Top MUST-Have Skills Recruiters Look For While Hiring Tech Talent

Most of us ponder what people generally mean by the ‘essential skills’ required to get hired. In Wealth of Words, the famous Indian mentalist and illusionist Amit Kalantri mentions that schooling doesn’t assure employment, but skills do. In this article, we will discuss the top must-have skills recruiters look for while hiring tech talent. We’ll cover the importance of communication and collaboration, the value of problem-solving, and the need for technical expertise.

The list of required skills is not written in stone and different job roles ask for different abilities. While some life skills are essential across all domains, recruiters need to be careful when hiring for niche job roles like web developers and other tech experts.

Programmers must possess a diverse set of abilities to carry out their responsibilities with utmost professionalism. The most effective programmers should be able to use a key mix of strategies to combine their knowledge, aptitude, and technical capability with soft skills such as working as part of a team and communicating well with others.

This article discusses the most crucial programming and non-programming abilities that recruiters look for while hiring tech talent.

Essential Programming Skills for the Right Tech Talent

Usually, computer programming abilities are a mix of creativity with technical and analytical components.

Programming skills, also known as hard skills, refer to measurable abilities that the aspirants develop over time through practice or study. Here are some of the essential programming skills that recruiters look for before hiring tech talents:

1. Proficiency with programming languages

While selecting tech talents, recruiters look for individuals capable of creating game-changing products, who truly excel in the field and possess more knowledge of coding languages.

This is because code is written in various programming languages such as SQL, Java, C++, or Python. Programmers are not expected to be fluent in every programming language available. Still, it is advantageous to hire candidates fluent in at least two languages to work on multiple projects and meet the client’s demands.

2. Full-stack Developers

Full-stack developers are software specialists who can work on both the front-end and back-end of a website. The professionals are familiar with the majority of programming languages and can assist you in bringing your minimal viable product to market as quickly as possible.

Recruiters look for such professionals as they execute agile projects with skill and proficiency, investing all their years of experience to attain the best product.

3. Ability to translate learnings to achieve real-world solutions

There is a reason why recruiters across the globe put emphasis on “projects” in their resume. A portfolio of practical projects shows that the candidate was able to solve real-world problems in the past.

Think of it this way, what would happen if an employee has vast theoretical knowledge but does not know how to understand a client’s brief or apply their learning to industry(real-life) projects?

This is why recruiters look for individuals who can tackle industry(real-life) problems using critical thinking and the provided material in the given time frame.

4. Mathematical skills

Mathematics is fundamental behind how the world moves to all of man’s modern engineering marvels. In the world of tech, maths and logic drive the syntax of every successful code used by programmers to create complex applications. A programmer’s performance is severely impeded if they don’t have a fundamental knowledge of maths.

So in general, recruiters look for programmers who have a solid knowledge of algebra and arithmetic.

5. Analytical skills 

This is almost as important as the number of programming languages the candidate knows. This is because day in and day out, they will be required to analyze the brief, the problems, and the path to solving them.

Recruiters need to hire coders with an eye for detail too. Apart from great coders, the ideal candidate should have good editing skills to avoid syntax errors and promote code efficiency.

Essential Non-Programming Skills for Tech-talent

The non-programming skills, also called soft skills, help potential candidates integrate into a workplace or collaborate effectively with others. Here are some of the essential non-programming skills that recruiters look for while hiring tech talents:

1. Teamwork

Being able to function in a group smoothly and efficiently is what teamwork is all about. The ability to motivate and inspire other team members to perform better as well as the emotional intelligence to understand their behavior, actions, and responses is essential to this.

The majority of recruiters place great value on teamwork. They seek individuals who can contribute multiple talents and ideas.

Recruiters use situational judgment tests to assess how a candidate would behave in situations requiring teamwork. CVs or application forms usually serve as a first indication of an applicant’s ability to work with others.

2. Problem-solving capability

Careers like engineering, scientific research, and technology require solving problems and finding solutions. These are the skills that set excellent software developers apart from others.

Recruiters have begun to include competency-based applications and questions to check the problem-solving skills of the applicants. Some examples of these questions should be as follows:

• Give me an example of a time when you ran into a problem on a project. What did you do?
• Have you ever disagreed with a member of your team? How did it get resolved?

They are all challenges that students must know how to address. Even the tiniest flaws can cause software difficulties, and programmers spend a lot of their time debugging rather than building code.

Hence, many software engineering jobs require the ability to identify software faults and solve them using deductive reasoning.

3. Communication skills

Software engineers, in general, do not operate in a vacuum; many communicate with coworkers and clients. Hence, communication skills are a top priority for industry employers.

Trust me, you wouldn’t like hearing a potential candidate say, “Oh! I did fix the bug but don’t know how I did it.”

One of the crucial characteristics of a good programmer is the ability to explain something technical or complex to a layperson. Recruiters search for various communication abilities to assure that the chosen applicant can handle the tasks and communicate in multiple settings.

4. Time management

Time management is a crucial skill to look at while hiring top candidates because it influences the project’s outcome the company is working on.

Besides, let’s be honest, no one likes a late project!

Most projects in the workplace are collaborative. Thus, programmers and other experts need to collaborate to give a quality product to the client. So, time management not only affects employee performance and impacts the operational procedures and accomplishments of other employees too.

Looking to Hiring Tech Talent? Hire a SuperCoder

Knowing how to code is indeed a trending and viable career option today.

CodeQuotient’s SuperCoders Program aims to prepare students with all the necessary skills required to perform the front and back-end tasks. The focus is- setting up a strong foundation of technical skills with real-time mentoring, deep analytics, and community-based learning with chosen students.

The program also helps budding programmers improve their coding efficiency.

At CodeQuotient, we are solving the hiring tech talent shortage by preparing the top students from colleges to become highly valuable tech professionals.

We hope these essential skills will help you select the most suitable candidates and recruit top tech talents. If you want to know more about CodeQuotient’s SuperCoders who have all the above-mentioned skills, get in touch now.