hiring manager – Resource Center https://resources.eteki.com eTeki-Technical Screening for Quality IT Hires Thu, 10 Nov 2022 10:48:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 Examining 6 Recruiting Metrics, and the Key for Improving Them https://resources.eteki.com/examining-6-recruiting-metrics-key-improving/ Thu, 10 Nov 2022 10:12:46 +0000 https://www.eteki.com/?p=1368 The post Examining 6 Recruiting Metrics, and the Key for Improving Them appeared first on Resource Center.

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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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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):

  1. Ensure the hiring manager provides a complete job description.
  2. Have a detailed intake session with the hiring manager.
  3. Filter resumes aligning with job requirements emphasized by the hiring manager
  4. 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).
  5. During the initial conversation with candidates, evaluate for technical fit.
  6. Have candidates undergo rigorous technical interviews.
  7. 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.

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]]> How to Fast-Track Technical Screening https://resources.eteki.com/webinar/how-to-fast-track-technical-screening/ Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:00:36 +0000 https://resources.eteki.com/?post_type=webinar&p=207493 The post How to Fast-Track Technical Screening appeared first on Resource Center.

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How to Fast-Track

Technical Screening

eTeki, shares how you can accelerate your technical hiring process

Watch

01

Boost

Boost return on interview by submitting pre-qualified candidates to hiring managers and hear them applaud.

02

Remove

Remove internal bias with independent, predictive ‘tech outs’ and reports with a common scoring rubric.

03

Impress

Impress hiring managers and your colleagues by shortlisting the right professionals every time.

Host

Maurice Fuller

Founder - StaffingTec

Speaker

Amanda Cole

Amanda Cole

Vice President of Operations, eTeki

Ready to Fast-Track?

 







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]]> Fixing the Hiring Process – Once and For All https://resources.eteki.com/fixing-the-hiring-process-once-and-for-all/ Fri, 11 Jan 2019 14:17:56 +0000 https://resources.eteki.com/?p=206707 The post Fixing the Hiring Process – Once and For All appeared first on Resource Center.

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Consider this statistic:

The World Economic Forum predicts that  “by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.”

This highlights a core problem with how we have evaluated talent and hired for multiple generations. We tend to evaluate talent in very subjective contexts, even though we know the objective skills needed for success in a role. That’s Problem 1. Problem 2 is that even though the business world is moving faster than ever, we still root the hiring process in bullet-pointed checklists of static skills, and we often take candidates at face value that they have those skills or have lead projects involving them.

These are major flaws of how we staff our organizations, especially in technical roles. When hiring someone highly-technical, especially if it’s a business critical project, you absolutely need to know they have the skills to perform that role. And you need to be comfortable with the breadth of their experience, in case the role you need now evolves in a few years. We’ve met people who entered companies as Java engineers and were working on Internet of Things projects in less than 18 months.

When you miss on hire, the cost is often around 30 percent of their first-year salary. For big engineering roles, that’s a major hit monetarily.

So the question remains: how do you reduce (you cannot totally eliminate) subjectivity and ensure the right skills are possessed by the candidate? This is the 1-2 punch at the center of improving the hiring process in IT/technical jobs — and in reality, in all jobs.

Step 1: Realize the resume is an outdated relic

The resume can help as a guiding document, just as a candidate’s LinkedIn profile can. But by no means should it be considered a be-all and end-all representation of a candidate.

Step 2: Determine what skills are needed for the role

This should occur at the departmental/hiring manager level. There is oftentimes an incentive to “laundry list” every possible skill under the sun. Avoid this and focus on the core skills someone would need in this role right now.

Step 3: Determine what someone legitimately having that skill would look like

This is where you need to move past the resume/LinkedIn/GitHub stage and actually talk to candidates and see them perform certain tasks, be that whiteboard coding tests or other projects. You need to have conversations with them about their experience and how they worked through that problem. This is where you begin to reduce the subjectivity because instead of someone telling you “Oh, I know C+,” you get to see how they actually interact with a project involving C+.

Question Interlude: Isn’t this what we do at eTeki?

Sure is. It’s interviews-as-a-service.

Question No. 2: Let’s say there are 100 candidates (round number) for a specific job. If eTeki has multiple interviewers assessing technical skill, how could an organization be sure of consistency in the process?

