It’s a challenge many organizations face: finding and hiring top tech talent. In a competitive job market where candidates have numerous options, it can be even more difficult to fill your highest-priority roles. If you’re struggling to find great technical talent at the early career level, it’s important that you re-evaluate your recruitment methods to determine if you’re missing opportunities to connect with great candidates.
Many organizations will find that the traditional method of recruiting from a small set of core schools is no longer sufficient for building a robust pipeline of top tech candidates. In such a competitive market, companies will have to expand their school reach to find candidates who are both qualified for their positions and career-ready.
That’s why we published a new guide, Where Next: How to Expand Your School Reach to Find Top Technical Talent in partnership with CodeSignal to help companies craft a plan to reach candidates who they may previously have overlooked.
In this guide, you’ll find strategies for expanding your school reach and get access to comprehensive rankings of the best schools to find tech talent in a number of different categories. The rankings, compiled by CodeSignal, are based on the percentage of students who scored above 800 on the General Coding Assessment at each school.
If you are unfamiliar with the General Coding Assessment, it is a standardized test designed to measure the core programming and computer science fundamentals taught in undergraduate programs in the United States. The GCA is taken by more than 50% of computer science graduates in the country, with over 9,000 students taking the test per week during university recruiting season.
The GCA consists of four language-agnostic code writing tasks meant to demonstrate the test taker’s coding ability. A score above 800 indicates that the test taker has excellent algorithmic and problem-solving skills and can develop large, complex applications. A candidate who scores above 800 can be assumed to have the skills necessary for most entry-level software engineering roles.
Because the GCA objectively measures a student’s coding abilities, it’s a great measure of career-readiness. That’s why more than 150 top companies use it as their main technical assessment for early career hiring. It’s also a great way to determine the effectiveness of a college’s computer science and software engineering programs. Schools that produce the most high-scoring students likely also have programs that help students develop the skills necessary to succeed in the workplace.
So which schools graduate the most students with high GCA scores? You may be surprised to learn that it’s not necessarily the colleges with the most prestigious names or reputations. While many well-known colleges and universities make the list, there are also a handful of schools that are not even ranked at all for their engineering programs by U.S. News and World Report. There are also a number of public schools, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and small private schools that may not be the first colleges you think of when considering computer science programs, but clearly do a great job of preparing their students in the field.
You can find the top 10 schools for tech talent below. To dive into more detailed rankings and learn how to utilize these rankings to revamp your recruiting strategy, download our full guide.
The Top 10 Schools To Target For Top Technical Talent
We were excited to partner with CodeSignal on this guide. CodeSignal helps fast-growing companies #GoBeyondResumes in technical recruiting with coding tests and assessments to support hiring at scale. We’re proud that the RippleMatch platform integrates with CodeSignal, helping companies automatically source students with high GCA scores.
Download the guide to view the complete ranking of the top 50 schools for tech talent. You'll also find rankings on the top schools by region and type, as well as advice on how to use these rankings to improve your early career recruiting.