If you need to hire a new programmer, software engineer, or computer scientist, it may be time to rethink your Ivy League degree requirement. Despite soaring unemployment in many job categories, unemployment rates for tech jobs have actually dropped (to 2.5%) since the pandemic started.
With college costs skyrocketing and most classes going virtual, more coding enthusiasts are likely to take their education into their own hands. And they have lots of options to choose from.
Kahn Academy, Code Academy, Code.org, and dozens of other virtual learning sites and bootcamps offer free or cheap ways to learn how to code, giving a generation of kids a fast- track to coding careers while they remain socially distanced.
And chances are when they complete their self-led education, employers will be fighting to hire them.
Five years ago, that would have been a ludicrous statement to make. Companies have historically included a four-year degree from a top university as a minimum requirement for hiring tech experts. That left many brilliant self-taught programmers struggling to find work, regardless of their impressive talents.
But in the past two years, the tech industry has changed its point of view on the value of the self-taught whiz kid. In 2018, both Google and Apple announced that they no longer required four-year degrees from their hires. IBM, Oracle, Facebook, Pinterest, and other major software companies quickly followed suit.
“There’s a growing emphasis on skills over school as they compete for top talent,” Laura Lorenzetti, an editor at LinkedIn told MarketWatch about this trend “Companies are taking experience as seriously as a four-year college degree.”
That experience may be a better measure of their future success.
In an environment where continuous learning is a requirement of the job, self-taught programmers offer proof that they are passionate about their education. These hires didn’t just go through the motions of completing a four-year degree. Every hour they spent online, learning a new coding language, or solving programming challenges, was driven by their own ambition and desire to learn. That’s a valuable asset in a world where the latest coding skillset is obsolete in a few years.
Opening your recruiting process to these candidates also makes it easier to find and hire more diverse candidates with great skills.
The trick for recruiters is figuring out how to draw these candidates into their pipeline, and to vet them fairly against candidates with four-year degrees. To do that, they have to change the entire vetting process. Here’s how:
Once you stop assuming great programmers only come from top-notch universities you’ll immediately expand your talent pool and uncover great people with a lot of passion for their work.