DBA Applicant Screening - Why Grind It When You Can Automate It?
By Nikita Tiwari
The road of hiring a programmer is convoluted and enervating. The frazzled state of recruiters at the finish line down that path is a sight we shudder to think of. Our recent venture down the database lane gave us an opportunity to speak to some of the most established professionals in the sector, and their experiences were an eye-opener.
While conducting recruitment for database professionals, recruiters often grieve the ambiguity that surrounds the process. This ambiguity arises due to factors such as the absence of the purported skillsets or experience, a certification that doesn’t sum up to much at the desk, a lack of practical experience of real-world problems, to name a few.
The most common laments across organizations are a lack of understanding of basic functionalities & concepts and their hands-on knowledge. After a strenuous recruitment process, most companies spend extensive amounts of time and resources training their new recruits. These training periods often last for six months but are also known to have gone up to a year.
If only, there was a way to automate prediction of extraordinary database talent!
Keeping in mind the struggles of hiring and training SQL Programmers, and the dire need for thorough efficiency that eventually filter the best database candidates, DoSelect has introduced a breakthrough database assessment feature on its platform that’s synonymous to relief.
No more woes of redundant tables (Who are we? Carpenters?), erroneous JOINS, misused primary keys and the like. From basic concepts to the more advanced and core ones, we’ve got you covered.
But aren’t other assessment engines doing so already?
The industry currently offers anachronistic methodologies. Your means are limited to MCQs, one-word answers, and basic querying.
To keep up with the sector’s growth and increasing level of competencies, our platform now supports two kinds of database assessments:
SELECT Query based - Along with the basic querying, a candidate’s understanding of more involved concepts (for e.g., the types of JOINS) can also be tested over a reasonably large database.
DDL/DML Query based - The incorporation of DDL and DML ensures a thorough learning and an in-depth evaluation. This inclusion renders high flexibility by equipping the assessment teams with a broad range of questions that has the potential to exhaustively test a candidate’s capabilities at creating and manipulating databases.
Our submission engine evaluates the accuracy and sanity of the submitted queries, in parallel. A well-rounded report examines the essential metrics of the candidate’s overall performance, followed by a careful winnowing of their proficiency across different database concepts like JOINS, Conditions, DML, DCL, Clauses, Comparison Operators, etc., each of varying complexity. This ensures that technical hiring managers have a more exhaustive view of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses before getting into an interview.
The proficiency level is measured on the concepts, complexity and time taken to execute an optimized query. Our performance analysis highlights the setting under which the assessment takes place to understand each candidate’s competitive expertise better.
And the pro bonos?
By minimizing the shadow resource’s time involvement, and the resources required to train a recruit, we hope to bring a wave of relief for the recruiters and trainers alike. Our conversations with database engineers reveal that a minimum of 6 to 12 months is spent on training a recruit. What if DoSelect reports eliminate the need to do so because you are already aware of them? Deployment ready candidates, without training costs and time, are a reality now.
Our current release covers MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.
What are your current database hiring blues? Write to us at nikita@doselect.com and we would help you eliminate them in a cost efficient and technically exhaustive manner. In case you want to give these assessments a spin, write to us at hello@doselect.com and we would set up a conversation.
Content Creator at DoSelect, dreamer, and dot-connector between music, every day, and the stars. My existence is constantly realigned by the magic contained within languages and words, the confluence of design and business, the rather familiar tug of unexplored places, portions of science and art that keep floating around our universe - waiting to find us, and coffee. Da da!
