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3 Advantages of Outsourcing Your Technical Interviews

admin — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 10:00:22 +0000

First, yes, you can do this. Some companies aren’t aware that you can outsource technical interviews. But, with companies worldwide struggling to quickly identify and hire quality IT talent, more and more are turning to outsourcing technical interviews to ensure that candidates have the necessary skills to succeed at a given job. After all, most technical recruiters are non-technical professionals, and do not have the qualifications to ascertain technical experience accurately.

Outsourcing Technical Interviews Advantages

Here are three, plus, the bonus, advantages you get from outsourcing your technical interviews instead of performing them internally.

1. Improve Quality of Hiring

The two primary internal approaches have shortcomings that negatively impact the quality of technical interviews, and as a result, quality of hire. Outsourced technical interviews don’t have these shortcomings.

Let’s take a look at the quality issues with the two primary internal approaches.

Pre-Submittal Tech Interviews by Third Party Staffing Suppliers

The typical approach for staffing companies is the use of an internal IT consultant or employee as a technical interviewer. The consultant is paid for a short amount of time—perhaps an hour or 30 minutes of their time. In some cases, a nominal gift card is shared instead of full compensation for the tech person’s expertise. While many firms have formalized this tech interview functionally, generally this is a “do me a favor, check out this candidate” type of situation. While the consultant generally has sufficient IT knowledge, interviewers may not be a role/stack match to the job and/or technologies required, there’s no guarantee that the interview process is legally compliant, and there’s no common scoring or reporting system.

Post-Submittal Tech Interviews by Hiring Companies

The approach most often used by direct-hire companies like financial institutions is to establish a technical interview panel for each new open IT position. Most panels are composed of three technical team members who likely will work with the person once hired. While committees usually do prep, ask questions together, and vote together, the members often aren’t trained in doing technical interviews. Even if they are, there’s another major flaw: they’re making a decision about whom they want to work with. That creates bias, as people tend to want to work with people like themselves, which isn’t conducive for increasing diversity.

When you outsource technical interviews, they are performed by an external IT professional with the technical skill set required in the role, paired with an intimate understanding of how their actions impact candidate experience and interview compliance. Meanwhile, the external IT pro is only concerned with who can best do the job, instead of who might be fun to work with. The result: a proper, extensive interview is conducted, and bias is minimized.

2. Decrease Time for All Stakeholders

It’s important to get technical interviews for candidates—especially top candidates—scheduled quickly. The best technical interview solution providers, often within 24 hours, can schedule a technical interview, conduct it and provide results in the form of a detailed candidate report.

Our research shows that it often takes a week or more for recruiters to schedule interviews with internal IT consultants, which delays getting feedback on the candidate. Combine candidate expectations for hiring decisions as if it were a buying experience not a hiring process with LinkedIn’s findings of time to hire in the IT sector at 44 days and your best candidates could very well accept another offer before you have the facts needed to make a next round decision based. Especially considering that IT professionals in high demand are more apt to receive multiple job offers simultaneously, according to Paul McDonald, Senior Executive Director at Robert Half.

In short, outsourcing technical interviews helps you minimize time to fill and time to hire while ensuring new hires have technical fit—a recipe for building and maintaining a top-caliber IT department.

3. Reduce Costs Substantially

Whether you’re looking to improve client retention by delivering high-quality candidates to the hiring manager on a consistent basis or you’re fed up with recruiting metrics outside of the norm, leveraging outsourced technical interviews makes financial sense.

Internal costs for technical interviews can add up surprisingly quickly. Assuming you have a team of three IT pros interviewing three candidates at a minimal cost of $50 per hour, you’ll absorb a minimum soft-cost of $900 Here’s how the math works:

Two hours of prep time for three IT pros, to agree on questions and format: $300
Three one-hour technical interviews with three IT pros: $450
One hour of deliberation with three IT pros: $150

The more growth or turnover in your department the more interviews and the costs can quickly escalate. A technical interview partner, meanwhile, conducts interviews at around one-third of the cost while reducing your company’s exposure for mistakes made by untrained interviewers.

4. Boost Revenue per Employee (BONUS Benefit)

While technological advancements continue to grow in leaps and bounds, unfortunately, IT hiring processes have not experienced optimal modernization to keep pace with hiring demands.

The result? Declining productivity due to disruptions in project timelines related to 1) reviewing embellished resumes from talent acquisition and/or staffing partners, 2) pre-screening tech skills of unvetted potential hires by phone and/or video, and 3) running technical interview panels ranging from 2 to 7 key tech pros already feeling the heat of being understaffed.

IT teams have begun to put this necessary activity into the bucket of technical debt. This kind of debt refers to sacrificing revenue facing responsibilities, employee morale, and/or quality of hire to fill an empty seat. By outsourcing the technical interview you are saving employees at your company valuable time—no more scheduling ping pong for unqualified candidates, technical panelists stay focused on critical revenue-producing projects outside of interviewing the top 3 candidates, and open IT roles close faster. Hear our executive team speak with Future of Work Influencer, Paul Estes, on his Work on Demand podcast.

Find out how much your company invests in technical interviewing.

Amanda Cole, Vice President at eTeki

Amanda Cole has more than 15 years of experience developing innovative programs staffed by non-traditional workforce’s including freelancers, paid & unpaid interns, boards of directors, special event volunteers, and skill-based volunteer programs. The annual value of services rendered for the largest programs exceeded $18M. She is a communications professional with superior facilitation and training skills, an engaging public speaking presence, and a fanatic about synergistic business relationships.

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5 Reasons the Human Factor Is Essential for Effective Candidate Screening

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 11:31:59 +0000

If you’re an IT manager, when it comes time to make new hires, you likely want more than anything else: a clone.

After all, while hiring, you still have to meet work and project deadlines and manage your teams—and perform all of the other tasks that more than fill up your workday. It sure would be nice to have another you to handle the extra workload hiring takes (often 30%), so you wouldn’t have more stress and less time to spend with family and friends.

The last thing you want, meanwhile, is to waste your time interviewing unsuitable candidates. That means you need recruiters to consistently deliver quality candidates, which in turn means they need to use an effective candidate screening process. As we will see, the human factor—live technical interviews with qualified technical interviewers with relevant experience—is a must for effective candidate screening.

