Tech Success Without Degrees: Hiring for Skills
Learn how tech firms prioritize skills and revolutionize the hiring process.
Step into tech hiring innovation. By challenging conventional wisdom, Jim Remsik, founder and CEO of Flagrant, prioritizes skills over degrees, reshaping the talent acquisition landscape.
Despite last year’s large layoffs in the tech sector, it’s still difficult to hire and retain people with tech skills. According to Deloitte, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2023, but in that same survey, recruiting talent is a major challenge for half of the companies surveyed and a moderate challenge for 9 out of 10.
According to the US census data, almost half of Americans lack an associate degree, and about one-third lack a bachelor’s, but that doesn’t mean these people lack skills. In technology, especially, the Internet abounds with courses and materials, many of them free, to teach oneself programming, networking, cloud management, and much more. In a world where employers are finding it extremely difficult to hire tech skills, it’s incredibly self-defeating to write off two-thirds of the country just because they don’t have a BA in Computer Science.
I should know. I’m one of those people. In high school, I didn’t really have a path I wanted to follow, and most of my family members were mechanics or factory workers. I did, however, regularly spend my lunch hours in the art room with Mr. Hansen. The guidance counselor asked him for students’ names to participate in a printing apprenticeship, which he suggested. I spent the last year and a half of high school learning a trade. Part of the program was developing digital prepress skills, including learning Adobe Photoshop.
In the early days of the internet, I would visit friends who had gone away to college, and we’d often play local area network (LAN) games in the computer lab. These games were often first-person shooters, but since I struggled with motion sickness, I’d eventually tap out. To pass the time, I’d hop on a chat board and talk to people from all over. Eventually, that led to wanting to share photos of my hobbies — particularly my hobby of working on cars — with my online friends, and, through trial and error and online reading, I learned that sharing the photo required placing it on an Internet server. That was the catalyst that led me down the career path I’m currently on.
Learning to Program and My First Tech Job
Once I had successfully placed pictures of my car online, I saw other people sharing pages they had made with photo galleries and other information about their hobbies. Wanting to do the same, I started to learn basic HTML and CSS, the building blocks of creating a web page. But I wasn’t satisfied with a static page. So I taught myself Javascript to enable interactivity with people who visited my site. Eventually, I wanted visitors to be able to send me an email from the page, which led to copying and pasting code and scripts from Matt’s CGI Script Archive so that I could create a form for that purpose. By day, I was cutting out objects from their backgrounds and pasting them into catalogs, and by night, I was learning to use the same tools to build more interesting web pages.
One day, my wife said, “Hey! There’s a job in the classified section that mentions all those letters you talk about,” meaning HTML, CSS, JS, and so on. It was a position with the Dane County government for a webmaster. I had plenty of samples showing what I could do from the personal websites I’d built, so I applied, interviewed, and, one day later, was told that they wanted to hire me. Unfortunately, the county had just instituted a hiring freeze, which meant they couldn’t bring on anyone new for the foreseeable future. So, I went back to my trade job, which, at this time, had me mostly doing manual labor.
Nine months later, I got a call out of the blue, and it was the interviewer from the county, who asked if I was still interested in the position. I confirmed some of the details, put my notice in with my employer at the time, and embarked on my first job in the tech industry.
Look at Skills, Not the Degree
The idea that I took a different path didn’t have the bona fides that followed me as I spent the next two decades coding, building web applications, and, eventually, founding multiple custom software consultancies. Even now, 20+ years into my career, I still sometimes wonder if I would be overlooked for my lack of schooling.
But I know from my own experience — and from hiring other coders — that the paper you receive from an organization is rarely an indicator of whether or not you will be successful.
I have absolutely hired people with an English or Communications major over someone with a CS degree because they not only had the hard skills I was looking for — examples of coding in Ruby on Rails, javascript, and other languages — but also were able to write, communicate and work effectively with team members and clients. At its core, software is about communication, and it’s more important that candidates can understand and translate information from one person (such as a client) into something that both computers and other developers can understand.
Hiring in Practice
We design software products, mostly using Ruby on Rails, for clients who need the products to work as expected. We’re not a giant firm. We have about 20 people, all of whom work remotely and are experienced developers and designers. While we can and do train people up on the job, we need skilled people who can hit the ground running.
While it’s hard to find the right people, there’s also no shortage of applicants. We recently had 219 applications for two positions — a senior UI/UX and a product manager — come in over a four-day weekend, which included Christmas. We take a team approach to hiring and, for the first time, used an applicant tracking system, which helped a great deal in managing the process.
There are two basic questions we ask of every applicant:
- Introduce yourself to the team by telling us a bit about yourself and why you’re interested,
- describe some work you’ve done of which you are proud.
These questions get at what’s most important to us, helping us understand the kind of work they are capable of doing and what they take pride in, and how they will adapt to or grow our company’s unique culture. Any of us could be successful one-off consultants, but we care too much about working closely with other people to do that. We also know that we can go further by working together.
A small team of employee members reviewed and ranked the applications using a five-star scale to determine the nine we wanted to bring to a phone interview conducted by the CEO and another senior member of the team. Here, our questions were slightly different.
For the Senior UI/UX design candidates, we requested a portfolio of published work and asked:
- How do you collaborate with cross-functional teams?
- Can you describe a situation where you had to advocate for user needs in design work?
For product managers:
- Can you describe a time you had to manage the disappointment of a major stakeholder?
- How have you resolved an issue without management getting involved?
Again, these are critical skills for our business, more fundamental, even, than technical skills. Obviously, the latter are important, but we’ll hire someone who is perhaps less experienced in Ruby on Rails but has the “soft” skills we need. We know that someone who is a Ruby on Rails guru but doesn’t know how to collaborate with others effectively is unlikely to fit into our culture because everyone needs to work very closely with each other and with our clients.
Also, we’re not a top-down organization. Our firm, Flagrant, is built on trust, and we need people who can make informed decisions independently. The user is paramount. We pride ourselves on understanding the customer’s voice and real needs and building solutions that address them.
After phone interviews, we identified two or three final candidates and conducted a full team interview. That’s important to me, because I want candidates to see who they’ll be interacting with so they can judge whether this is a place where they can be successful and happy. We get feedback from the team in an anonymous survey, and then have a small group make the final decision. The entire process takes about one month from initial submission review to making an offer.
See More: Centralized Candidate Hubs: The Future Of Seamless Interviews
Advantages of This Process
One of the biggest advantages of this process is that it involves the entire company. This is not practical for larger organizations, but I believe it’s important for the people with whom the candidate will be working to be involved in the process, both for the sake of the organization and the candidates. Also, this process enables us to assess fundamental skills, which some people call “soft skills.” These skills, which include effective communication, critical thinking, adaptability,and the ability to collaborate — are essential to success at our company. These skills are difficult to train, and they have the largest impact on our business. We don’t care about their degree or lack of a degree. We care about skills, hard and foundational (i.e., soft).
In 2024, when it’s hard to find the skills tech organizations need, it makes no sense to have degree requirements. Hire for skills, not degrees, and make sure your hires have not just the hard technical ones but also the foundational skills to succeed as part of a team.
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