Executive recruitment company Monroe Consulting Group's Technology Division is offering free technical testing of job candidates it submits to corporate clients as part of moves to further strengthen its recruitment process and place the best candidates in the best jobs.
Monroe Consulting Group is a multiple international-award winning recruitment company that specialises in emerging markets around the world, including Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, China, Chile and Mexico. Technology and information technology (IT) is just one of the areas in which the company operates, as well as banking, finance and insurance, industry, consumer goods and the health industries.
Monroe Group Managing Director Andrew Hairs said recruitment consultants operating in the technology sector often heard complaints from leading companies about the frustrations they had experienced due to shortages in programmers and developers to fill key roles, and the processes involved in finding the right people who were adequately qualified.
One of the most common issues that was brought to Monroe’s attention was that too much time was wasted interviewing candidates who lacked the necessary technical abilities, such as programming abilities, to take on certain jobs, Mr Hairs said.
“It is for these reasons that Monroe has committed to providing the option of free technical testing of all the candidates we submit to our corporate clients through our recruitment processes,” he said. “The technical tests are completed online through the Codility service, one of the world’s leading code-assessment platforms. Every individual profile submitted to our clients will come complete with a CV, consultant interview notes and a detailed technical report from Codility.”
Mr Hairs said that by requiring that candidates undergo technical testing, Monroe was able to reduce the time companies wasted interviewing candidates without the required capabilities or desire to change employers, adding that the testing would incur no additional costs.
Codility executive Mary Petrie said the comprehensive solution for finding, testing and assessing programmers reduced the amount of time spent evaluating and screening technical candidates. Codility could help build unique assessments from the company’s constantly evolving pool of programming tasks, or create new tests based on job descriptions and internal screening requirements, she said.
“With nearly 1,500 clients from industries ranging from financial to gaming, Codility has provided more than 2.5 million assessments of programmers globally,” she said. “The Codility platform has been able to empower recruiters during their hiring process to sift through and find the best coders, quickly.”
Ms Petrie said the Codility platform would help Monroe locate programmers with superior coding abilities and provide detailed insights into the processes that each developer used in order to solve tasks.
“With an assessment solution such as the Codility platform that is able to evaluate both the performance and correctness of candidates, Monroe will continue to maintain its position as a market leader in locating top-tier technology talent in emerging markets,” she said. “Corporate clients will benefit from Monroe's enhanced services through the overall streamlining of the hiring process. This will allow for the more efficient use of time and money and screen out applicants that are unable to perform the tasks needed for the position.”
Mr Hairs said he believed the free testing would be particularly attractive to companies that had already implemented technical testing but were looking to reduce the costs of the process, or start-ups and smaller companies that were yet to build programming skills tests into their recruitment processes.
In addition, Mr Hairs continued, there were a range of advantages for candidates who sit the tests “as they will be able to benchmark their skills against an international programming community.” “Also, including a test score along with your CV will greatly increase the chances of a candidate securing an interview,” he said.