The Screening Automation Trend
The importance of the human factor seemingly flies in the face of one of the biggest trends in recruiting’s digital transformation – automation of candidate screening. Bullhorn’s Top Staffing and Recruiting Trends for 2020 report found “a major variance in the interest level (26%) in digital transformation depending on company size and role.”

See how eTeki had a pulse on the business drivers and satisfaction factors associated with decoupling the expensive, yet essential, the human-centric step of the hiring process. Their solution provided elastic interview capacity that’s transformed how India and the rest of the world hire IT, teams.

It’s easy to see the motivation for automation: speed. As the LinkedIn report makes clear, recruiters are under pressure to deliver more candidates in the same or less time. And with today’s computerized screening tools (such as personality and skills assessments) being smarter and more effective than ever at filtering out weak candidates, we agree that it makes complete sense to use them.

The problem is, these tools can’t—and likely never will be able to—filter candidates at the level IT hiring managers demand. To achieve that level of candidate screening, prior to delivery to hiring managers, candidates who’ve advanced through automated screening must go through live, rigorous technical interviews with trained technical interviewers who have relevant technical experience. In fact, these technical interviewers, in a way, act as the clones that IT hiring managers are seeking, asking tough, probing questions and evaluating answers as the hiring managers would.

5 Reasons Live Technical Interviews Are Essential
Live, rigorous technical interviews provide five benefits that make them essential for quality candidate screening.

You learn whether candidates have the relevant experience to succeed at a given job. Computer-based tests can evaluate candidates’ high-level competency. Screening challenges, such as coding exercises, meanwhile, can show whether candidates can do the work. But only live technical interviews reveal details about candidates’ true levels of experience with key tasks, challenges, tools, etc.—giving a far more complete picture of how successful they are likely to be at given roles. The reason: interviewers understand the job requirements and how the skill or tool is used to fulfill a specific responsibility. This gives them a keen ability to probe candidates about their key job-relevant experience in ways that computerized tools simply can’t (such as through follow-up and clarification questions based on candidates’ answers to initial questions).

You learn about how much supervision candidates would likely need. Learning about candidates’ job-relevant experience is an important indicator of how much managerial supervision they are likely to require. For example, if screening shows that one candidate is technically competent but has minimal experience, that candidate can probably handle the task but would likely require close supervision and additional training. Meanwhile, if a second competent candidate has lots of experience, that person would only require light supervision. Clearly, it would be easiest on a hiring manager to hire the second candidate. Knowing the amount of supervision likely to be needed could even impact whether to deliver one or both candidates.

You learn about candidates’ suitability for virtual teams. More and more teams today are virtual—89% of respondents to a 2018 survey reported being members of virtual teams. Virtual teams create leadership, communication, cultural and skills challenges, and it’s important that members be able to do their work with a minimal amount of handholding. As a result, it’s important that recruiters deliver candidates with the necessary experience, which is best revealed by live technical interviews.

You learn about candidates’ relevant problem-solving experience and capabilities. While tests can evaluate problem-solving ability, learning how candidates solved real-life challenges is far more valuable for evaluating how they are likely to deal with future challenges. In technical interviews, interviewers can probe candidates about instances where best-laid plans went awry, to learn how candidates solved specific types of problems. This will reveal whether candidates merely have knowledge about relevant challenges, of if they have experience actually solving them.

You learn a variety of other candidate information that could impact whether candidates should be delivered. Live video interviews are revealing in other, miscellaneous ways that computer-based tests simply aren’t, and the insights gleaned can be valuable for candidate delivery decisions. Truthfulness, or lack thereof, is one example. Sometimes candidates use odd body language and provide other non-verbal cues—such as not giving eye contact—that are signs of embellishment or lying. Some candidates even use proxies for screening tests, challenges and technical interviews. With the latter, candidates often get caught because of situational factors, such as audio feedback caused by multiple audio inputs in the room.

Keep IT Hiring Managers Happy
For recruiters, it’s critical to keep IT hiring managers happy—which is why combining quick and quality candidate delivery is important. Today’s automated candidate screening tools are terrific, but using technical interviews at the end of the screening process is essential for delivering the quality that hiring managers demand. Fortunately, technical interviews using on-demand freelance interviewers can be conducted in 24 hours or less, meaning there’s no need to sacrifice speed.

In other words, the end result of using technical interviews properly is exactly what recruiters want: happier IT hiring managers. Not only are the hiring managers able to spend less time interviewing unsuitable candidates, and more time managing their teams, working on critical projects, and with their families and friends, but they also are more likely to make better hires.

And if in doing so stronger recruiter-hiring manager relationships are built, it can make a profound difference in talent acquisition (TA) results. According to Bersin by Deloitte, “Our research found the most influential predictor of TA performance outcomes is a strong relationship between the recruiter and the hiring manager; in fact, this relationship is four times more influential than other TA performance drivers.”

photo credit: johnnytangphoto Odysseus’ Rock via photopin (license)

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Examining 6 Recruiting Metrics, and the Key for Improving Them

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 10:12:46 +0000

How should recruiters and employers measure the recruiting process?

It’s a question without a consensus answer. There is no recruiting metrics gold standard because too many factors impact recruiting priorities and results—company size, industry, and job type to name a few. Yet to make intelligent adjustments to your recruiting process, and to evaluate the results of those adjustments, you need to measure something. But you also can’t measure everything, or you won’t get much actual recruiting done.

With that in mind, we’ve selected six metrics that you should consider evaluating in your recruiting process. After we go over them, we’ll discuss the key factor for improving whichever metrics you use.

Time new hires stay at a company

What it is: Number of years that new hires remain with your organization.

Average value: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.2 years in January 2016 (the most recent time for which data is available), down from 4.6 years in January 2014.

Be aware: A number of factors can affect the median tenure of workers, including age, industry and occupation. For example, wage and salary workers in the public sector had more than double the median tenure of private-sector employees, 7.7 years compared to 3.7 years. Also, as LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2017 survey shows, this metric is valued most by smaller organizations—those with 200 employees or fewer.

Use: For evaluating the quality of hire. A shortcoming here is significant time lag; if you make a positive change in your recruiting practices today that impacts the quality of hire, it could take years before there’s a significant corresponding positive change in this metric.

Time to fill

What it is: Amount of time, typically measured in days, between when a job is opened and an offer is accepted.

Average value:

As per our recent hiring metrics research, the average time to hire and fill all IT Development/Engineering roles globally, it takes 33 and 68 days. However, this number can vary greatly depending on where you are located. The U.S and Canada take 56 days to fill and 33 days to hire while Asia takes 92 days to fill and 36 days to hire.