We provide them a playbook in terms of what to ask, how to approach the candidate, what tests and exercises to walk them through, etc. There will be certain topics and discussions an employer wants, and that’s road mapped for interviewers. This ensures consistency, which also helps reduce the subjectivity inherent in the hiring process.

Back to the steps. Step 4: Test the candidates on the necessary skills.

Got it. eTeki helps there!

Step 5: Present the findings to a hiring manager.

Ah-ha, this is one of the most beautiful part to fix hiring process. See, now you are presenting actual, objective information about a candidate’s skill sets and capabilities. It isn’t just “I like how he sounded on the phone” or “It’s cool he worked for Oracle for a number of years.” (While it is cool they worked for Oracle, you have no idea what he or she did there until you see them walk through technical skills.) The hiring manager receives scores around technical proficiency and around experience, on 1-5 scales. It makes their process of narrowing down/selecting candidates much more data-driven and less based on “gut feel” or side factors.

Step 6: Make the selection

Now it’s rooted in data!

Step 7: Make the offer

And now you’re not going to miss on it, which will save you that bottom-line cost hit.

Step 8: Celebrate and bolster your relationship with hiring managers

Beautiful, right?

Now, it’s not always that easy, of course. There are hiccups between any human-to-human interaction has a degree of subjectivity. But if you truly assess skills and experience with vetted interviewers, your hiring process instantly becomes more relevant and scientific than it would be otherwise. And that’s an important goal in an era where business needs shift dramatically and we continue to compete on top technical talent.

surendra

Surendra Pepakayala 

Surendra Pepakayala has over 18 years experience in implementing enterprise, web, cloud and DW/BI solutions, leading teams of 15-100 developers/software engineers, DBAs, architects, and project managers on project/product budgets ranging from $100K to $80M in revenue. His work spans startups, the medium sized boutique consulting firms and multinational companies in Insurance, Telecom, Retail, Manufacturing, and Education.

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]]> Guarantee Your IT Hiring Managers a Great ‘Return on Interview’ https://resources.eteki.com/webinar/return-on-interview/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 09:46:00 +0000 http://resources.eteki.com/?post_type=project&p=206272 The post Guarantee Your IT Hiring Managers a Great ‘Return on Interview’ appeared first on Resource Center.

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Guarantee Your IT Hiring Managers

A Great ‘Return on Interview’

Webinar with Industry Big Man Tim Sackett

Watch

01

Learn

Learn five ways successful companies are doing technical interviews differently to choose great talent.

02

Design

Design a technical interview process that attracts talent, and learn the things that turn off technical talent in interview.

03

Develop

Develop an interview strategy for technical talent that will increase your hiring manager satisfaction.

Host

Tim Sackett

President, HRU Technical Resources

Speaker

Amanda Cole

Amanda Cole

VICE PRESIDENT ETEKI

Ready to Fast-Track?

Field will not be visible to web visitor
Field will not be visible to web visitor

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]]> Why You Should Care About Helping Your Hiring Manager https://resources.eteki.com/why-you-should-care-about-helping-your-hiring-manager/ Thu, 25 Oct 2018 14:06:45 +0000 https://resources.eteki.com/?p=206669 The post Why You Should Care About Helping Your Hiring Manager appeared first on Resource Center.

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Though the day-to-day can sometimes feel transactional, recruiting is all about building relationships. Mostly we think about this regarding the candidate, but the relationship between recruiter and hiring manager lies at heart of the process. Without this, the lifecycle would be incomplete and likely to fail. Here, the primary challenge is overcoming the difference of perspective to educate the other and finding a way to meet in the middle. The bulk of this responsibility falls to recruiters, already familiar with how things operate and what we need to succeed. Here’s a systematic look at how and why recruiters should care about helping out their hiring managers:

Impact on processes

Foundational to talent acquisition, how recruiters interact, work with and ultimately support hiring managers directly corresponds with hiring outcomes. However, approaching the process from different places, with different objectives, can often cause friction. In part, this us vs. them mentality comes from opposing vantage points. Recruiters get down in the trenches, doing the sourcing and screening, working with resources at hand to provide hiring managers with the best possible candidates, while hiring managers look to fill a specific need.

According to research from iCIMS, some 80 percent of recruiters think they have a “high” to “very high” understanding of the jobs they recruit for, while 61 percent of hiring managers believe recruiters have, only a “low” to “moderate” understanding. To cross this chasm, taking the time to spell out the process, step by step gives hiring managers clearer visibility into the inner workings of your recruiting team. At the same time, listen and listen carefully to the hiring manager at the outset. From here, share periodic updates to demonstrate progress and help estimate timing.

