Recruitment

Prestigious media company looking for person to fill software engineer/web developer role. The successful applicant will be an expert with at least 10 years experience in each of the following technologies: C, C++, PHP, Java, HTML, Javascript, CSS, XML, XSLT, Apache, Unix, Linux, Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Perl….

Salary £18,000 pa

There was a London Java Community mailing list discussion a week or so ago about the recruitment process for Java developers, recruiters expectations and requirements for candidiates and whether these were the best approach for finding the most appropriate person for the job.

We discussed the approaches that taken by recruiters to try to find the correct person for the job but it seems that all too often it falls down to knowledge in certain technologies. For example, has the candidate got experience  Spring, Hibernate, JiBX, Tomcat, Java, XML, XSLT…and so on (see the above job description!).

But the fact of the matter is, these are just technologies. Any decent enough techie will be able to pick up a good working knowledge of any of those things within a pretty short period of time. Being a skilled developer does not equal having a long list of technologies on your C.V. The skills are abilities that the developer has honed through previous development experience. For example, the ability to:

• Hold large amounts of information in their mind at one time
• Work through the information, make sense of it…
• Pick up new technologies with minimum effort
• Manage their time well, to best prioritise their work load
• Proactively identify potential issues with design and implementation
• Bring new/innovative approaches to the table
• Choose the most appropriate techniques, approaches and technologies to the project
• To integrate well with the existing team

“Woah, hang on a minute”, I hear you cry, “If they don’t know the difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer then there is no way I can take them on.”

Really? Can’t they just Google it?

“Well, I mean, I suppose, but if they don’t know whether the escape character is forward slash or back slash!”

Oh, well, ya know, the IDE will probably tell them. Usefully makes the text go bold or something.

Ok ok, enough. Lets be serious. You don’t want an £18k/£30k/£40k+ a year compiler. You can download it for free off the Sun website. You also don’t want a £18k/£30k/£40k+ a year reference manual for Spring or Hibernate.

But you do want the best person for the job, and so recruiters need to address better ways of identifying the higher skilled candidiates. Whether that is a programming challenge in a “real life” environment, or a team work challenge, I don’t know. But let’s face it, Brain Bench or whatever it’s called and annoying questions to try and trip the candidate up can’t be the right way forward. Throw them in the bin!

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m just way off the mark here and if that’s the case, then please comment and let me know what you think!