As of December 2016, U.S. jobs take 27.2 working days to fill, according to DHI Hiring Indicators. That’s slightly below the all-time high of 29 days hit in 2015, but significantly higher than 2009 levels (just over 15 working days).

Be aware: As recruiting software provider Workable notes, time to fill can vary greatly by industry and job type: “While the industry average time-to-fill for engineering in the US was 58 days, some roles had much lower numbers, like data scientist with 28 days. Meanwhile, hiring a senior QA engineer was taking 121 days on average.”

Use: For evaluating your sourcing and hiring processes.

Time to hire

What it is: The number of days between a successful candidate’s first contact (e.g. they apply for the job) and their hire date.

Average value: eTeki research found that the data shows that interviews per hire for all engineering roles across the globe are 12. In America and Canada it’s 13 but in Asia 11 in 2022

A Glassdoor survey found that the process of getting hired in the U.S. took 22.9 days in 2014, up from 12.6 days in 2010.

Be aware: As with many recruiting metrics, the time to hire can vary greatly based on job type and other factors. “High-skilled jobs that require judgment, creativity, and technical skills generally require longer, more intense job-screening processes,” Glassdoor chief economist Andrew Chamberlain told SHRM.

Use: For evaluating the speed and quality of your screening and interviewing process.

Hiring manager satisfaction

What it is: The level of satisfaction of hiring managers with your hiring process.

Average value: Not available due to different ways of calculating. A 2014 ERE study found that hiring managers tend to give recruiters a C-plus grade.

Be aware: An October 2016 study by workforce intelligence provider Visier found that 71% of hiring managers said that to increase the quality of people they hire, HR needs to improve its recruiting process.

Use: For evaluating the quality of hire.

Submit-to-interview ratio (aka present-to-interview ratio)

What it is: The ratio of candidates submitted/presented to hiring managers to the number of given interviews.

Average value: A good submit-to-interview ratio in staffing is 3:1 or better, but in some industries can see as high as 6:1 or 8:1.

Be aware: If the ratio is high, possible causes could be poor screening, the recruiter not understanding the type of candidates the hiring manager is looking for, or the hiring manager being too picky.

Use: For evaluating the quality of screening and recruiter effectiveness. If your time to fill is high, a poor submit-to-interview ratio indicates lackluster screening may be to blame.

Interview-to-offer ratio

What it is: The number of candidates on average a hiring manager needs to interview in order to make an offer.

Average value: We’ve been told an average interview-to-offer ratio is about 4.8:1. A good ratio is 3:1 or better.

Be aware: As Amy Caswell notes in a Recruiter.com article, a “high interview-to-offer ratio is a cause for concern because of the waste it creates — not just in the recruitment department, but also the wasted time the hiring manager invests in performing too many interviews.”

Use: For evaluating the quality of candidates submitted.

It’s All About Screening
No matter which metrics you use to evaluate your hiring process (the period beginning after candidates are sourced through the interview), the solution for optimizing them is the same. Great candidate screening.

If you consistently deliver or submit quality candidates in an efficient time frame to hiring managers—what we call delivering a high return on the interview—your metrics will look great. In fact, we’ve seen a company get its submit-to-interview and interview-to-offer ratios close to 1:1 through great screening practices.

Meanwhile, if you’re metrics need improvement, the solution is bound to be in improving your screening practices. Here’s a listing of quality candidate screening we recommend for tech roles (click the link for detailed descriptions of each step):

Ensure the hiring manager provides a complete job description.
Have a detailed intake session with the hiring manager.
Filter resumes aligning with job requirements emphasized by the hiring manager
Perform other prescreening activities (e.g. validating candidates’ identity and experience via social media, personality/work style assessments, automated reference checking, validating candidates’ IT certifications).
During the initial conversation with candidates, evaluate for technical fit.
Have candidates undergo rigorous technical interviews.
Deliver technical interview videos and reports along with candidate shortlist to the hiring manager.

A Useful Resource

If you need help with calculating recruiting metrics, Glen Cathey’s Boolean Blackbelt sourcing and recruiting blog has terrific sourcing and recruiting candidate funnel and output calculators (spreadsheets) that you can download for free.

The post Examining 6 Recruiting Metrics, and the Key for Improving Them appeared first on Resource Center.

The Future of Technical Screening Could Look Much Different

admin — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 18:12:34 +0000

As HR and business experts are pointing out, new technologies are changing work as we know it.

Take Forbes contributor Sylvia Vorhhauser-Smith, who says that in the future “employers may not have employees as we know them today,” but instead have “virtual talent warehouses” with some permanent talent, but much of it task or project-based. Some of this talent, she says, may not even be human.

Also notable is how these new technologies (artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.) and the resulting changes in the nature of work also promise to cause major changes to technical job screening. While it’s impossible to predict exactly what technical screening will be like even 10 years from now, with the help of technical recruiting experts, we’ve come up with the following four predictions.

Artificial Intelligence, Bots, and Screening Technologies Will Take Over Much of Technical Screening

One of the biggest complaints IT hiring managers have about technical recruiters is that many lack sufficient relevant technical knowledge. As technologies continue to advance, especially those in the emerging third and fourth platforms such as AI, shortcomings of relevant technical knowledge among recruiters will only become more acute. The result: recruiters will struggle to differentiate between strong and poor candidates for tech roles associated with those technologies.

We expect, however, technology solutions to arise that will help recruiters with their pre-screening efforts. In other words, much of recruiters’ work in sourcing and initial screening will be shifted to technology tools. Some examples:

We expect that recruiters will rely on prescreening bots for specific areas of expertise to give them a baseline understanding of candidates’ competency.
Bots could do the first level of screening by chatting with candidates.
Bots could help identify fraudulent candidates.

IT hiring managers also could see their roles in candidate screening and resume review decrease. In part, this is because tech hiring is snowballing that many hiring managers won’t have the time to serve those roles. Instead, skill and screening assessments—made more powerful by new technologies—will help fill the need.

However, there are limits to the impact of automation in screening. Human review and monitoring of data from automation will be important. And, as noted in the next prediction, an automated screening will still need to be weighted with live, person-to-person technical interviews.

