Soft Skills in Software: How Technology is Improving the Accuracy of Recruitment for Software Engineers

Tech hiring in the 21st Century has come with plenty of opportunities and challenges. While the age of remote work has made it easier than ever for companies to acquire global talent to better suit job openings, finding the right soft skills and onboarding new hires can seem like a significant hurdle to overcome. 

When recruiting software engineers, it’s essential to use the technology available to engage the most qualified and suitable candidates. 

Particularly when hiring for remote roles, gaining insights into the soft skills of your candidates can be a challenge. However, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are helping to bridge these gaps in the hiring processes to pave the way for the best possible hires for your company. 

With this in mind, let’s take a look at how intelligent tech is enhancing talent acquisition for software engineers: 

Multimedia Recruitment Strategies

When recruiting global talent for remote positions, you should assume that candidates have never heard of your company and have no idea about your workplace culture. Filling this knowledge gap can be difficult, but supporting job descriptions with multimedia can help. 

Creating video advertising to provide in-depth coverage of your workplace culture and business goals helps you showcase your brand comprehensively to candidates, helping to attract prospects who share your ambitions. 

Video content can also work well at recruitment drives and job fairs to help improve candidate engagement with your company. Adapting your video across various channels can also be great for building a recognizable brand online throughout social media and other recruitment websites. 

AI-Assisted Interviews

Even when conducting interviews in a face-to-face environment, accurately charting candidate soft skills can be a difficult task to get right the first time. 

For software engineers, industry-relevant soft skills like the ability to communicate clearly, collaborate, manage time, problem-solve, think critically, and build interpersonal awareness with colleagues are extremely important and hard to monitor at the interview stage. 

Artificial intelligence video interview platforms have helped to bridge soft skill analysis for recruiters, and is a revolutionary technology for tapping into global talent pools. 

AI platforms can use the technology to analyze candidate facial expressions, tone of voice, and even choice of words to assess responses on an interpersonal level to gauge their emotional intelligence and soft skills. 

With this technology, it’s also possible to transcribe interviews to help recruiters to accurately recall key responses without having to sift through hours of video footage. This empowers far greater time efficiency while limiting the risk of overlooking suitable candidates. 

Focusing on Skilled Candidates

Artificial intelligence can also help to offer individialized and highly targeted Employee Value Propositions (EVPs) for each candidate. This can empower you to personalize your outreach and directly target the needs of each prospect you get in touch with. 

This process is made possible by tracking a candidate’s behavior on your website and sending them customized content and messages based on their interpreted interests. 

AI can make headhunting talented candidates far more seamless, and the ability to analyze countless social media profiles instantly can help to improve your recruitment of both passive and active candidates based on factors like their industry, job title, location, experience, and many other skills through job boards like LinkedIn. 

True-to-Life Testing

CVs are useful as an indicator of technical skills among your candidates, but it’s difficult to gauge competencies without a hands-on test and feedback. 

Fortunately, there are a growing number of assessment tools available for software engineers that can test competence in coding ability and other industry-relevant skills that can provide real-world scenarios to overcome. 

Assessment tools like HackerRank and Codility both offer coding tests to help you accurately score your candidates’ competencies. Likewise, IKM Testing offers an assessment environment that you can create yourself, helping to make tests more relevant to your company’s tech stack. 

By including your existing senior developers in the assessment process, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of your candidates’ skill sets and how much onboarding they would need. 

Chatbots to Support Onboarding

Artificial intelligence is also helping to break down troubleshooting issues in remote workplaces for skilled employees. Timely issue resolution is essential for just about any role in a company, and chatbot technology is emerging as a key tool to help organizations deliver immediate assistance to candidates throughout the recruitment and onboarding process in real time. 

This technology doesn’t just enrich the candidate experience but helps to lighten the load for HR reams, allowing them to better prioritize their tasks. 

Thanks to natural language processing (NLP) or even generative AI large-language models (LLMs), chatbots can contextually comprehend candidate inquiries to deliver a seamless recruitment journey that extends throughout the onboarding process. 

Enhancing Talent Acquisition

Software engineers are highly skilled employees that can be challenging to recruit for in-house roles, but the age of remote work has opened the door to a far larger domestic and international talent pool that can improve the recruitment process for many companies. 

While remote hires can make the identification of soft skills in software engineers more difficult, emerging technologies and artificial intelligence are paving the way for more accurate and effective hires across the board. 

By replicating that all-important human touch with multimedia and responsive chatbots, it’s possible to build a conducive recruitment experience for talented prospects while empowering them to showcase their soft skills in a way that can be picked up by AI tools. 

Recruiting for skilled roles can be hard for recruiters, but with the right technology, it’s possible to hire effectively and retain your most suitable candidates for longer.