Of Dragons and Developers: A Tale of Hiring Homework and Gamification - Beginner

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Join Nele as she shares the story of a hiring project she did with a teammate or hers at Bigbank (An Estonian bank specialised in lending, around 430 employees in 9 countries, around 100 of which in technology).

The background is that it’s quite difficult to hire developers in Estonia, as there are significantly more vacancies than developers fit for the positions, meaning it’s very hard to get candidates and then retain their interest. This is especially the case if the company hiring is not a sexy startup or an already well-established technology company but rather falls in the middle part of the employer-attractiveness spectrum.

Nele and her teammate created a hiring test task (and later a front-end task) and promoted both of them publicly, calling anyone interested to try to solve it. They saw that although this was a simple premise, the task encouraged people to show off their skills and tools of choice, providing valuable information on whether or not they would fit in at their company.

They also made sure to provide thorough feedback on each solution they received to make sure that everyone at least heard back from the company and got some thoughts on how to improve their coding practices.

Join Nele as she shares the statistics from the results and the lessons learned, encouraging other companies to also approach hiring developers/technical people in a more creative manner.

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