The Human Factor Will Still Play a Role, Particularly in Technical Interviewing

Most of the experts we consulted with believe, as we do, that—at least for the short- and medium-term future—technical interviews conducted by hiring managers or other IT professionals will remain an important part of the screening process. After technology-driven prescreening for evaluating required competencies, technical interviews with human experts are needed to evaluate candidates’ relevant experience. The human factor is important at this stage because only qualified people are able to probe candidates’ responses, understand their nuances, and ask appropriate follow-up questions.

As one technical recruiting expert noted, bots could assist human interviewers in providing better technical interviews. For example, by identifying appropriate questions to ask based on the job role and candidates’ experience.

Perhaps in 20 years AI and bots will have developed the ability to effectively evaluate the experience. In the next five to 10 years, however, we believe it’s doubtful that technologies will be able to replicate the experience that human technical interviewers can offer.

New Types of Assessments

We expect new types of assessments to arise to meet the screening needs of employers using contract- and task-based workers.

One example: As recruiting expert Steve Levy suggested to us, we could see assessments that deliver skill and team compatibility scores. These scores would help determine if candidates’ skills match the needs of a project or team. The company would use the scores of other team members to ensure that the gig worker would bring the needed skills.

Another example from Levy: an “adaptability to new technology” assessment. As new technologies come to the forefront, employers need to know how well job seekers are able to adapt.

Plus, with much of gig tech work likely done remotely, we may also see assessments that gauge a person’s ability to work remotely, without supervision. After all, if a person is a remote gig contributor, the employer is going to want to ensure the person will be able to work well in that environment.

More Robust Professional Profiles

Many tech professionals might not even wait for employers to give them assessments. Instead, since they will be serving as entrepreneurs selling their own services to a variety of employers, they could have skill and experience assessments done on themselves to be able to showcase their skills and experience on their professional profiles.

We envision the development of skill certification programs, in which peers formally vet workers’ skills, allowing job seekers to show the certification in these skills on their professional profiles. Job seekers with tech skill certification would likely find themselves at an advantage in landing gig work associated with those skills.

One technical recruiting expert told us that while nice to have now, having profiles in the development platform GitHub, the programming online community Stack Overflow, and on LinkedIn will soon become musts for tech talent. Although with Google announcing in May a push into the job search market, Google for Jobs, it will be interesting to see how that impacts LinkedIn, other job search companies, and technical screening.

Some good news: applying for jobs could become much less time-consuming for candidates, which is good news for both them and employers. When candidates apply for positions, career history and online profiles could eventually be automatically submitted to recruiters without any effort from candidates. In addition to saving time for candidates, employers will benefit from eliminating candidate abandonment during the application process.

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How-To Find the Best in Tech Across the Globe

Punita — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:22:18 +0000

How-To Find the Best in Tech across the Globe

As the New Year approaches, so does a brand new hiring season. With change and resolutions already on the brain, this affords the perfect opportunity to catch the eye of top tech candidates – active and passive alike. But getting in front of this in-demand talent pool takes more than repeating the same old story and hoping it resonates. Instead, organizations looking for tech talent need to refresh and recharge their recruiting strategy and give candidates a reason to believe in taking on a new opportunity. Consider the following six tips:

Look to the data – Remember the promise of Big Data? Now’s the time to use it; with 2018 rapidly disappearing, dig into the information collected throughout the year before making any significant adjustments. Just like crossing the street, look both ways and walk through the whole process to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what needs improvement. From there, define what matters moving forward and review with stakeholders, hiring managers, and executives to get everyone on the same page.

Explore key metrics like application drop off rate, time-to-fill, cost-per-hire
Map out the existing process to identify and account for any gaps
Set new goals based on hiring needs, market trends, and earlier results
Only 1 in 3 employers have applied to one of their companies’ jobs to see what the process is like.

Improve job descriptions – Writing impactful job descriptions is an art form, attempted by many, mastered by few. When it comes to finding tech talent, create a copy that demonstrates a clear-cut understanding of the role and responsibilities without unnecessary buzzwords. These candidates understand the esoteric nature of their work and want to work for organizations that do, too. Save the ping pong table for their first day and use the job description to get down to business: qualifications, skills, certifications, and a basic overview of compensation and benefits (that goes beyond “competitive”).

Include any specific tools or technologies used on the job
Pay attention to detail and get the facts right
Highlight company culture and meaningful perks
Shorter posts (1-300 words) get candidates to apply 8.4 percent more than average.

Enhance job advertising – Bringing science into the process, programmatic job advertising was once a nice to do. Today, it’s becoming a must, particularly when it comes to tech talent. Sure, it might seem obvious where tech talent hangs out online (social networks, GitHub, etc.) but going programmatic lets recruiters expand their reach without having to scour every corner for an untapped talent pool. Better yet, different payment models can stretch budget dollars while uncovering those hard-to-find skill sets.

Weigh the benefits of cost-per-click vs. cost-per-applicant
Run test campaigns to find the right approach
Maximize ads with simple, straightforward content and formatting
By 2020, 86.3 percent of digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.

Automate recruitment marketing – Like most parts of the recruiting process, even marketing can – and should – be automated. In the case of tech talent, marketing automation is another way to attract and engage job seekers who could otherwise go undiscovered. Rather than bombard highly-sought after talent with impersonal and irrelevant messages, automation will offer up curated content and personalized interactions, nurturing these candidates and keeping them interested.

Build campaigns around specialized hiring needs
Promote a well-defined employer brand to a broader audience
Save recruiters the hours spent calling or sending out individual messages
Nearly 70 percent of enterprise companies are investing in recruitment marketing capabilities.

Implement video screening – With tech talent scattered around the world, video is one way to speed up the screening process and conduct interviews without incurring travel costs. By removing borders and boundaries, the video also makes it easier to get the meetings scheduled and shared between team members for feedback and next steps. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) further enhances the possibilities of video, adding valuable features for collaboration and analysis.

Create a resource about what to expect to help candidates prepare
Consider both live and pre-recorded interview options
Optimize video interview questions as needed using the insights provided
Recruiters can do 20 video screens in the time it takes to do one phone screen.

Evaluate and assess candidates – Incorporating pre-employment assessments into the process works two-fold, giving tech candidates the chance to show off their talents while validating capabilities and showcasing personality and behaviors. Reinforcing this with input from interviewers versed in the technical skills needed to complete the role in question can help separate the maybe from the definite hires. Simultaneously creating a highly personalized candidate experience, tech talent gain a stronger sense of the potential employer and feel for the job.

