Why a ‘Deep Jobs’ Platform is a Better Choice for Companies and Remote Job Seekers

Great employees are a must, not only for building big companies but also for keeping organizations competitive in the market. But as anyone who has ever had to hire for important roles would agree, hiring remote talent often feels like a gamble. 

While the use of traditional job boards in the hiring process is undeniable, recruiters and candidates increasingly feel that these platforms’ mere act of matchmaking is not yielding the desired results.

The covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the inherent flaws and the shallow nature of traditional job platforms. Millions of talented people are now finding themselves in jobs (if they are lucky enough to have one), where they are both underutilized and under-compensated. Firms are also facing difficulty hiring quality talent since hundreds of thousands of skilled workers have gone remote.

In such a scenario, the whole idea of a traditional CV and job listing platform looks outdated, and the need for a ‘deep jobs’ platform is now more critical than ever. 

So what is a deep jobs platform?

Traditional job listing platforms offer a digital equivalent to a CV that gives only a few key points about the candidate. They also provide little to no help in vetting and retaining the ideal candidate. Their offering stops at the mutual discovery of companies and prospective employees. 

As the name suggests, a deep jobs platform goes deep into the hiring process and addresses the various stages associated with it. It offers a higher value proposition to interested employers and job seekers by providing customized products and services. It does so by creating highly enriched candidate profiles with the right signals/indicators for recruiters and managers. A deep jobs platform also offers support across critical stages of the employment journey like vetting, onboarding, payments, etc. Post-match, a deep jobs platform, like Turing, may even offer support services like time tracking, performance monitoring, and communication tools, among others, to ensure high productivity and transparency for customers and employees.

The remote hiring challenge in tech

For technology companies, recruiting skilled talent is difficult as thousands of firms compete to hire from the same limited local pool of skilled developers. The scarcity of top-level talent in the market makes retention a big problem, too. 

And with so many organizations chasing so few developers, hiring becomes costly. These hiring challenges hit companies from the Bay Area and New York, especially hard since it has become prohibitively expensive to hire top IT professionals. The problem of recruiting top talent has become so huge that now 65% of technology leaders believe it is hurting the industry.

So, to solve the above problems of hiring, retention, and cost, many firms are looking for remote developers. But hiring the right team of offshore developers can be tricky, particularly when most of the recruiters rely on a traditional resume to source candidates. 

According to Turing.com co-founder and CEO Jonathan Sidharth, companies usually struggle with three things while trying to hire remotely distributed teams. 

He says, “first, it’s really hard to find high-quality remote talent. Second, it’s extremely difficult to evaluate and vet remote talent to figure out who’s the right match for your company. And finally, how do you manage and operate a distributed team after you found the right team?”

Jonathan and Turing co-founder Vijay Krishnan faced all these problems while building their previous start-up, Rover, out of Stanford in 2007-08. They found they had to cast a wider net to recruit talent after realizing that start-ups like theirs couldn’t compete with giant Bay Area companies like Google and Facebook to recruit the people they needed. But, after they decided to run Rover via remotely distributed teams, they found that the CVs on job portals were of little help for remote-first companies that needed to hire quality offshore developers. 

Jonathan explains the problem of the traditional CVs by giving the following two examples. 

A Silicon Valley company might feel comfortable with a computer science graduate’s academic credentials from any of the Ivy League universities. But the same organization may be clueless while hiring a remote Nigerian developer, seeing an institute, which might very well be the Stanford of Nigeria, on his/her resume.

Similarly, a US-based company might not doubt an ex-Googler’s caliber because everybody knows Google and the vetting process it implements to hire quality developers. But, what’s the Google of Rio? Most of us don’t know.

In other words, companies will have little idea about the real skills and qualifications of remote developers through a traditional CV as it won’t tell them enough about the foreign schools and companies.

What solutions does a deep jobs platform like Turing provide?

Jonathan and Vijay understood the importance and need for a deep jobs platform to provide in-depth developer profiles, a rigorous vetting process, and management solutions for modern-day hiring problems. So, after the acquisition of Rover in 2017 by Revcontent for close to $30mn, the duo decided to build something new based on their prior experience, and Turing was born.

Turing’s approach is a vertically-integrated solution that replaces traditional IT service company offerings with an AI-based platform. It connects the top 1% of remote developers with the best US and Silicon Valley firms. 

Unlike a traditional jobs board, a deep jobs platform like Turing doesn’t stop at just matchmaking.  It goes beyond that and solves multiple problems for both companies and candidates during the hiring process.

• Deep Sourcing and Profile Creation: A deep jobs platform such as Turing goes deep into the global talent pool to find the best candidate. It creates an impactful profile that lists out the skills and potential of a developer. These deeper profiles help match companies and candidates according to their requirements and skill-sets, respectively.

• Rigorous Vetting: When a human reviews a resume, there are inherent biases that exist. But a deep jobs platform like Turing implements a color and gender-blind vetting algorithm to select the best candidates meticulously. Turing evaluates top candidates by testing their expertise, experience, performance on scientifically-designed coding challenges and interviews. 
• Matching and Onboarding: An AI/ML-powered deep jobs platform like Turing not only matches companies with the right developers but also helps onboard them. The onboarding process addresses the vital concept of culture fit. Employees fitting into the existing culture of companies exhibit superior job performance. They are more satisfied and also less likely to leave the company.
• Collaboration Tools: On the management side, Turing provides tools and protocols to address the challenges of managing remote teams. The Turing Workspace and Turing Virtual Machine do it all for the companies from tracking hours to enabling check-ins and standups to security.

• Payments processing: The payments are entirely handled by Turing, making it easy for both the organizations and job seekers.
• Risk-free trial: Turing is so sure about its selection process that it lets companies pay after two weeks of the free trial if they are satisfied with the developer’s quality.
• Community: Since remote work doesn’t give developers the atmosphere of a physical office, where they bump into their colleagues now and then, many workers might feel lonely. Turing understands this well and hence provides a sense of community to world-class developers. Having a community not only helps developers connect and grow but also creates long-term value for them.

Deep jobs platform in a remote-first world

With studies predicting more and more people shifting to remote work, companies must have the best possible offshore talent on board to stay ahead in an ever-changing tech market. In such a scenario, a deep jobs platform with its deep developer profiles emerges as a better choice for companies and remote job seekers. It enables them to go genuinely boundaryless.

“Talent in the cloud working from anywhere beats talent restricted to a single city. People have a better quality of life. Companies have a larger, more diverse talent pool. Why does your team need to live where your office is headquartered?” says Jonathan.

Turing’s expertise in the remote developer arena will iron out many of the problems that organizations could face while hiring and retaining top remote engineers in this ‘highly uncertain’ period.

If you’re a developer looking for the best remote US jobs or an organization planning to hire remote silicon valley caliber candidates, try Turing’s deep jobs platform for yourself today.