Survey: Tech recruiters are ready to dump CVs, academic requirements

Dive Brief:

Fifty-seven percent of tech recruiters said they definitely or maybe would be willing to remove CVs from their recruitment process for developers, according to a hiring survey conducted by CodinGame and CoderPad in late 2021.
Recruiters also demonstrated an openness to applicants from nonacademic backgrounds, with 39% saying they "regularly" drew from this pool over the past year. Another 41% said they drew from this pool of applicants, but "rarely."
CodinGame and CoderPad gathered responses from 4,000 tech recruiters and 14,000 developers for its survey. Respondents came from across the globe.

Dive Insight:

As recruiters continue to compete for developers in the war for talent, more are approaching their requirements for prospective candidates with flexibility and openness. Recruiters are facing a dire need for talent in 2022, the survey showed, with 35% of recruiters planning to hire more than 50 developers this year, and more than 8% preparing to hire more than 500.

But this embrace of flexibility is about more than needing to fill roles. Improving diversity of hires remains a key goal for many tech organizations, trailing only candidate experience, talent retention and talent pool expansion as an HR priority for 2022, according to the CodinGame and CoderPad survey.

Widening the talent pool could help companies achieve this goal. In a report on diversity in tech released in 2021 by mthree, 51% of respondents said they struggled to recruit diverse entry-level employees, yet 20% of those surveyed said they "exclusively" hire graduates from top colleges, and 29% said they are "more likely" to hire such graduates.

"While the Ivy League schools are actively trying to improve the diversity of their students, young people from certain socio-economic backgrounds are inevitably more represented than others," the mthree report explained.

Responses from developers to the CodinGame and CoderPad survey show many now come from a nontraditional background. Fewer than half (43%) said they learned computer programming in university or engineering school, while 32% said they were self-taught and around 10% followed an online or offline training course outside of their regular education.

"Savvy recruiters who focus on skill-based hiring will be ahead of the game," the hiring report concluded.