Develop assessments for both hard and soft skills as well as culture fit
Appraise candidates before advancing top contenders to hiring managers
Streamline hiring, with a more efficient, less time-consuming process
Organizations using pre-employment assessments improve the quality of hire by 68 percent.

In a competitive hiring landscape, recruiting the best in tech goes beyond just being there. It takes focus, determination and a handcrafted approach built around best practices and proven strategies – with serious tech know-how.

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Amanda Cole

Vice President at eTeki, specializes in recruiting and training contingent resources, as well as leading organizations leveraging this type of workforce for multi-million dollar service delivery.

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Engaging your hiring manager to make the most impactful hires

admin — Thu, 24 May 2018 16:10:37 +0000

One of the most talented individuals I ever managed would never get hired in today’s workforce, and that makes me sad.

When I led a team at IBM some years ago, our team was comprised almost entirely of computer science graduates, as you might imagine. That is, except for one woman with a PhD in medieval French literature. Because she had a background that was entirely different than the rest of us — and because that background was academic and required her to defend theses and dissertations for years — she was absolutely great at thinking outside of her realm and knowing how to problem-solve. In short, she could see the things that the rest of us, weighed down with technical tunnel vision, had problems seeing. She was a superb addition to the team.

In the modern hiring manager-recruiter relationship, though, I doubt she’d find her way onto that team. Much of recruiting right now comes down to lists of 30 or more technical skills. The candidate with the most checkboxes wins (or, sadly, the candidate that has the most checkboxes and the least salary cost). This isn’t the right way to get the best people.

But the hiring manager-recruiter relationship is a perennial question, and most organizations have still yet to solve it. Can it be solved? Yes. There are a few key approaches.

Ask the hiring manager about the scope of personal action for this hire
Is the hiring manager thinking that the new hire will be someone who fulfills assignments, or is someone who is going to take a technically creative lead on his/her team? This is a crucial question. Most people with the right pre-existing skill sets can enter roles where their main function is fulfilling assignments. But only people with the right combination of logic and thinking skills can be a lead for the department moving forward.

I once managed a man named Mike at the Dimension Data offices in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’d call Mike an “intuitive simplifier.” He was a good coder, yes, but he was also good at getting to the heart of what our systems needed to do. Without fail, he delivered simpler, more elegant systems instead of the bulkier, more complex ones we were used to building. We found Mike, who was a tremendous early career hire for us, by asking this series of questions of candidates and hiring managers:

To the candidate: “How and when have you solved a problem using ideas and techniques outside the realm of the problem? How and when have lessons you’ve learned outside your discipline (for example, software development) helped you in your discipline?”
If a candidate can walk you through this successfully, they likely have the analytical skills and creativity you need in a future anchor for the department. If you just need someone to hit their marks — that is, execute against precise instructions — this question is less important.

To the hiring manager: “How much learning does this role involve? How technologically fresh do they need to be? What scope does this role allow for creativity”
This is important to understand: in 2000 or so, the “game changing” technologies appeared every 1.5-2 years. That gave recruiters enough lead time to locate the talent their hiring managers needed. Now, game changing technologies emerge in under a year. With so much change afoot companies and candidates easily get distracted, not knowing what technologies to embrace and which to ignore. Does your business require swift adaptation to technology or other emerging trends (such as shifts in social media usage and platforms)? If so, your hiring needs to focus more on adaptability and the wise embrace of change than on ephemeral skills lists that rapidly go out of date. Do you need someone with the potential to learn and grow quickly? If so, you need to look to the candidates’ background — have they shifted industries, teams, roles, responsibilities?

As an aside, in the past we looked unfavorably on candidates that moved between industries and technology platforms. But with the way the tech stack and business overall move now, adaptability in a candidate can be a good sign. If they have good recommendations, technical skills, and can answer questions about how they learn, their past history of shifting industries shouldn’t automatically count against them. In fact, past experiences that demonstrate adaptability and growth are good signs your candidate will do well in today’s fluid environments.

To the hiring manager: “How much supervision is this role going to need? Would you consider someone with more experience and offer a higher salary for the role?”
Fresh-out-of-school candidates — which my colleague Amrut will address in a future eTeki article — and junior candidates tend to need more supervision as they develop. Many hiring managers are busy people who want projects finished and delivered on time. But if they’re too busy to supervise and develop, their less experienced teammates may fail to develop as they should, causing frustration on both the manager’s and employees’ parts.

Don’t shy away from considering advanced candidates who are further along in their career. Granted, experience often comes with a higher price tag that can put the candidate out of reach. But here, too, a broader perspective can help. Higher salary costs can be offset by shorter ramp up time after hiring, greater team velocity (meaning that the team is more productive), and lower supervision costs. If you take into account the entire lifecycle of an employee’s contribution to your company, you may find that advanced candidates cost less overall than less experienced ones, especially for roles that require a lot of autonomy.

This discussion can be awkward for hiring managers, because for a variety of reasons they may harbor reservations about taking on employees with more advanced skills than they have. Likewise, they may feel constrained by rigid budget rules. Nevertheless, the discussion is worth having.

Recruiting-hiring manager relationships are about building shared trust. Today’s highly competitive employment market demands flexibility and creativity of both recruiters and hiring managers. I’ve repeatedly been asked why my engineering teams stayed together for so long, continuously reinventing themselves to meet new challenges and adapt to new technologies. My answer, after giving credit to luck and good fortune, is this: I learned to look past what the candidate can do for me today to imagine what their creativity, independence and problem-solving skills could do for me in the future tomorrow I could only barely imagine.

" class="vc_single_image-img attachment-thumbnail ld-lazyload" alt="Reed Hyde" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" data-src="https://resources.eteki.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/reed-hyde-advisor-150x150.jpg" data-srcset="https://resources.eteki.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/reed-hyde-advisor-150x150.jpg 150w, https://resources.eteki.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/reed-hyde-advisor.jpg 200w" data-aspect="1" />

Reed Hyde, eTeki Tech Advisory Panel
Reed Hyde brings a globe-spanning mix of business and technology expertise. While serving as the product owner of the NTT / Dimension Data worldwide cloud, he and his team relaunched the company’s public cloud and grew the company’s portfolio with new private and hybrid cloud, reversing the company’s decline in cloud sales.

