8 best tech hiring platforms today

Need to find developers fast? Wish you could skip all the hard work that comes with the process - posting the job, reviewing resumes, and trying to figure out who’s a good fit?

If there’s one thing that’s absolutely certain about the traditional hiring process, it's that it’s long and outdated. Sure, it has worked for quite some time, but not anymore.

There are far better ways to hire tech talent than posting job listings, reviewing resumes, and using self-reported claims as the basis for hiring.

For one, you can use a tech hiring platform and skip all that process altogether.

In this guide, I’ll show you the best tech hiring platforms and help you choose the one that fits your needs.

Before we get to the good stuff, though, let’s take a closer look at the concept of a tech hiring platform.

What is a tech hiring platform?

You know - the best way to appreciate the concept of a tech hiring platform is to look at the alternative, the traditional hiring process.

I’m sure you’ve experienced it firsthand many times over. It’s the process of attracting candidates through job listings, ads, or by spreading the word about the position on social media, reviewing their resumes and cover letters, and trying to figure out who’d be a good fit without actually having met them or seeing their work.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a completely flawed system.

But it’s not perfect either.

For one, the process is extremely long and time-consuming. It can be nerve-wracking for you, too.

After all, all you have to work with is the person’s claims about themselves. And as I’m sure you’ve experienced more than once, these claims often don’t match the reality.

Tech hiring platforms help overcome those and many similar issues with the traditional hiring process. They also significantly speed up the path to having new team members contribute to the company’s projects.

So, what are those tech hiring platforms?

Well, when we use this term - tech hiring platform - we refer to a system that gives recruiters access to a vetted pool of candidates to hire.

With a tech hiring platform, instead of attracting potential candidates through listings, ads, and social posts, you search for them in a database of highly qualified and vetted developers.

You, then, shortlist candidates based on real-world projects and their work and reach out and engage the best ones.

IMPORTANT - Note how with a tech hiring platform, you control the entire process. You search for candidates, you review their work, and you engage them. There is no reaching out, waiting for responses, and so on.

Let me show you what it looks like using our platform, Frontend Mentor Hiring.

This is the heart and soul of any tech hiring platform - the search engine.

(Search engine within a tech hiring platform)

This is what you use to find candidates based on different criteria:

• Skills
• Availability and contract type
• Experience levels
• Location (if relevant), and more.

The search engine returns matching profiles, which you can review, view the candidate's projects, review their code, etc., and build a shortlist of the best developers to hire.

(Showcase of candidate projects in their profile.)

The profile also allows you to send the candidate a message and begin the hiring process.

Candidate vetting

Let me draw your attention to my description of tech hiring platforms. I called them “a system that gives recruiters access to a vetted pool of candidates to hire,” and the key part of this is “vetted.”

You see, the most important part of a tech hiring platform is that it contains a database of developers, coders, and other tech candidates. But none of these people are there at random.

In fact, they’ve all been vetted before being accepted onto the platform. As a result, when you search the database, you know these people pass certain criteria.

But, and this is something worth keeping in mind when you review those platforms, not every tech hiring system vets candidates the same way.

• Most such platforms use skills and real-life projects to assess candidates before accepting them. At Frontend Mentor Hiring, for example, our candidates come from our development community. However, for a candidate to be able to create a talent profile, they need to reach a certain threshold. Plus, we rank our results, so that the most competent candidates are towards the top of the results.
• Some platforms, however, review the candidates' resumes and self-reported skills and vet them based on those rather than real-life projects.

Keep this distinction in mind when you’re reviewing the platforms listed below. Full disclosure: both approaches to vetting work. But they differ significantly in terms of the quality of candidates you’ll find on the platform.

Pros and cons of using a tech recruitment platform

Let me run through their pros and cons quickly as the last thing before showing you what the best tech hiring platforms are.

Let’s start with the pros

#1. Direct access to vetted candidates

I know that I’ve mentioned this benefit a couple of times already, but it’s worth repeating.

With a tech hiring platform, you no longer have to wait for candidates to come to you. You actively seek the best ones through the platform’s search engine. And the big benefit of the platform is that it gives you access to that large database of vetted talent.

And it’s a direct access, too. Not only can you find the best candidates on the platform. You can also engage them and start discussing potential employment.

This leads to the next benefit…

#2. A much more efficient hiring process

Tech hiring platforms significantly cut the time it takes to find, review, and hire someone. In fact, with the platform, you can have a list of potential candidates in minutes, have their profiles reviewed equally fast, and start talking to them shortly after.

This stands in direct opposition to the traditional hiring process. In it, you have to wait days, if not weeks, for all the resumes to come in, spend days reviewing them and identifying who fits your criteria (or rely on not-too-ideal tools to do it for you.) And only then can you start engaging the best talent. Unfortunately, at that stage, some of those people might have found work elsewhere, leaving you to start all over again.

#3. A broad spectrum of tech talent

Finally, tech hiring platforms allow you to scale hiring. For one, such a platform would offer a broad spectrum of talent - developers specializing in different stacks, languages, and so on. This means you can easily find candidates for all kinds of projects and positions on a single platform.

However, there are several cons of using these platforms, too

#1. Some platforms can get expensive

Some tech recruitment platforms charge a monthly fee. Others charge you per candidate or hire.

The monthly fee is usually lower and allows you to scale operations at a cost. But the one-time fee (or done-for-you fee) can be quite expensive sometimes.