Effect on candidate experience

Beyond the initial communication between recruiter and hiring manager, working in tandem becomes critical when it comes down to the interview stage. At a time when unemployment rates are low and, well-qualified candidates are in demand, interviewing needs to be seamless and executed with ease.

As analyst Brian Westfall puts it, “Constantly rescheduling interviews cuts both ways: The company suffers while the role goes unfilled, and the job seekers suffer from a frustrating candidate experience.” No doubt hiring managers will recognize the former, but the latter may need some additional explanation in this seller’s market for job candidates. Resolve this by sharing candidate satisfaction scores or feedback you’ve collected from previous interviews. Showing the receipts is a surefire way to bring hiring managers into the fold and providing valuable insight into candidate sentiment.

Emphasis on employer brand

Building on the individual experience is the larger employer brand perception that exists in the world at large. In the age of Glassdoor and social media influence, applicants and employees can tell their story publicly. Recruiters are acutely aware of the power candidates wield and how this may impact their efforts. It is the company’s identity,  or as William Tincup explained, “One part values, one part culture, one part experiences.”

Recruiters account for this with carefully worded job descriptions, exacting sourcing strategies, and curated interview questions. Every step of the process is well-intentioned and deliberate and relates to your employee value proposition. Despite this, like the candidate experience, the hiring manager experience benefits from a line of sight into employer brand standing, ongoing efforts, and how these fit in with the overall recruiting process.    

Check the tech ‘tude

In the midst of learning about hiring needs and explaining the logic and rationale behind the process, recruiters and hiring managers may still find themselves feeling at odds. Though recruiters do not take orders, they do function as project managers for the purpose of finding and hiring top talent. Chalk it up to ego, experience or a little bit of both and it’s easy to let attitude derail effectiveness — and, ultimately, success.

Instead of pushing back on the asks of hiring managers, help them understand how you can help them. Spend time talking, get to know them on a deeper level, including their professional background and strengths and weaknesses. Knowing who you’re working with will make it easier to match with their next hire. Establishing a basis of trust will win your confidence when you go out on a limb on a prospective hire.

Learn to play the game

Having made it this far, recruiters feel empowered to hit the ground running, with or without the help. But let’s not fool ourselves. This is a not a process that recruiters can go alone, which is why there are tools and technologies for everything from sourcing to onboarding. Much like giving support to hiring managers, recruiters need to accept the benefits of screening solutions to expedite their workload and get to qualified candidates faster. You don’t know it all. None of us does. But one thing is for sure, to improve the process and better your outcomes, keep the candidates close and your hiring managers closer.

Reed Hyde

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.

The post Why You Should Care About Helping Your Hiring Manager appeared first on Resource Center.

]]> Engaging your hiring manager to make the most impactful hires https://resources.eteki.com/engaging-your-hiring-manager-to-make-the-most-impactful-hires/ Thu, 24 May 2018 16:10:37 +0000 https://www.eteki.com/?p=2709 The post Engaging your hiring manager to make the most impactful hires appeared first on Resource Center.

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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.

Reed Hyde

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.

The post Engaging your hiring manager to make the most impactful hires appeared first on Resource Center.

]]> That feeling when your candidate flops https://resources.eteki.com/that-feeling-when-your-candidate-flops/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:55:20 +0000 https://www.eteki.com/?p=2669 The post That feeling when your candidate flops appeared first on Resource Center.

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I’m not a marketing guy by any means, but I’ve heard time and again how stories resonate more with the human brain than anything else, so here’s my story.

A few months ago, we were working with a client here at eTeki. The client had a few open technical roles, and for one of them, one of the candidates scored a 1.33 out of 5 on our technical interviews platform — meaning our technical expert interviewer basically had almost no confidence in their ability to perform in the role.

This was confusing to some of us (and some on the client side) because the core elements of a successful hire were there. Namely:

  • The job description was solid.
  • The resume of this candidate was a great match for the job description.
  • The candidate had worked at 2-3 major tech brands.

Normally, one would think a strong resume match + big brands is going to almost instantly get through a recruiter to the hiring manager.

So, I was curious how this candidate got a 1.33. I watched the entire interview on our platform. The candidate was good and gave OK answers, but it was clear that in previous roles, they had worked as part of a team. They didn’t have specific knowledge of certain tech stacks and coding languages. This role required an individual contributor, and the candidate could not have hacked it. The 1.33 score was right.

