smart. Everyone on our team wants to experiment and learn, we care about the people who use our product and we want to make it great for them. We’re constantly learning and evolving.

In honing our work culture, “Sprints” is a Google Ventures concept that has worked really well for us. We decide on a new feature we want to roll out, and work together to design a prototype in under a week. The results have been great. We’ve experienced a huge amount of buy-in from all departments, so we are now implementing this methodology into our operations and strategy.

Of course, there’s fun stuff that’s just kind of sprung up as we go, like our conference table is actually a ping-pong table, there’s a book exchange in the break room, and – my personal favorite – the office dogs!

You are on the front lines of tech recruitment, seeing demand grow. What’s the answer to the talent shortage in the tech sector?

I definitely don’t think that you need to go to university to be a developer. These degrees are great for learning the foundations of software, which is important for a certain type of developer, but there are many, many types of developers. I think that’s what people forget when they are building a modern technology company. A broad range of skills is extremely important to have within your software development team, so I see the rise of coding boot camps and other shorter programs as a big positive.

To me, the future of training tech talent is a combination of modernizing computer science degrees, and probably opening up more vocational training, like one- to two-year courses that focus more on practical software development than the tenants of computer science. We offer coding classes for all employees, as well as tuition benefits to encourage anyone who’s interested to learn more about programming. After all, it’s our business and we want our team to be literate.

Why is your platform good for companies?

We help businesses to understand better what they need. Not everyone is a tech person, but most companies need tech people, so we give recruiters extensive training on programming languages. That way there’s a basis of understanding of how all this technology works together, and what exactly their needs are. We empower both sides of hiring to find what they need. Companies get vetted candidates that are actively looking for a job, and developers only receive offers that are relevant to their skills and interest.

For this Indian HR leader, Berlin-based Zalando has proven the perfect place for her to grow her skills, and the company.

Manjuri Sinha leads the technology talent acquisition team for Europe’s Leading e-commerce platform, Zalando SE. She possesses international experience in Tech business Partnering and Talent Acquisition for mid- to large-size organizations such as Accenture, and has worked and lived in India, the Czech Republic, and Germany. She also wears other hats, like speaker, mentor, and blogger. Before her session at Hiring Success 18 Europe, we asked her how her past has shaped her present and what’s on the horizon for the future.

How did you come to work at Zalando? Where were you before Berlin?

Before Zalando, I was working with Accenture, as a Lead Tech Business Partner in India. My team of BP’s managed employees across North America, Germany and Brazil. I was on sabbatical in the Czech Republic when I was approached by Zalando, and then moved to Berlin in 2014.

What attracted you to the company?

The strategy and the early success. Zalando is a fairly new business, yet has an exponential growth story.

What have been the biggest challenges since coming aboard?

Scaling the organization, and hiring a huge number of quality-tech-talent to continuously build the organization.

What are your next big goals?

As a Tech Talent Leader, my goals is to move towards more process automation, and take my team to the next step of being Talent Acquisition advisors.

What is something about your process you think needs to change?

To look at processes and pick out the repeatable tasks, and automate as much as possible.

How important is tech to the HR industry now vs when you started?

Very important, be it for assessment, attraction, and selection. Tech is everywhere, today technology helps us make better decisions, such as scheduling tools, CRMs, and video interviewing tools.

What will your job look like in a few years?

I would like to see it to be more strategic. Talent Acquisition is still considered an operational activity, and I would like to change this mindset.  

What would you tell your younger self before getting into the industry?

To have Patience, pick your battles, that you don’t need to tackle everything at once.

What would you have done differently?

Nothing much, actually. I am where I am because of my unique journey and would not have done it differently. Maybe on the personal side yes, I would have loved to give more time to family.

What does Hiring Success mean to you?

For me, success is not only closing numbers but bringing quality onboard, adding value, aligning talent strategy with business strategy, building an organization and keeping it sustainable.