My recommendation is that you evaluate which pricing model would work best for you: a monthly fee or a one-time (but higher) price per candidate.

#2. The steep learning curve on some platforms

Similarly, not all such platforms are easy to use. Granted, tools like Frontend Mentor Hiring have been designed to be as simple and intuitive to use as possible.

However, some other platforms take a different approach, requiring you to jump through some hurdles to get the system to work.

Luckily, most platforms offer some form of trial so you can evaluate their functionality before signing up.

So, with all the background information out of the way, let’s review the best tech hiring platforms.

8 best tech hiring platforms for modern recruiters

#1. Frontend Mentor Hiring

Frontend Mentor Hiring (disclaimer—this is our platform) is a tech hiring platform built on top of Frontend Mentor, a highly successful developer learning platform.

The learning platform has over 850K registered users, many of whom seek job opportunities. Our hiring platform helps companies discover top talent within our large Frontend Mentor community.

What’s important about our hiring platform is that we require members of the learning community to reach a certain level of points before they’re eligible to create the talent profile.

As a result, any candidates you find on the platform have been vetted and proved themselves by working on actual projects.

Ideal for: Hiring early-career developers

Job types offered: Freelance, full-time, remote

Vetting process:

• Real-life projects completed as part of the Frontend Mentor community
• Project-based assessments

Looking to hire early-career developers? Check out Frontend Mentor Hiring, a developer hiring platform where you search for and hire based on real-life skills rather than self-reported claims.

#2. LinkedIn Talent Solutions

It may seem a little cheeky to include LinkedIn on this list. It is not a tech hiring platform per se, after all. But LinkedIn offers some capabilities to search for and engage candidates. Plus, given its popularity, any list of tech hiring platforms would be incomplete without it.

Having said that, I have to point out LinkedIn’s shortcomings when compared to other platforms on this list.

For one, LinkedIn does not vet developers in any way. It does offer you a way to search for the best talent but you need to qualify those candidates yourself.

Finding candidates with LinkedIn Talent Search does take time, too. In fact, I’d say it’s the most time-consuming platform on my list.

But on the pros' side, practically everyone’s on LinkedIn, meaning the platform offers the most complete and robust database of tech talent.

Vetting process:

LinkedIn does not vet candidates.

#3. Greenhouse

Greenhouse is a complete hiring platform, meaning that its feature set exceeds most of the tools I’m covering on this list. However, depending on your requirements, this can be a benefit or a disadvantage. It’s also a platform built specifically for enterprise companies and focuses on serving recruitment teams with high-talent goals.

Needless to say, the platform’s capabilities reflect this. For example, with Greenhouse, you can follow the traditional hiring process but do it at a scale.

With the platform’s Talent Sourcing feature, you can aggregate your job listings to more than a thousand job boards with ease.

You can build talent pools, nurture relationships with people in those pools, and hire them all from within the platform.

You can then use data to support decision-making, choose the right candidates, etc.

Best for: Enterprise hiring

Vetting process: Not specified

#4. Workday

Workday is a complete business platform with capabilities spanning finance, HR, hiring, business planning, operations, and more. It’s easy to think of it as an all-in-one business ops tool to run an entire (large) business. And I guess that’s what the tool really is, in fact.

But for this list, I’m focusing on the platform’s talent acquisition features. And the platform offers quite a robust set of capabilities to help manage the entire tech hiring process at scale:

• Tools to scale candidate reviews to surface the best candidates fast
• Candidate engagement
• Candidate messaging
• AI-based skills intelligence foundation, and more.

Vetting process: Not specified.

#5. Toptal

Toptal is adamant about delivering only the best talent to recruiters, a goal that’s mirrored in the company’s promise: “Hire the top 3% of freelance talent.”

To do that, Toptal instills a rigid vetting process that includes live problem-solving sessions.

Another thing that’s different about Toptal is that this isn’t a self-serve system, though. Unlike Frontend Mentor Hiring, for example, Toptal doesn’t offer a search engine you could use to scan a database for people matching your criteria. Instead, you need to talk to the company’s specialist, who will then scout their databases and identify the best potential candidates for you.

Vetting process:

• Technical screenings
• Live-problem solving sessions
• Test projects

#6. Arc.dev

Arc is a full-on developer hiring platform that gives you access to a network of vetted candidates, robust search features, and even HireAI, an artificial intelligence capability that helps you identify the best candidates instantly.

Vetting process:

• Technical assessments
• Coding challenges
• Interviews

#7. Codility

I appreciate that the two last platforms on my list are slightly different. For one, they focus on streamlining a particular aspect of the process - evaluating and vetting candidates to ensure the best possible fit.

But they are also enormously helpful with the most challenging aspect of the skills-based hiring process - evaluating and assessing the best candidates.

Codility does that by allowing you to set up online coding tests and conduct technical interviews with candidates.

With Codility, you can define the minimum required skill sets for candidates, skill-map internal teams to identify skill gaps, conduct technical interviews, and even use the system to detect suspicious activity during the test.

#8. TestGorilla

Finally, TestGorilla offers tools and capabilities to boost your skills-based hiring. The platform features a robust library of tests, ranging from code assessment to personality test, cognitive ability to language proficiency.

This tech hiring platform allows you to set up assessments, invite candidates to complete them, and grade their performance to show you the strongest candidates.

And there you have it…

Eight absolutely amazing tech hiring platforms to find the best developers and tech talent.