We often turn to our clients to understand the ins and outs, the ups and downs of their tech hiring lives. One pain point that comes up regularly is mis-hiring.

The cost of a mis-hire can be anywhere from 5 to 27 times an employee’s actual salary. This means that a mis-hire for a tech position that pays £45k per year could cost your company anywhere from £225k to £1.21m! That’s a lot of money – money that you could be investing elsewhere.

While you may not be able to eradicate mis-hires from your recruiting vocabulary completely, you can limit how often you experience them. Here are my top tips – tried and tested by our vast community of HR professionals and tech hiring managers.

Tip one: Introduce potential hires to your tech team

Tip two: Streamline and automate your screening progress

Introduce potential hires to your tech team
As part of our 2020 international CodinGame survey, we asked developers: “What is the main, non-negotiable reason you’d decline a job offer?” More than 1 in 3 developers (34.4%) replied: “Company culture doesn’t match my personal views.”

What does this mean? This means that company culture is incredibly important to developers – just as it is (or should be) to you.

Indeed, a culture and values mismatch can result in a painful recruitment experience. So, what can you do to avoid the distress of a mis-hire? One thing I’d strongly recommend is introducing potential hires to your tech team. The people working at your company will reflect your company culture with authenticity and transparency.

Here at CodinGame HQ, for example, we often invite promising candidates to join us for lunch. We eat at a large wooden table in the kitchen. At lunchtime, this table becomes a busy hub. We don’t all eat the same thing at the same time and conversations rarely rotate around work – it’s very laid-back. 

By inviting a developer to the office at lunchtime, we give them a real, unfiltered sneak peek of life at CodinGame. They get to meet the people they’d be working with on a daily basis, ask questions and generally get a feel for the place.

Candidates have a clearer picture of what to expect, and we get to see if they’re comfortable in our office environment. Both company and candidate can make an informed decision and hopefully avoid any disappointment further down the line.

Streamline and automate your screening process
According to CodinGame’s annual tech recruiting survey, over 80% of HR professionals consider that ‘Finding qualified candidates’ is the single most difficult thing about recruiting developers.

Yes, finding potential hires, filtering applications and figuring out if candidates are qualified for your job opening is difficult. Sifting through CVs is both inefficient and time-consuming.

Can you rely on a CV to give you an accurate overview of a tech candidate’s skills? No.

I’ve seen cases where candidates have had the right qualifications, experience and programming languages on paper, but who have ended up falling short of the expected technical expertise. I’ve also seen hiring managers miss out on talented developers with high potential – simply because of an unattractive CV or an untraditional career path.

Developer profiles are becoming increasingly diverse: 34.6% of developers are self-taught, for example, according to our recent international survey. This is why at CodinGame we are paving the way for skill-based hiring.

Hiring organisations turn to our online technical testing platform to streamline, automate and speed up their screening process. By sending hands-on, gamified coding tests to candidates, our clients level the playing field for all developers. They receive a detailed, reliable test report and can uncover hidden gems in a heartbeat.

I strongly recommend making technical testing a part of your screening process. I believe in fair and efficient skill-based recruitment.

Equal chance for every candidate, no matter their background, and quality hires for companies – that’s why I founded CodinGame for Work!

Aude Barral is co-founder of CodinGame, which edits CodinGame for Work, an online tech hiring platform that helps HR and tech professionals source, screen and retain talented developers.