Just when you thought you knew what tech employers were looking for in a job candidate, along came 2020. Now, a deadly virus is on the loose, protests—sometimes riots—have broken out and a reality TV star is president of the U.S.
Now here you are, applying for jobs with this going on out your window. Am I the only one who could see this as the setup for a Far Side comic?
So clearly it’s safe to trash all our assumptions about how the tech job market works, since we’re trashing all assumptions about how anything and everything work in this almost-Mad Max world.
I was recently in the tricky position of feeling out what qualities to look for in a job candidates to fill two part time positions in our company. In the past, we at WP Code Camp hired only people we could talk to in person. We did experiment by hiring a remote marketing person once, and he did a great job. But despite these positive results, we just drifted back to hiring in person.
That’s no longer an option. I have a pile of resumes and cover letters to review, and I’m not sure what I should be looking for. Pre-pandemic, personality and other nonverbal cues were important to me: Did the candidate show up to the interview on time? Did they dress nicely? Do they speak articulately? Were they easy to get along with? Would they mix well with our culture?
These days, most of that is either unknowable or moot. How can I tell whether a candidate presents themselves well on a Zoom call? Does it matter how well they’d fit into our culture when we’ll primarily be communicating via email?
I wondered whether I was the only one facing this dilemma, so I talked to more than a dozen other employers in the tech industry about what they’re looking for in 2020 that they weren’t in 2019. Here is what they said.