Hiring managers are busy people, and they spend a lot — A LOT — of time looking at unqualified resumes. This is because the typical screening and sourcing processes don’t do much to weed out exaggerations of knowledge or experience.

I was re-telling this story to Amanda, our VP of Operations, the other day and I hit on two things.

  • One of the biggest challenges for recruiters is earning the hiring manager’s trust in your reliable process.
  • Convincing hiring managers to focus on the most important skills about the job is another.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into how we do this at eTeki.

Build trust with the hiring manager by proving the process
I’ve started encouraging some recruiters to do this. Let’s go back to the 1.33 score example above. Once we validated the 2-3 top candidates — the opposite of Mr. 1.33 — for that position, I recommend to recruiters that they follow this sequence:
Step 1:  Prepare information on the top 2-3 scoring candidates, as well as the “, looks great on paper but scored low on tech screen” candidate (1.33).

  1. Professional social sites
  2. Eligibility results
  3. Technical suitability details
  4. Resume

Step 2: Compare pre-screened candidates in real-time with the hiring manager.

  1. Present the top 3 using the information above
  2. Present your “Candidate 1.33”
  3. Review side by side expert insights for each candidate’s technical performance indicators

This is HUGE for hiring manager-recruiter relationship. Many hiring managers have to be concerned about P&L for their department (it’s tied to their incentives). They have no time to waste on unqualified candidates put in front of them by well-meaning recruiters without a modernized technical validation tool.

They begin to view their relationship with you as strategic and a time-saving value-add. Respect re-enters the equation then. That’s really big, as a strong working relationship between a hiring manager and a recruiter can dramatically benefit a hiring process.

Tailor the process for the hiring manager
Providing the hiring manager an opportunity to add their voice to the interview increases engagement between the recruiter and the hiring manager.  We hear from recruiters that, hiring managers don’t like going into detail. They throw the job description at the recruiter and tell them to get to work.

But when the recruiter can mention, “Hey, there’s this special section where you can communicate directly with the technical expert.” the hiring manager is more engaged. They tend to offer lots of ideas and questions and go into more detail — and again, that helps you, the recruiter, and it helps the overall relationship. It’s a win-win.

What companies pay for when they buy enhanced screening solutions is a crystal ball into the candidates they need to complete the overall strategy. The crystal ball becomes a lot clearer when the underlying relationships are working.

The bottom line
The point of any business is to solve problems for the people it serves, right?
Most of us at eTeki are from either a tech or staffing background. We’ve seen these pain points firsthand, oftentimes for decades. We want to fix them. We want to make hiring managers and recruiters work better together, we want firms to get better candidates, we want people to save time, and we want everyone to feel like the process is fruitful.

Rob Miner

Robert Miner
Chief Revenue Officer at eTeki, helps businesses increase revenues and decrease internal costs by providing state of the art technical screening.

Why waste another hour of hiring manager’s time?

Get Started Now

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]]> Taking Back HRtech – The Wild Wild West https://resources.eteki.com/taking-back-hrtech-the-wild-wild-west/ Thu, 29 Mar 2018 18:15:59 +0000 https://www.eteki.com/?p=2606 The post Taking Back HRtech – The Wild Wild West appeared first on Resource Center.

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Technology in recruiting can oftentimes feel like spackle. Recruiters use it to fill the holes in their background, expertise, experience, value, or something else. We can put our entire faith in the system, because we’ve been told and sold that the system and the process will solve everything.

The problem: not enough in recruitment is doing a good job of identifying the actual problem they need to solve, and not enough are vetting the existing technology enough either.

Let me be clear, though: Technology has not harmed recruiting
I believe deeply in technology. I think it has done great things for talent acquisition and it will only continue to evolve into bigger and better things.

But the technology is only as good as the recruiters using it, or — perhaps this is the more accurate way to represent it — how the organization framed up the usage of the software suite. This is often why “software” becomes “shelf-ware.” If it doesn’t work with existing workflows or the recruiters aren’t educated on it or allowed time to poke around, adoption isn’t going to be high, the contract won’t be renewed, and we’ll be back at Stage 1 in 12-18 months with a new tech stack. No bueno.

How can TA professionals be better about using technology?
Follow this bouncing ball:

Collect data on your processes: This is everything from response rate to emails to interviews scheduled to time to fill to whatever else you want/need to track.