In a recent article about Facebook’s “diversity”, a major news publication reported their employment as 69% male, 57% white, 34% Asian, 4% Hispanic  2% black and 3% other ethnics.  There was no mention of age or religion, or other important “protected” demographic categories. Their global head of diversity at Facebook said “we have a long way to go.”  Toward what?  Maybe Facebook hires a lot of Asians because, as a group, they stand out as performers in math and technology.  Maybe they hire a lot of Asians because their office is in a geographic location with high concentrations of Asians in the workforce, thus reflecting local demographics.

Should Facebook’s labor force reflect the percentages of these protected categories in the entire population (or the global population or in their local geographic location)?  Facebook said it is trying to generate more hires for “underrepresented groups” so I take it that achieving population distributions is their goal, though the value of this is not made clear.  If we apply the same standard to all other businesses, including 6 million small employers with an average of 10 employees, the cost of achieving the “desired” distribution and the implications for the quality and productivity of the resulting workforce become serious concerns with questionable benefits.

Consider an NBA team. Its small number of players (about 15 on a team) hardly represents the population distribution. I see no seniors, no short people, relatively few whites, Asians and Hispanics, and I would guess not many of Jewish persuasion or many other religions. Shouldn’t they be held to the same standard as Facebook or any other business?  The NBA hires based on skill and performance, it probably doesn’t care much what you look like (even if owners have personal views that are disagreeable, they hire based on skill).  Any firm that purposefully does not hire the “best” workers it can find for the jobs it has regardless of what they look like or believe will underperform (as would an NBA team that hired people my age to play).

A “Stanford fellow” observed “Clearly Facebook has to step up now and so something about these numbers.”  Really?  Well, I can barely use my cell phone, but I am available for one of the “senior” slots in their new demographically correct labor force.  Pressuring firms (or requiring it as some wish to do) to structure their labor force to match some politically determined distribution will diminish the productivity of the work force and the performance of our economy.  Firms must be able to hire the best workers available if we are to get the most out of our resources.

This article was written by William Dunkelberg from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

In a previous Forbes post, we considered the disconcerting reality that while we find ourselves in the midst of an unemployment crisis—one characterized by highly educated candidates who are unable to find skilled work—employers from myriad industries are nevertheless reporting that they’re unable to find the talent profiles they’re really looking for. And evidence indicates that this talent gap primarily refers not to an absence of technical skills, but to an absence of “soft skills,” or what we’ll call 21^st century skills. These primarily refer to interpersonal and general analytic abilities like: teamwork, empathy, leadership, negotiation, adaptability, and problem solving.

This is highly useful information to students and educators, but employers can also learn a lot from this research about how to hire successful candidates. The problem is that 21^st century skills are very difficult to assess with any kind of rigor, especially before one can evaluate a candidate on the job. Can a candidate think innovatively? Collaborate with other team members? Assimilate feedback and coaching? Will the candidate get along with her team members and other colleagues? Will she bring personality strengths to the table that the current team might be lacking? Will the candidate be adaptable to new environments and successfully integrate with teams? It is very difficult to reduce these questions to discrete qualifications and quantifiable metrics in the same way we can assess recognized degrees and numerical grades.

Certainly some approaches exist. For example, businesses have used “type”-based personality tests for decades in attempts to measure the 21^st century skills of prospective candidates, assuming that certain personality types would correlate with high performance. One example is the Jung Typology Profiler for Workplace, which purports to measure qualities such as “Power” (leadership index), “Assurance,” “Visionary,” “Rationality,” and so forth.

The reality is that personality tests such as these have serious methodological flaws and lack the statistical reliability to predict performance among prospective employees. In fact, the makers of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a closely-related profiler that also has its origins in Jungian typology, clearly state in their ethical guidelines that “It is unethical, and in many cases illegal, to require job applicants to take the Indicator if the results will be used to screen out applicants.”

It’s clear that we need 21^st century methods to assess 21^st century skills. Unfortunately, that seemingly simple idea proves to be much trickier in practice than it is in theory.

