The Ultimate Technical Recruiting Cheat Sheet

No matter how many years of experience you’ve got as an HR leader, recruiting developers can sometimes be daunting.

If you come from a non-technical background, chances are you’ll have to spend a lot of time deciphering the jargon and acing your hiring strategy.

One recent Indeed survey found that as many as 9 out of 10 HR professionals say they find it challenging to find and recruit technical talent, with over a third of them saying they find it “very” challenging.

Although getting up to speed on all the programming languages, frameworks, and tools that software developers and their teams use can demand a fair amount of time, knowing commonly used, crucial terminology can prove to be a huge advantage when it comes to speeding up your hiring process.

This is where a cheat sheet comes in handy!

With several years of experience as a healthcare IT recruitment agency, we’ve created a highly informative technical recruiting cheat sheet that can take your recruiting efforts to the next-level and help you land the best tech candidates in a considerably shorter period of time.

But before that, let us get to understand:

Why do You Need a Technical Recruiting Cheat Sheet?

As the term itself suggests, a technical recruiting cheat sheet is nothing but a compilation of the different concepts and terms that a hiring manager needs to keep in mind when recruiting for a technical role.

A good hiring cheat sheet features various essential components such as:

  • definitions of any specialized positions,
  • knowledge about coding language and framework requirements from the candidate’s end, and
  • knowledge about necessary skill sets when hiring for a particular role.

You get to see this information in a at-a-glance, simple format that enables tech recruiters and hiring managers to determine how to attract top talent and whether the potential candidates they’re eyeing will be a good fit for their company.

A technical recruiting cheat sheet can also help you pinpoint critical information swiftly, accelerating the speed of the selection process, and get into greater depth with the candidates who show promising career graphs.

Some other benefits of the technical recruiting cheat sheet are:

  • Improved clarity and precision when formulating job descriptions,
  • Enhanced knowledge of the tech world,
  • Being able to better screen and test potential hires for job suitability,
  • Greater understanding of industry standards to judge a potential candidate’s overall competitiveness,
  • A handy and readily accessible compilation of the technical skills necessary to streamline recruitment processes.

Now that you have a brief idea about why exactly you need a cheat sheet for hiring tech talent in the first place, let us look at:

A Detailed Technical Recruiting Cheat Sheet

Area of Expertise: Front End and UX

Technical Role Technical Skills Needed as per Industry Standards
.NET Developer C#, ASP, ASP.NET, VB.NET
Cocoa Developer/ OSX Developer Applescript, Apple, Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Objective C, Objective C++, iOS, OS X, Xcode
Flash Developer Flash, ActionScript
Front End Developer Ajax, ASP, ActionScript, CoffeeScript, Flash, CSS, HTML, HTML5, JQuery, JavaScript
Interactive Developer CSS, HTML, XHTML, Ajax, JavaScript, PHP
Rails Developer Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby-HTML
Windows Developer C, C#, C++, ASP, .NET, Windows
SharePoint Developer ASP.NET, Ajax, CSS, C#, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, SharePoint, Windows Server, VB.NET, XML, XSL

Area of Expertise: Back End

Technical Role Technical Skills Needed as per Industry Standards
Back End Developer Java, C#, Python, PHP, Ruby
Business Intelligence Analyst Business Intelligence, BI, C++, C, C#, Cognos, Java, ETL, jQuery, Objective-C, R, SQL

SAS, SSAS, SSRS, SSIS, Visual Basic, SAPUI5-CSS, HTML5, CSS3, OData, JavaScript

Dynpro, Dynpro-ABAP

Data Mining Python, Perl
Data Engineer C, C++, HBase, Cassandra, Java, HDFS, Ruby, Puppet, Scala
Linux/Unix Proficient Developers Debian, AWK, Emacs Fedora, Linux, Linux-Kernel, Unix, vi, vim, RHEL

Shell Scripting: Bourne Shell, Bash, C Shell, Korn

Scripting: Python, PHP, Perl

Machine Learning/ Recommender Engines Perl, Python, R, Java, Weka
Oracle Developer .NET, ASP, SQL

Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, RDBMS

SAP Developer C++, COBOL, ABAP, mySAP, ERP, SAP, Netweaver, JAVA
Site Reliability Engineer Authorization/Authentication, HTTP, Cloud, Linux/Unix, Network Design, SQL, Security, performance, and disaster recovery, TCP/IP, SSL

(Languages will vary as per organizational demands)

Software Architect Agile, .NET, API, Ant, C++, Cassandra, CouchDB, CORS, HTTP, Git, Maven, Java, MySQL, Mongo, Oracle, MVC, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Redis, SDK, SOA, Teradata, Unit-testing, Websocket

(Requirements will vary by search on languages, company, frameworks most commonly used, APIs, databases, tools, etc.)

Area of Expertise: Big Data

Technical Role Technical Skills Needed as per Industry Standards
Big Data Engineer Cloud Computing, Cassandra, HBase, Hadoop, Mongo, MapReduce
Data Engineer C, C++, Cassandra, HBase, Java, HDFS, Ruby, Puppet, Scala
Data Mining Python, Perl
Oracle Developer .NET, ASP, SQL

Databases: Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDBMS

Machine Learning/ Recommender Engines Perl, Python, Java, Weka, R
Platforms Infrastructure C, C++, Cassandra, Go, HDFS, Java, HTTP, MySQL

Area of Expertise: Mobile

Technical Role Technical Skills Needed as per Industry Standards
All Mobile Development Memory-management, Event-handling, Multithreading
Android Developer HTML5, C, C++, Linux, Java
iOS Developer C, Cocoa, LUA, HTML5, Objective-C
Blackberry Developer C, C++, Java, HTML5, Cascades, QT
OS X Developer Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Objective-C++, Objective-C, Xcode, OS X
Web Developer ASP, Ajax, CSS, CoffeeScript, HTML, JavaScript, JRuby, JQuery, Ruby on Rails, Ruby, PHP
Ruby on Rails Developer Ruby on Rails, Ruby, Ruby-HTML
Interactive Developer CSS, Ajax, JavaScript, HTML, XHTML, PHP
.NET Developer ASP.NET, ASP, C#, VB.NET

Area of Expertise: Quality Assurance

Technical Role Technical Skills Needed as per Industry Standards
Software Release Engineer/ Build Release Engineer/ Gatekeeper Scripts: Python, Perl, Maven, TCL, Shell

Repository Tools: Git, ClearCase, SVN (Subversion), Perforce

Languages: C++, OO languages

Build tools: Ant, Aardvark, Hudson, Gradle, Jenkins, Mave, Make

This comprehensive technical recruiting cheat sheet will definitely help you gauge your potential candidates’ skills in a more detailed manner and get the best talent toward your organization within no time.

If you wish to learn more about what you can do to stay on top of your game and build a strong, result-oriented team of tech talent that helps maximize your recruitment ROI, and minimize your time-to-hire and cost-per-hire, get in touch with us at BenchPoint today!

We will be happy to guide you with your smallest queries related to technical recruitment.