Analyze that data: See where the actual pain points and problems are. Don’t invent them in meetings. Actually look at what’s happening in your organization and see where the problems are.

Now begin going and assessing technology: You can talk to vendors, but when you do, keep the specific problem in mind. Ask if you can get a case study or speak to an existing client who has dealt with that specific problem.

Bring in the right parties: Assessing tech can’t come from just a TA leader. You need to bring in the whole team who might be using the software. They need to see what it’s like, how similar it is to current workflows, etc. Sometimes the vendor will push back on this, but if they want the sale, they’ll usually agree to team-driven demos. Then you need to bring in people from IT (to check on enterprise implementation and connection with other suites), finance (contracts), etc. This isn’t a “HIPPO” (highest paid person’s opinion) situation for the highest-ranking TA leader. This decision needs to be made as an ecosystem.

Use your own data: Demos are done with clean data. Clean data is designed to work in demos. That’s the point. Your data is a bit messy. You should get demos with your data, and/or a 30-60 day trial. But what’s the point if you don’t understand how it works with your data?

Beware the con jobs: “Our product has AI in it” and “It will reduce the cost to hire” are two that always pop out for me. You need to ask deeper questions. What form of AI? What does it do? How does it learn as it goes? How will it solve your issue? HR technology vendors have exploded in recent years, in part because of the low cost of entry — but in part, sadly, because we as a profession haven’t gotten wise enough to catch the tricks.

HR Tech is still the wild, wild west
Once the marketing teams get a hold of it, we get to a place where supposedly every platform can do everything under the sun — but we should be smart enough to know that it’s all in the name of the sale. It might not do everything. And it might not help our specific need.

We should think on this differently: You know how cars are compared? Standard vs. add-on features? Price? Reviews from actual customers?

What if we built a system that compared HR tech around a series of standard variables? So if you wanted to figure out what chatbot was best for you, you’d access this webpage, look at the different features and price points, get in touch with some past customers, and tune out the marketing-speak to get towards the best solution for us.

This is something I’ve heard more in recent years at trade shows and during “conference season.” More people seem to want this — an easy way to compare options and understand what they need.

At the very least, build one internally. Pull in info from vendors (their marketing-speak). Talk to customers and record that. Get pricing information. This comparison dashboard is what should be presented to the ultimate check-writers.

The bottom line
We need to ask tougher, better questions as a profession. We need to be smarter in assessing how and why technology makes sense for our problems. Don’t be afraid to push the status quo. Don’t be afraid of doing the homework. As you do this, your recruiting skills are going to improve too! You’ll be a better analyzer. You’ll be a better thinker. You’ll be a better question-generator.

Tech can be great for recruiting, but we as TA pros have to do more to make sure we’re analyzing and vetting it correctly.

steve

Steve Levy
Steve Levy brings an atypical combination of recruiting expertise and a technical experience to his performance-focused engagements with clients. A founding member of the recently launched Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals, Steve is widely known as a talent acquisition influencer across many industries and has been recognized as one of the most influential technical recruiting thought leaders, one of the top people to follow in social media recruiting, and a Top 100 Twitter Accounts Job Seekers MUST Follow. Check out his blog Recruiting Inferno or catch him as a respected speaker at sourcing and recruiting conferences.

The post Taking Back HRtech – The Wild Wild West appeared first on Resource Center.

]]> We Need Proactive Recruiting Now More Than Ever https://resources.eteki.com/we-need-proactive-recruiting-now-more-than-ever/ Thu, 15 Mar 2018 16:31:28 +0000 https://www.eteki.com/?p=2584 The post We Need Proactive Recruiting Now More Than Ever appeared first on Resource Center.

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When I worked for the #1 technology staffing agency in the United States, I met the most successful recruiter in the company.  What she said then is still clear to me today, “I don’t recruit for jobs on the board (our open reqs).” I couldn’t wrap my head around that, so I sat down to learn what her secret sauce was. Her philosophy and method was to consult with her account manager,  build a portfolio of the technologies that were used in his active and prospective accounts — and using a variety of tactics, she would build a funnel of passive candidates in those technology stacks.

She was a master at maintaining and nurturing those candidates. She developed, nurtured and maintained a seven-figure pipeline. It’s like a game of chess – she thought ahead and had all the right moves.  So whenever her account manager’s requirement hit the board, she already had a bench of qualified candidates.