Tools for talent development do not work for pre-employment screening

Part of the problem is that many companies are using the wrong tools for the job.   There is a fundamental difference between tools intended to develop existing teams and tools used for pre-employment selection.

While typical personality tests are poor tools for pre-employment screening, there is evidence that newer tests can help managers better develop and deploy the talent they have already hired. For example, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a tool that helps individuals understand and describe their own talents, and is commonly used by managers to understand and capitalize on the strengths of those they hire. More importantly, it is methodologically sound, and its reliability and validity are backed up by clear evidence.

For example, Facebook uses StrengthsFinder in a clever way to deploy talent efficiently. Regardless of the job openings they have available, Facebook simply hires the smartest people it can find, then uses StrengthsFinder results to understand their talents and create a job tailored to the candidate.

One might naturally assume that the same type of test that helps identify and develop strengths in an existing team could also be used to assess suitable candidates for entry into that team. In the words of Gallup, “Absolutely not… A development-oriented assessment such as StrengthsFinder is markedly different from selection tools because its purpose is not to assess whether an individual is suited for a particular job or role. Instead, it aims to provide talent insights for developing strengths within roles.”

Pre-employment selection tools can predict employee performance on the job

Many pre-employment selection tools succeed at predicting performance because they have a completely different design than development tools like personality tests. Instead of seeking general traits and preferences, selection tools are tailored to a particular job in a particular organization, and are statistically calibrated to provide reliable predictive results (i.e., candidates who score highly on these tests also tend to perform well after they’re hired). In addition to the StrengthsFinder development tool, Gallup also offers these pre-employment selection tools, which include analytic services to ensure the validity and predictive value of the measures for candidate screening.

Pairin, Inc. is another organization that seeks to combine the personality test approach with specialized testing (for specific jobs, values, culture, etc.) as part of a pre-employment selection system. Using the Job Pairin System, employers can assess the presence of around 100 coachable/changeable behaviors such as emotional intelligence, leadership, attraction of followers, and even character.

A new spin on the behavioral interview

While services from Gallup and Pairin provide strong, evidence-based methods, the debate on using metrics to assess 21^st century skills will certainly continue. For good or bad, it is unlikely that the traditional way to measure 21^st century skills – the behavioral interview – will be unseated anytime soon. (Behavioral interviews are those that include questions like “Tell me about a time when you worked effectively under pressure.”)

Certainly, behavioral interviewing has problems of its own – for example, canned and otherwise disingenuous responses are all too common. While most companies still use a behavioral interviewing approach, those with top hiring practices tend to put their own clever spin on the questions to weed out rote responses and thus generate better insights from candidates. Questions like this tend to yield a wider spread between canned responses and those that show more nuance and self-awareness. Google also uses behavioral interviews, but structures them in a way that allows them to perform analytics and prove that certain responses predict employee performance.

Beyond the interview

Whatever method companies use to assess 21^st century skills in prospective employees, it’s important that they reflect on the key principles behind the assessment approaches. Findings from research on 21^st century skills provide an extremely valuable lens through which companies can view all interactions with candidates. Consider: What can you teach a new hire on the job, and what can you not teach? With information now abundantly available to us, almost anyone can learn basic Photoshop skills, for example, via online seminars. But what about abstract but indispensable skills like connectedness and empathy – can they be taught on the job?

When you interviewed the person who is now your highest performer, how did you know she would outperform the rest? Did you spot her innate ability to relate to other people, her ability to intuit the needs of different kinds of people? What were the indicators that she possessed those abilities?  We’d like to hear your thoughts on these questions and your experiences with hiring for 21^st century skills.

