“We were in the middle of recruiting a developer as the UK went into the first lockdown”

Good help, as the cliché goes, is hard to find. That’s always been so, but by March 2020 I thought I had figured out the challenge of finding new software developers for my team. We had a process: an initial phone call followed by a face-to-face interview. After that, our new hires were in the office with us, where getting them up to speed was a well-trodden path that we were practiced at walking. Then everything changed.

We were in the middle of recruiting a new developer as the UK went into the first lockdown, so there wasn’t much time to stop and think.

In common with all but the biggest companies, the majority of our new hires are sourced via recruiters. Although several recruiting firms we work with furloughed staff because of a general drop in activity, we experienced no more than the usual difficulty in sourcing plausible candidates for interview. But, how to interview them?

Even at the worst points of the pandemic, travel and