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Score Candidates to Submit the Talent That Hiring Managers Need

admin — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:41:17 +0000

“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.” — The Rolling Stones

Who knew The Rolling Stones gave such great talent acquisition advice?
Hiring managers can’t always, and usually won’t, get everything they want in a hire. But with intelligent candidate sourcing and screening—including using a candidate rating system—technical recruiters can give hiring managers what they need: quality candidates to choose from.

To create an effective scoring system, we recommend using the concept “idealize then realize.”

Idealize—Determine during intake sessions the characteristics, qualifications, etc., of ideal candidates.

Realize—Recognizing that ideal candidates often are not in the pool of available candidates, weight the importance of different characteristics, qualifications, etc., in evaluating candidates. The result should be a scoring system that objectively reveals the best candidates for submittal.

In both “idealize” and “realize,” hiring managers should take the lead, because they have the best idea of what they want—and need.

Determining Your Scoring System
Proper candidate evaluation depends on the nature of the job and the priorities of the hiring manager. What that means is there are almost endless scoring systems to evaluate candidates. The good news, however, is that once you create one scoring system, it’s easy to adjust it for future roles.

That’s because you typically screen for many of the same characteristics, qualifications, etc. For the given IT roles, hiring managers’ weighting of factors are the primary variables. The factors themselves come in two basic categories: eligibility factors and suitability factors.

A sampling of eligibility factors to evaluate candidates upon includes:

Location (live within driving distance, willing to relocate, willing to relocate with relocation assistance only, only willing to work remotely)
Salary required within the acceptable range
Relevant experience
Education level
References check out
Professional social media
Observed soft skills (ability to write, speak at an acceptable level)
Ability to answer basic relevant skill questions (aka knockout questions)
Employment background check

A sampling of suitability factors (which tend to be more subjective, but are more predictive of job success) to evaluate candidates upon includes:

Automated skill assessment results
Workstyle assessment results
Behavioral technical interview results

To create a scoring system, you need to know which factors to screen for, how factors will be weighed and how points will be allotted—all of which should be determined using the hiring manager’s priorities.

Let’s look at quick examples of how factors might be weighed and points allotted.
First, weighting factors. A hiring manager might decide that the results of technical interviews should have a much bigger impact than education level on candidates’ scores. As a result, the technical interview might be worth up to 30 points or more, while education scores might max out at 10 or fewer points.

Second, allotting points for individual factors. Let’s say you’re scoring candidates based on location. One scenario could have lived within driving distance worth 10 points, willingness to move eight points, willingness to move with a relocation package three points, and remote availability only zero. But if the hiring manager says working remotely is not a possibility or highly undesired, remote availability could be a disqualifier or give a candidate negative points. (It’s important to note that for compliance reasons, any disqualifier must be a factor that is relevant to the job.) Then again, if the job can be performed remotely, the location might not be considered at all in the scoring.

A Checklist for Performing Submittal
This checklist provides an overview of how to use a candidate rating system—from start to finish—to help you collaborate better with hiring managers and submit better candidates.

___ You’ve Determined the Candidate Rating System Before Beginning Sourcing and Screening. A candidate rating system helps guide your sourcing as well as your screening. It should be in place during intake or shortly after (although it’s always possible to adjust it later). In this step, it’s a good idea to verify that the screening factors are weighted based on the hiring manager’s specifications, and confirm that the agreed-upon screening steps will be effective for evaluating those factors. Be sure to create a spreadsheet for your scoring system that allows for an easy side-by-side comparison of candidates.

___ You’ve Conducted Agreed-Upon Sourcing and Screening Activities. This step is the nitty-gritty—performed sourcing and screening, and inputting candidates’ scores for each factor into your scoring spreadsheet. Do be sure to communicate any important issues to the hiring manager, such as if it becomes clear that candidates are consistently falling short of expectations. If this were to occur, possible next steps would include adjusting/lowering expectations (e.g., allowing remote work, reducing desired years of experience) and rescoring, or performing more sourcing activities.

___ You’ve Stripped Any Protected Class Information From Your Scoring Spreadsheet and Other Materials Provided to Hiring Manager. Protected class information is illegal to use in hiring decisions, so you should ensure it’s absent from all materials you give to the hiring manager. For example, don’t include candidates’ college graduation dates, because they can indicate a candidate’s rough age. Also, candidates’ names have been removed to eliminate potential gender or ethnic bias—instead refer to the professional with their initials or unique code system.

___ You’ve Submitted Your Candidate List and Provided Your Report—Verbal and Written—to the Hiring Manager. In this step, it’s important to remind the hiring manager that the scoring was conducted based on the eligibility and suitability factors that he or she said were most important. Then go over the scoring results for competitive candidates—breaking down each candidate’s scoring to show strong and weak points. For improved clarity, sort the candidates by the score, so that Candidate 1 has the highest score, followed by Candidate 2, and so on.
By breaking down candidates’ scores into their individual components, you enable the hiring manager to make ranking adjustments. For example, the hiring manager might notice that Candidate 3 is strong in a number of areas but is dinged by requiring remote work and having high salary demands, and decide that, considering the overall strength of the candidate, that those drawbacks are acceptable. In the reevaluation, Candidate 3 might even have become Candidate 1.

It’s also possible at this step that the hiring manager might decide that not enough candidates meet the qualifications to move forward with final interviews. Ideally, this would have been caught during the screening process, but you’d have the same potential next steps as if the problem were caught earlier: rescoring using different standards or sourcing more candidates.

The Big Benefit for Recruiters
Recruiters who use scoring systems effectively achieve a tremendous benefit along with better candidate submittals: it positively impacts the relationships they have with hiring managers. Hiring managers recognize the strategic thinking involved and respect the recruiters’ hard work. This results in increased hiring manager buy-in into the recruiting process.

Smart hiring managers will even use the scoring system in making their final hiring decision—adding on the scores of candidates’ final interviews to determine who, considering and weighing all factors, is Candidate 1, and will be offered the job. By doing so, these smart hiring managers maximize the chances of getting what they want—and need—in the end: the best possible hire.

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The Road That Technical Recruiters Should Follow—Every Time

admin — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 20:19:27 +0000

In the “Wizard of Oz,” we’re repeatedly reminded that Dorothy must “follow the yellow brick road” to find the wizard and get home to Kansas.