Wayne Gretzky’s father, Walter, taught “The Great One” how to win with this mantra, “Go to where the puck is going, not where it has been”.

Tactics
Let’s explore some of the tactics essential to proactively build a robust pipeline that will increase your success in existing accounts and win you opportunity in prospective accounts.

Existing Accounts
In existing accounts, or ones where you are able to talk to the hiring manager, develop an open relationship by describing your proactive sourcing approach. Let them know that you are willing to put your team to work for them before they even have a need. You must ensure that the hiring managers know you are not going to turn this open relationship into sales pressure.  Present it as being more like a talent show. Use the up-front “skin-in-the-game” value of your team’s efforts, to get buy-in to proactively submit exceptionally qualified passive candidates, even before an open job order exists.

Oftentimes, hiring managers will have internal issues with an employee, but not be at the point of considering replacement. Providing a pipeline of exceptional passive candidates oftentimes creates an opportunity to make a “replacement placement” that was not even in the works.

The key involves establishing the value of the intake session to the hiring manager, and a developing comprehensive sourcing strategy.

Prospective Accounts
With prospective accounts, you will likely have an incumbent staffing provider who already has a competitive advantage. So before we focus on what you can do to win an opportunity to compete, let’s recognize what everyone else is leading with:

  • I will work harder than anyone else
  • Give me the hardest to fill requirement
  • I’m young and hungry and will work harder
  • I’m old and experienced and will work smarter
  • I have a billion LinkedIn connections
  • I will give you better rates
  • I will find you the best candidates
  • I will find you more candidates
  • I will only show you the best two candidates
  • I have a big “S” tattooed on my chest and my friends call me “StaffingMan”
  • I’m pulling the same candidates off the job boards as everyone else but I’ve given each of them a pack of Tic-Tacs.

When a hiring manager pays your company for a candidate, they are not investing in your sales acumen, they are investing in your proactive recruiting process.  So it is important to be aware that presentation is what gets you in the door – product is what keeps you there.  Take the sales ego out of your playbook – stop selling yourself and start selling your recruiting process.

Account Mapping
With both existing accounts as well as prospective accounts, Account Mapping is the key to proactive recruiting.  When you recruit proactively you end up with product the competition does not have.  As noted by Glen Cathey of Boolean Blackbelt fame, “Posting jobs yields a very low percentage of qualified applicants – sometimes less than 5%-10%.”

In what I like to call “espionage recruiting,” proactively gathering intel from candidates is the key to account mapping.  

The goal is to analyze your current sourcing methods, and then refine as many as you can to become low effort-high impact.  

  • Reference checks
    • Peer references = possible passive candidates
  • Job boards
    • Reverse resume searches
    • Search for reference names and phone numbers
    • Learn what technologies your business development prospects are using
  • User groups
    • Never try to sell, be honest, and seek understanding
  • LinkedIn
    • Write posts and share in relevant LinkedIn technical groups, as well as provide thoughtful commentary on posts shared by IT thought leaders.
    • Use Boolean to search for candidates open to making job changes. (“looking for” or “new opportunities”) AND “title”
    • If you don’t get the response you’re looking for with prospective candidates found in your Boolean search, use the similar profiles feature to the right.
  • Boolean Searches
  • Intel from candidate  
    • Who else is hiring?
    • Company structure of past employers
      • Who was their best “go-to” person when they faced tough challenges?
        • Uncover the most senior talent
      • How were hiring decisions made?
      • Who are the key players?
    • What other agencies have they been approached by?
      • What jobs did they turn down?
    • What other agencies have they worked for?
      • Likes and dislikes
    • What offers have they turned down
      • New business development targets

The goal is to focus how much recruiting effort and time is expended in finding a submittable candidate who is likely to get the job.  Put a little effort into organizing the discarded data which that recruiting effort produced.

A simple way to look at it is you started with one job requirement.  You sourced 6-8 reasonable candidates, of which one gets the job. You have 7 marketable candidates left, and a wealth of candidate intel to lead you to new business opportunities you didn’t know existed.

What’s different about your proactive recruiting process?  Do you have a crystal ball to identify which candidate is best suited for the job, like eTeki’s 2,500+ expert freelance tech interviewers?  Tell your hiring manager something they have not heard already, something that contributes to their success.

Get Trial Started
Rob Miner

Robert Miner
Chief Revenue Officer at eTeki, helps businesses increase revenues and decrease internal costs by providing state of the art technical screening.

