Four Non-Tech Professions That Will Change Your Tech Recruiting

The future of jobs and tech recruiting continues to change. Automation, AI, and machine learning are among the disruptive technologies that could displace 85 million jobs and make way for 97 million new jobs by 2025.

As the world of work becomes increasingly digitized, many non-technical employees will have to learn to program. This way, they can relieve the already busy engineering teams by taking on simple coding tasks themselves.

This article explores how hiring non-tech professionals who program can benefit a company’s tech recruiting and help build high-performing distributed engineering teams.

How to build stronger on-site & distributed engineering teams

Companies need to grow their on-site and distributed engineering teams to develop customized solutions and drive value in the coming years. But as a technical leader, you may already be struggling to find enough talent. 

One strategy might be to expand your company’s tech recruiting to include non-technical positions that can relieve your developers of simple programming tasks.

Given the increasing popularity of no-code platforms, the need to learn to program may seem counterintuitive to many non-technical people. But even if employees don’t have to write code with these platforms, they still need problem-solving skills to leverage them.

And learning to program is a great way to improve those problem-solving skills, which, by the way, are among the top skills employers believe will grow in importance by 2025. 

Let’s talk about four non-technical professions that need to learn programming to support your developers in the years to come.

#1 Designers

Frontend development is becoming increasingly complex and demanding. So designers who can create user interfaces using code are an invaluable help to developers. 

Many modern design tools already provide automatic code generation of UI elements for direct use in web projects. Designers with solid HTML and CSS skills can help developers create web frontends by editing the generated code and incorporating it into the project.

At the same time, designers can make the UI look precisely the way they envisioned. This helps reduce communication overhead – especially for distributed engineering teams – and thus shortens development time.

#2 Business analysts

Business analysts need to visualize and transform data into valuable insights and automate repetitive workflows. These requirements make them ideal citizen developers who can develop the necessary functions themselves. 

Programming skills enable them to better understand the technical requirements of their tasks. And this makes it easier for them to find and create a solution, for example, with a low-code platform.

Ultimately, they can fulfill their needs themselves – exactly when and how they need it. They only need to call in developers when they require a more complex solution, which reduces the burden on your on-site and distributed engineering teams. 

#3 Marketers

As marketing becomes more data-driven and automated, marketers need to understand how websites and apps work. Only then can they experiment with different user journeys and optimize the user experience as they see fit. 

Many websites and eCommerce platforms offer low-code features. With these, citizen developers can create and modify frontend elements with little to no code. 

For example, marketers don’t have to wait for development resources to create an ad banner on their website with these platforms. Instead, they can do everything themselves.

This allows them to respond better and faster to users’ needs, while developers can take care of their projects. 

#4 Sales Professionals

The more technical products and services become, the better salespeople need to communicate to serve potential customers with different levels of tech knowledge. 

Programming skills can help sales professionals better understand what they are selling. And, as a result, they can provide potential customers with a better understanding of their product or service.

Sales staff can put together fitting feature packages and answer most potential customers’ questions without involving a developer. This can leave a competent impression on the client and contribute to a successful business deal.

Read more like this: Streamline Your Technical Recruiting to Hire Full-Stack Developers.

Assessing technical skills of non-tech professionals

According to a report by low-code company Outsystems, 20% of respondents said that Citizen Developers were already using low-code in their organizations to reduce the burden on IT departments. By hiring non-engineers who can take care of programming tasks, developers can deliver products and provide value to customers more efficiently. 

Recruiters play an essential role in building and maintaining future-proof these distributed engineering teams, but first, they need the right tools and techniques to assess applicants’ technical skills, regardless of their background. 

The more employees need to have hands-on programming skills, the more valuable code testing becomes. To this end, tech recruiters can use tools like CodeCheck to get a straightforward and quick assessment of candidates’ coding skills.

However, an interview platform is better suited for assessing technical skills they can’t evaluate through code testing. CodeLive, for example, offers a remote interviewing environment and several tools that recruiters can use to identify non-tech professionals’ problem-solving skills.

This could be the perfect opportunity to talk to your recruiting team about what they can do to help meet future tech recruiting needs. Start the discussion by sharing this blog post to understand how they can help you build powerful distributed engineering teams.

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