As a technical recruiter, you also have a road that you must navigate successfully to reach your goal—delivering quality tech talent to the hiring manager. But this road:

Isn’t made of yellow bricks, making it harder to travel
Must be traveled quickly to reduce time to hire

Let’s take a look at the key stages in the journey that technical recruiter need to get right. Failing in any of these stages could make your chances of delivering quality talent melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Stage 1: Get Hiring Manager Buy-In
You can’t successfully navigate the road to better tech talent alone. Just as Dorothy has traveling companions, you need the hiring manager on your journey.

The hiring manager should be your partner during the technical recruiting process. You need an intensive intake session with the hiring manager to get details about the job and agreement on the technical screening tools and process that will be used, and you need him or her to communicate with you during the process as events dictate.

Since the goal is to find a successful new hire for the hiring manager, it would seem he or she should want to be invested. But that’s not always the case—especially if you fail to make having a quality relationship a top priority.

Stage 2: Define the Job
If you don’t know enough about the talent you’re supposed to find, you’ll have to be extremely lucky to find it. You can only gain this clarity with input from the hiring manager. No intake session with a hiring manager is complete until you’re clear about what the job is, and the skills and experience strong candidates will have.

IMPORTANT: The “perfect candidate”—a candidate who meets every qualification—often isn’t out there. As a result, it’s vital to separate the “must-have” from the “nice-to-have” skills and qualifications.

Effectively defining the job helps the writing of an effective job description and guides your candidate screening. It also nurtures the hiring manager’s engagement, because it raises their confidence in the process and in your abilities.

Stage 3: Sourcing for the Right Talent
Once you know the talent you’re looking for, you need to go and find it. Easier said than done considering the intense competition for tech talent.

It’s critical to diversify your search—go beyond job boards and find talent at places where tech professionals congregate, such as industry conferences and online communities such as GitHub and Stack Overflow. You might consider targeting passive candidates as well, especially if your company has a strong employer brand.

Be careful not to shut out certain candidate groups. With many organizations looking to improve diversity, the ability to find talent from groups that are underrepresented in IT, such as women, can be highly valued. And, of course, they add to your overall candidate pool.

Stage 4: Screening for Synergies
Once you’ve sourced talent, begin the screening process to eliminate candidates who clearly aren’t a good fit.
It’s important to screen for both eligibility and suitability factors.
Eligibility factors might include:

The candidate’s salary demands are within your range
The candidate lives near or is willing to move to the job location
Required certifications
Required skills are listed on their resume, LinkedIn, etc.

Suitability factors are considered less objective, yet the insight generated is the most predictive of future success in IT roles. Parts of suitability screening include:

Knockout questions (administered by recruiter)
Automated skills assessments
Workstyle assessments
Behavioral technical interviews

In your screening, consider speed and quality, the candidate experience, diversity and inclusion, and whether the screening is legally compliant. Because of all of the different factors and tools, screening can be complex and can slow down the hiring process significantly if you’re not careful. We recommend using a screening checklist (we’ll provide an example next week) that technical recruiter agree upon with the hiring manager during intake.

Stage 5: Validating Your Shortlist
Although we noted behavioral technical interviews in the last step, they bear special mention here. A landmark University of Notre Dame study found that behavioral interviews are 5.5 times more predictive of future job performance than traditional interviews.

As such, scored behavioral technical interviews—which evaluate how well candidates’ technical skills and experience meet the requirements for the job—should be the last step before submitting your shortlist to the hiring manager. It’s essential, however, that the interviews are conducted using best practices.

Stage 6: Submitting to the Hiring Manager
You’ve completed your work. Now it’s time for the hiring manager to finish the hiring process, including making next round interviewing decisions, working with HR to extend an offer, and making a hire.

The post The Road That Technical Recruiters Should Follow—Every Time appeared first on Resource Center.

For Great High-Volume Tech Recruiting, Apply the KISS Principle

admin — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:26:44 +0000

UCLA coaching legend John Wooden famously said, “Be quick but don’t hurry.” A good principle for basketball. Equally good for high-volume tech recruiting. If you hurry the technical recruiting process, you’ll end up making bad hires that will harm rather than help your organization. If you drag out the process, your organization won’t have the talent it needs when it needs it.

To meet Wooden’s principle, we recommend applying an even more well-known principle: KISS — yes, Keep it Simple Stupid. Simplify the important steps of recruiting, and make sure you execute them at a high level. That’s how to consistently achieve quality high-volume tech recruiting results.

Of course, specifics matter. Below are some of our favorite tips that will help you stay consistent with the KISS principle.

Stay Organized and On the Same Page

Disorganization is your enemy. It leads to delays, confusion, mistakes and bad hires. And it’s more likely to occur when you’re trying to hire many workers at the same time.

So be vigilant about staying organized. This includes ensuring that you’re on the same page with hiring managers, and that you’re communicating when you need to with candidates. As a LinkedIn high-volume recruiting guide notes, “even the slightest disconnect” with hiring managers “can lead to wasted time and energy.”

Use Automation

Automation helps you stay organized, and ensures that certain key steps—such as candidate communication—are handled correctly every time. So when sensible, take advantage of it.

Use Technical Screening Tools

Technical screening tools are helpful for increasing speed and maintaining quality—especially when you’re hiring in volume.

When you’ve sourced many candidates, checking references is time-consuming and might not even be completed. Automated reference checking ensures all candidates’ references are checked with the same standard.

The technical interview stage can be another bottleneck. Interviews can take days or weeks to arrange, and conducting them takes valuable time away from your technical staff. Outsourcing your technical interviews to the right provider will ensure that interviews are conducted using best practices, that your technical staff’s time isn’t used up, and that results come in as little as 24 hours.

These are just a couple of examples. The ideal high-volume process will use a variety of processes and technologies to improve the organization, save time, and maintain quality.

Make it Easy to Apply

If you want to hire a good number of candidates, it’s important to facilitate a large candidate pool. Part of that is making it easy to apply by keeping any application forms short and simple, and pre-populated responses when possible. An Indeed survey found that 42% of job seekers say that lengthy applications are the most frustrating part of the application process.

Look at Metrics

Track how you’re doing to see what can be improved. Even if you use the other tips in this post, you’re bound to find some ways to fine-tune your process—if you take advantage of key recruiting metrics, including those available through technical screening tools.

As Jerome Ternynck, the founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, told SHRM, two important metrics to track are time to hire and time to start—as these will help you improve the speed of your hiring process.