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]]> Is your recruiting process actually alienating top-tier candidates? https://resources.eteki.com/recruiting-process-actually-alienating-top-tier-candidates/ Fri, 23 Feb 2018 09:33:38 +0000 https://www.eteki.com/?p=2563 The post Is your recruiting process actually alienating top-tier candidates? appeared first on Resource Center.

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There’s a common misunderstanding in the talent acquisition community. We tend to focus on the negative results of common recruiting processes and hiring campaigns.  Let’s change it up (put our pessimism aside) and try to focus on how, moving forward, we can avoid the alienation of our best candidates and ensure we actually HIRE them.    

Consider the ‘why’ & ‘how’
This comes down to communication between a recruiter and a hiring manager. Normally both sides understand, or at least can communicate around, the actual job description and the bullets/objectives therein. That’s a good start. But when the communication isn’t clear between those two sides, usually the “why” is left out — why does that manager need that hire at that moment in time? When the “why” isn’t clear, people get brought in for roles they’re not suited for. They may have the requisite bullet points, but they’re not what the hiring manager actually needs at that moment. This is why conversation is crucial and why all managers need to be able to clearly explain the “why” of every open seat they have.

So, how do companies accomplish a clean process — the kind where top candidates don’t feel alienated (and the best people actually GET hired)?  What are these companies doing that make people WANT to work for them?

Avoiding dishonesty: Proactive recruiting
Proactive recruiting is about building a pipeline and establishing relationships before a position is officially open. Be honest and set expectations up front for all aspects of the job. Honesty helps to move hiring the process along and fast track your process to get you from interview to salary negotiation. But some organizations are less than honest about their proactive recruiting methods, which can lead to forced relationships or long, drawn-out conversations where an actual role is never going to be in the cards. In those cases, the candidate side will be turned off.

Being timely
Establish an honest time-to-hire schedule.  Set the expectation(s) as to how you will be communicating throughout the process and when to anticipate these communications.

Have you ever been considered for a position and gone WEEKS without hearing anything about where you are in the process at this point (or if you’re still even being considered)?  That kind of wait time never translates well to candidates.  It often feels disrespectful. Even early on in the process, taking forever to get an interview scheduled is a turn-off — and remember, the A and B level tech talent (the people you want) have other offers and a lot of times, better options. You need to act fast.

Establishing goals: The big picture
We all have career aspirations and goals.  You want to believe that each role you take can lead somewhere, or the keystone of your professional arc. So, when a recruiter only talks about their needs for a req as opposed to the needs of the candidate — alienation occurs.  The candidate now feels like an outlier instead of someone being sought out.   Jobs are extremely important to people.  Most spend the better part of their middle years at or around work.  Acknowledging and addressing a candidates career aspirations is a must during the hiring process.

Vetting for tech
A lot of companies will try to vet tech candidates with one of the following methods (or — things to avoid during the vetting process):

  • Long lists of scripted questions, i.e. “What To Ask A [Developer]”
    • Scripted questions will bore the candidate and they may not accurately reflect their skill set.
  • Long form tests
  • Interviews with HR or managers that aren’t familiar with the role
    • Candidates tend to feel less confident about their role when being asked technical questions by individuals that are not as technically proficient as they are.

Avoid alienation by…

  • Having better conversations with hiring managers.  This will provide more context on the role and specifically why it’s a current need. Hiring managers should explain which of the job description requirements are most important and which are negotiable.
  • Evaluating your current processes.  Where are the choke points? Where are things slowing down (and how to speed them back up)?
  • Using third-party technical vetting. This is what we do — interviews as a service, to help you avoid bad hires, meet volume hiring needs, and address potential gaps in expertise.  Tech candidates love talking tech to an individual they consider a peer.

Caring: This is where most effective business process starts — someone has to care. Yes, recruiters are busy. They are spinning a lot of plates and it can feel like top-of-funnel activities and scheduling are the most valuable. Evaluate your process and how it affects not only your company and your success, but the success of your candidates.

Rob Miner

Robert Miner
Rob Miner has a wealth of experience providing technology solutions to businesses and corporations large and small, from start-ups to Fortune 50 organizations. By consistently delivering well crafted solutions to address business-critical needs, clients have actively sought his input to formulate and execute profitable business initiatives. His experience covers technology staffing, managed services, professional services projects & implementations, training, and building sales teams.

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