This post was written by Kate Jenkins, editor at Ashoka and editor-in-chief of The Intentional Quarterly, and James Ray, a Strategy Consultant for Nonprofit, Human Services, and International Development clients at Accenture It was originally published in Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network  This post does not necessarily represent the views of Accenture. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

When it comes to advice on how to recruit software developers, you’ve probably heard it all before: look for someone with passion, technical expertise, an interest in your product, and a good cultural fit. Easier said than done. With nearly 4.59 job openings for every agile developer, the good ones get snatched up pretty easily and digging through pools of passive candidates can seem a bit daunting if you don’t know how to identify those characteristics. So what are you really looking for? As the team behind Stack Overflow, the largest Q&A site on programming (and a CEO who literally wrote the book on how to hire technical talent), we’ve created a science to finding top technical talent. Below, our 5 must-haves for any developer who wants to join our team.

1. Open source projects and/or a personal, technical blog

What it shows: Passion

Public artifacts like open source projects and personal blogs truly show that a developer is excited and interested in their field. We want to hire people who love their work and make a hobby of it on the side. Working on open source projects and blogging demonstrates that they are really into coding—and that’s exactly what we need at Stack Overflow.

2. Stack Overflow reputation points and a Github profile

What it shows: That they know their stuff

It may be a little meta to use our own site as a scale for hiring developers, but the fact remains: 25 million people come to Stack Overflow every month, and it’s seen as a site of record for all programming topics. We look for a high reputation score on Stack Overflow and sort through their code samples on Github to find evidence they show potential and depth of knowledge.

3. A variety of experience – and at least one exceptional skillset

What it shows: Intelligence and problem-solving skills

If someone has mastered more than one programming language, this shows they are smart, learn quickly, and can solve hard problems since they know the strengths and limitations of each language. We throw specific job requirements to the wind and just look for people who have truly demonstrated that they have achieved technical excellence in one particular area. This combination is the clincher – you’ll find a well-rounded developer who’s also an expert.

4. Completed projects, not just completed certifications

What it shows: That they get things done

We want someone who has a track record of finishing projects. It’s easy to complete a class and receive a certification; it’s much harder to build something from start to finish that actually works. That’s why we don’t fixate on education or experience. A full LinkedIn profile or a long list of certifications shows only one thing: that they have a lot of free time on their hands, which is something that all unemployed programmers have in common.

5. An ability to communicate as well as code

What it shows: That they’ll fit on our team

A developer who can’t explain his own code won’t help us collaborate and grow as a team. Whether in writing or in-person, this last piece of the puzzle helps us to measure how likely this developer would be to get along with our other programmers and our company objectives. To measure this, treat their personal blog or top Stack Overflow answers as writing samples to get a glimpse for how well they can actually explain their technical know-how.

Bethany Marzewski (@stackcareers) is the Marketing Coordinator at Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 (a SmartRecruiters Partner), the largest online talent community for professional programmers.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates, and make the right hires.

Yahoo kept this in mind when they hired their current CEO Marissa Mayer. In 1999, Mayer was Google’s first female engineer and their 20th employee. During her 13 years with Google, she was an engineer, designer, product manager, and executive. Within a year of becoming Yahoo’s President and CEO, Mayer oversaw the policy change that required all remote employees to work in-office, boldly dealing with the problems created by Yahoo’s “huge, bloated infrastructure.” Let’s not forget how Mayer acquired Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition. Barely a year in, Mayer has played a crucial role in cultivating Yahoo back into shape.

Fellow tech companies have followed suit and hired their own key players. Here are the Most Important Tech Hires in 2013 (so far):

5. Instagram: Emily White

White is Instragram’s new Director of Operations. She was Facebook’s Director of Mobile Partnerships, where her primary focus was to get Facebook on as many devices as possible. Prior to Facebook, she was an early employee of Google, helping to build GoogleAdWords among a few things. In addition to Instragram, she currently holds a board seat at Lululemon. With her rich experience with partnerships and business operations, White is an important hire for Instragram. A protege of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, White has the potential to monetize Instagram’s under-leveraged popularity without sacrificing user experience, and expand its brand partnerships for the future.