“Competition for talent is steep and high-volume recruiters have realized that if they don’t hire faster than the competition, they are likely to lose candidates to the competition,” Ternynck said. “Determine internally what your time-to-hire should be and track it across your company to ensure you meet it.”

A variety of other sources discuss keys to success for high-volume recruiting. The focus of these sources is often on seasonal and retail hiring, but some are applicable to technical hiring. The remaining suggestions are some of our favorites from these sources.

Source Your Previous Candidates

When you’re trying to hire tech talent in bunches, you want to source a large number of good candidates. An often-underused source of good candidates is people who’ve applied for IT jobs with your company in the past.

As an Ideal article explains, according to a CareerBuilder survey, “One of the biggest complains employers have about their recruiters is the failure to look at candidates in their own database.”

Focus on Sourcing

A SHRM article notes that high-volume recruiters often need to go beyond the typical large job boards and take advantage of other resources to find quality talent. In the case of tech, great talent can often be found on sites where IT professionals congregate, such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, and online communities.

SHRM also notes the importance of referrals. Recruiting expert Rebecca Barnes-Hogg stated, “Referrals can make or break your search for high-demand talent. It’s too easy to forget relationship building when you’re under pressure to fill large numbers of positions quickly, but job boards and resume databases are no longer as effective as they once were and you need referrals to build a pool of candidates.”

—-8. Write Great Job Descriptions

LinkedIn’s high-volume recruiting guide points out that when you have a lot of open jobs, more candidates isn’t enough—you want to attract BETTER candidates. “One way to attract great talent is to write your job descriptions in a way that appeals to the caliber of people you’re looking to hire. ’Caliber’ doesn’t just mean the right kind of skills and experience, but also the right attitude and values.”

—-9. Assess Current Personnel, Onboarding and Training

An Avontis Group blog post notes the importance of remembering that members of your current staff could have the skills that you need. So don’t forget to see if your existing employees might be suitable for the roles you need to hire for since you already have a good idea of their work performance.

Also, when you bring in a good number of new hires, it’s also important to get new hires up to speed quickly. So evaluate your onboarding and training to ensure that the new talent you bring in will be as successful as soon as possible.

The post For Great High-Volume Tech Recruiting, Apply the KISS Principle appeared first on Resource Center.

8 Cool Talent Acquisition Technologies That Recruiters Need to Consider

admin — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 15:51:59 +0000

What are the reasons that some recruiters aren’t taking advantage of talent acquisition technologies?

Cost is certainly one. A minority might be afraid to modernize. But for most non-adopters, the issue comes down to ego—thinking that they don’t need talent acquisition technologies for work they’re perfectly capable of doing.

Let’s quickly address each of these reasons:

Cost—Technologies often aren’t as expensive as you think. Especially when you consider personnel time invested in the recruiting cycle, deadlines which can be missed due to manual processes, poor decisions resulting from lack of predictive data, and the like.
Fear—It’s difficult, if not impossible, to be an effective recruiter today without using technology. Almost all recruiters use applicant tracking systems, job boards, and resume parsers. It’s not a scary jump to move into many of the other available tools. Pace your implementation to realistic time frames and get training tailored to your learning style.
Ego—Many recruiters are capable of doing most of what talent acquisition technologies do, but these technologies increase your efficiency and enable you to focus on efforts and skills that technology can’t replicate. Don’t let your ego get in the way of using tools that can help you recruit better, raise your status and earn more.

Let’s examine eight talent technologies that can help your recruiting career.

Temporary Labor Marketplaces

While most recruiters use job boards to find talent, temporary labor marketplaces aren’t as widely used. Even though, as of 2020, companies like Intuit realize 40% of the U.S. workforce is made up of contingent workers.

Given the size of the contingent worker population, the value of sourcing quality talent from one of these sites is great.
Example of provider: TopTal

Crowdsourced Recruitment Services

Crowdsourced recruitment involves the use of pools of independent recruiters to source qualified candidates for a fee. This enables you to spend more time on other key tasks, such as wooing promising candidates or working with hiring managers.
Example of provider: Crowdstaffing

Social Search Tools

Social search providers enable you to effectively mine the tremendous number of potential candidates on social media and other searchable sources, such as your organization’s recruiting data.
Example of provider: SwoopTalent

Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

Given the high volume of talent that recruiters work with, even highly organized recruiters can forget key communication with candidates. As every recruiter knows, effective communication is essential for creating positive candidate experiences. On the other hand, as Jack Kelly has detailed, poor communication is at the heart of candidates’ top complaints about the hiring process.

CRMs will help you manage communication with both passive and active candidates, as well as previous applicants, to ensure no important emails are left unsent. Some might be thinking that applicant tracking systems can be used for this. True, to an extent. ATSs manage the applicant process, and as such help organize the communication with applicants only.
Example of provider: Beamery

Automated Skills Assessments

Ideally, especially in skills-driven jobs like IT, applicants will already possess key skills for the position you’re recruiting for. Automated skills assessments can help ensure that the talent you’re considering has basic qualifications. A wide variety of these assessments are available, and some are quite specialized. For example, Lytmus offers simulated tech environments that enable employers to effectively evaluate candidates by how they solve real engineering tasks.
Example of provider: Lytmus

Video Interviewing Technologies

Video interviewing is simply a more efficient way to interview candidates. It gives you more insights about candidates than phone interviews do (and provides a better candidate experience), without the time and expense associated with on-site interviews. Combine the convenience of video interviewing with subject matter experts coached to also be professional interviewers and now you’re talking an undeniable competitive edge above other recruiters.
Example of provider: eTeki

Behavioral Assessments

Behavioral assessments help you determine if candidates have the personality traits that you’re seeking for a given position. Often times, these traits are important for job success. For example, PeopleAssessments.com—whose co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Tom Janz, is an eTeki advisor—evaluates integrity and enthusiasm, both key qualities for most successful hires.
Example of provider: PeopleAssessments.com

Automated Reference Checking Tools

Reference checking can be a frustrating and time-consuming process, especially if you’re having difficulty getting in touch with candidates’ references. Automated reference checking provides a quick, fuss-free and legally compliant way to verify references.
Example of provider: aRefChex

More Ideas
The list above certainly isn’t exhaustive. There are many technologies—and seemingly new ones popping up all of the time—that can benefit recruiters and recruiting at companies of all sizes.

If you’re looking for more ideas, check out this Inc. article on apps that help boost recruiting and retention by business and technology author Minda Zetlin,

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