Waste less time hiring JavaScript developers

Here's two problems I think you have:

• Candidates with keyword-laden CVs that turn out to be complete flops and waste everyone's time
• Missing great candidates because they had CVs that didn't highlight the experience you care about

At CareersJS we use what we call the "rescue questions" to deal with both. If a CV comes in and has the right keywords but doesn't quite convincingly bring them to life, or if a CV comes in and we think the candidate might be relevant but we don't have the information we need to make a decision, we have a solution.

Get your recruiter to send applicants a five question questionnaire whenever you get a CV that isn't an immediate knock-out.

We've found five questions to be the sweet spot in terms of candidates taking the time to respond, and drawing out the relevant answers we need. Here's two of the five we like to use:

What's your experience with creating automated tests? Please describe testing libraries you've used for both unit tests, and deeper integration tests, including anything exotic or interesting you might have used like Cucumber. Write a line or two with what you've used, what you used it for, and what you liked or didn't like about it

and

Which deployment systems have you used to get your code live? Examples might be Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, or some home-grown Docker container builder. Write a line or two with what you've used, what you used it for, and what you liked or didn't like about it

We've found this can shave the first hour from most interviews, means you only talk to people with the actual experience you care about, and gives you a whole reservoir of things to talk about in the interview itself. We've made placements before where we've simply ended up discarding the candidate's CV and sending the client the answers to the questions instead.

But, be careful, and don't go overboard. If it's going to take strong candidates more than 5-10 minutes to reply to your email then you're starting to get into technical screening territory, and you might be asking for too much investment from the candidates before you've properly sold them on the role -- recruitment is a two-way sales process, after all.

Now one advantage of being technical people is that we can pick out a set of questions unique to each role we work on however you can get pretty far with some generic JavaScript questions depending on if the role is front-end or back-end focused, and most likely you'll get a great return on investment by cajoling the technical people in your team to come up with questions relevant to your role.

If you're looking to hire JavaScript people and want some help with your questions, feel free to drop me a quick email at pete@careersjs.com, tell us a little bit about your role, and we'll send you an appropriate set from our generic list for free!