How to Build the Ideal Development Team: 10 Years of Lessons at Novatics

Hiring great developers and designers has never been easy. Over the past 10 years at Novatics, we’ve been through countless hiring processes—from in-person challenges to the remote-first world accelerated by the pandemic. Every success (and failure) has taught us something valuable.

How Our Process Evolved

Today, our selection process includes both behavioral and cultural alignment checks, along with technical evaluations tailored to each position. These are done through two or more interviews with each candidate.

Why start with culture fit? Because any good service—yes, even picking the bakery where you buy your bread—requires communication, trust, and a bit of chemistry. Tech is no different. Technical knowledge alone isn’t a reliable predictor of performance. After all, software is never built in isolation.

As for the technical part, we’ve come a long way. We used to send candidates home with web app challenges. But we ran into some major issues:

• Too time-consuming: Candidates needed several days to complete and present their challenges, slowing down hiring timelines.

• Poor candidate experience: Dedicating so much time to a hiring process can be frustrating—especially when feedback is slow.

• Incomplete evaluation: Even real-world tasks often missed key areas like databases or APIs.

• Too easy to game: With so much online content, submissions sometimes felt generic or AI-assisted.

Our solution? We replaced take-home tests with structured technical interviews. The goal: a faster, more insightful process that gives us a deeper understanding of a candidate’s skills.

We still use short challenges in specific scenarios—like our internship program, which draws a high volume of applicants. In that case, a quick challenge helps with the first round of filtering, without requiring a big time investment from candidates.

The Challenges That Persist

Even with an improved process—lower turnover, faster hires, and better metrics—we knew there was still room to grow.

A few things continued to bother us:

• Candidate nerves: Many people don’t perform well when being watched live. Synchronous interviews don’t always reflect true potential.

• Early misalignment: Within the first 5–10 minutes, we could often tell a candidate wasn’t a good fit.

• Wasted time: Our technical team might spend an entire hour interviewing someone who clearly wasn’t right for the role.

• AI-generated answers: With the rise of LLMs, we started noticing candidates using chat tools to "cheat" during interviews.

The Solution: Bright

As a tech company, we built our own solution. Bright was born not only to improve our internal hiring process—but to reimagine the candidate experience. It’s our answer to the evolving challenges of tech recruitment.

Here’s what Bright solves:

✅ Async evaluations: Candidates complete assessments without the pressure of live observation.

✅ Smart proctoring: Built-in tools ensure responses reflect actual skills and knowledge.

✅ Better filtering: Go beyond resume screening and identify the most promising candidates early.

✅ Time savings: Hiring managers, recruiters, and dev teams can focus on qualified candidates and strategic decisions.

The Real Impact

What drives us most is solving a real problem. It’s not fair—for companies or candidates—to waste time on processes that could be smarter from the start.

• For companies: More efficiency, better hires, and smarter use of resources.

• For candidates: A fairer, less stressful process with clearer, more useful feedback.

Final Thoughts

Building a great dev team isn’t about finding the perfect process—it’s about continually evolving.

Over the last decade, we’ve learned that the right mix of culture, technical ability, and smart tools makes all the difference.

Bright is the result of this journey. Soon, we’ll share more about how we’ve implemented it internally—and give practical tips on how to use tech to make hiring more efficient and more human.

What about you—what’s your biggest challenge when building a tech team? Want to learn how Bright can transform your hiring process? Let’s talk!