4. Eventbrite: Mark Rubash

Rubash joined Eventbrite as its first-ever CFO and brings with him over 30 years of finance, accounting and investor relations experience. He was formerly the VP of Finance and Investor Relations at eBay and later the Senior Vice President of Finance at Yahoo. He has also held executive roles at Heartflow, Readen Commerce, and Critical Path and currently serves on the Boards of Intuitive Surgical, Iron Planet and Line 6. With Rubash’s experience and “a proven track record of leading teams through periods of extraordinary growth,” it will be no surprise when Rubash is the one that leads Eventbrite through their IPO. This of course comes after Eventbrite raised $60 million of venture capital in April.

3. Facebook: Richard Williamson

Williamson was recently hired to manage Facebook’s expanding mobile-software group (there is some ambiguity around his official title but LinkedIn states “Director of Engineering”). You may remember him as the Apple engineer who led the Apple Maps team in replacing Google’s mapping service and was fired when the results were subpar. However, it can be said that Williamson and his team can’t be entirely blamed. Rather, according to VentureBeat, it was “Apple’s hubris in assuming it could duplicate in a year or two what took Google many years and thousands of engineers to do: build a great mapping service.” With that said, Williamson had worked at Apple over a decade and was one of the top engineers Steve Jobs put on the iPhone. With enough time and confidence, Williamson has the drive it takes to make monumental strides for Facebook for years to come in the mobile department.

2. Twitter: Simon Rogers

Rogers was hired by Twitter to be its very first Data Editor, a position created to uncover the most fascinating stories as told by aggregated tweets. He was previously a data journalist at the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. There he created guardian.co.uk/data, an online data resource which publishes hundreds of raw datasets and encourages its users to visualise and analyze them. He was also a news editor at the Guardian, working with the graphics team to visualize and interpret huge datasets. With 15 years of data journalism, Rogers will play a critical role in helping Twitter make sense of all the information coming through its servers. He will be key in moving Twitter several steps forward toward becoming the reliable, compelling, and competitive go-to news source.

1. Google: Noah Falstein

Falstein was hired by Google to be its Chief Game Designer. According to TechCrunch, the position is rumored to be catered for the Android Play Studio. Falstein has been in the games industry since 1980, having worked and designed hit titles for companies such as LucasArts, 3DO, and Dreamworks Interactive. More recently, he’s been the president of The Inspiracy, his own consulting firm specializing in game design and production. Though it is unclear what Falstein will be working on at Google, it must be something very big if his gaming expertise has been enlisted among Google’s ranks. If it is for an “Android Play Studio”, Falstein is the best player to substantially expand the gaming platform on the Android. At the same time, Google will be capitalizing on Falstein’s interest in the field of “Serious Games,” defined as “Using Games, Game Technology, or Game Industry Techniques for a purpose other than pure entertainment.” As gamification becomes more important to all software development and adoption, who knows what Google has up their sleeve?

P.S. Photo Credit SoftIcon. Google’s great, and getting more social. All SmartRecruiters Job Ads have one click share to Google+.

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SmartRecruiters wants to know: How do you make hiring easier? RubyNow’s Mike Newcomer had this to say.

1. Tell us a little about the history of RubyNow.

RubyNow was created with one simple purpose: to provide a platform for human-reviewed, premium Ruby jobs to be shared with the greater online community.

2. How does RubyNow’s service work?

Employers can purchase job postings that will run on the webpage and be sent to our subscribers via e-mail, RSS, and Twitter. Prospective candidates can access the postings via any of the aforementioned mediums or via online search.

3. What are RubyNow’s market differentiators?

All postings are human-screened, so you can be certain that they are real and of high quality. We also curate a 2,000+ Ruby developer list that receive all new postings in their inbox.

4. Why should hiring businesses use the service of RubyNow?

We are one of the top Ruby job boards on the web, and you can be certain that your posting will be seen by hundreds of prospective candidates.

5. What’s a fact we may not know about RubyNow?

Our company is run by people with extensive tech backgrounds, who are active in tech projects outside our job board as well.