hiring managers – Resource Center

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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Subpar hiring managers can be common. What do you do?

admin — Mon, 14 May 2018 18:42:43 +0000

The point of this article isn’t to knock hiring managers. Oftentimes they are very busy, accountable to their own P&L and other factors, and recruiting/talent acquisition — while ideally, it would be a primary focus for them — isn’t, because other priorities rise up.

So when we say “subpar hiring managers,” we don’t mean at their overall job. They might be great at core tenets of their job. We mean it in the sense of “Not involved in the recruiting process as much as they could be.”

These hiring managers tend to:

Under-communicate
Not offer context on the role
Not make themselves available for interview windows
Generally seem to make the process harder as opposed to easier

If you encounter — or consistently work with — a hiring manager like this, what can you do?

High-Level Solutions
Work to build the relationship: Obvious advice, yes. But here’s what we mean. Go out of your way to try and deal with the hiring manager. Understand what they like — the composition of their family, sports teams, interests, hobbies, passions. Engage with them around those topics. Take them to coffee or drinks. Explain that you want to make their teams super high-performing; you want their team to be among the best and most bonus’ed in the company. Be their ally.
Psychologically, this can be a challenge. If your role is rooted in HR — which does not face revenue — and their role is tied to P&L, they might view their work as more important than yours, and not make time for you. Keep trying. Everything around work is about relationships. Keep building those relationships.

Tactical Solutions
Focus your initial meetings with them: They are busy. They don’t want their time wasted, as their time feels tight as it is. So simplify the initial meetings. Here’s what you need to know:

Why do you need this role?
What are the three main skills you need?
What was lacking in this function before?
What type of person do you think works best in your current team?
Where do you see the role evolving to in 3-5 years?

Get those answers quickly, write down the answers, and get out.
Now prepare a one-pager: The one-pager will run down everything you discussed and include a sample job description and plan for posting the job. Give them right of first refusal/edits. If it’s very similar to the quick meeting you had, you won’t get a lot of pushback typically. Now you can commence a search.

The most obvious thing of all
Bring them good candidates: If you constantly bring them subpar candidates (in their eyes), they won’t respect you long-term and may even undercut or run end-arounds on you on future placements. That’s unfortunately fact at most organizations.
But “bring them good candidates” is the top rung of the recruiting ladder, right? Everyone is trying to get there and no one does it perfectly.
We have a little bit of a hack.
Most hiring managers want to know that the candidate:

Can do the job now, i.e. hit the ground running
Isn’t lying about past experience or qualifications

As roles become more technical in the form of coding languages, personalization suites, advanced data, and more … these things become harder to screen for by recruiters and hiring managers who have been thinking one way about their industry for years. They just don’t know what a true personalization expert might look like.
But you can outsource that function to a technical expert.

The expert knows what questions to ask, and knows how to determine how much, well, BS is coming back from the candidate.

Here’s what this does, subtly: now you’re changing the dynamic of your relationship with the hiring manager. Consider this example.
Candidate A went to Stanford, worked at Oracle, and led a big data project.
Candidate B went to a mid-level school, worked at some high-growth companies, and also led data projects.

When the technical expert comes in for interviews, he realizes “A” was just a member of that data team. He lead nothing. He has some skills but not the full suite — and he’s never run a team.

Now, if you present “A” and “B” to a hiring manager, a lot are going to favor “A” — brand-name school, brand-name company, all boxes being checked.
When you present and say “B” is better, you have real reasons (data!) and background from a technical expert for saying why “B” is better.

You just brought the hiring manager a better candidate, and he/she respects your opinion and process more.

Tons of aspects of the recruiting function are outsourced everyday throughout the entire ecosystem. Outsourcing the technical expertise piece makes perfect sense in terms of bolstering the hiring manager-recruiting relationship.

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Ryan Leary
Ryan helps create the processes, ideas and innovation that drives RecruitingDaily. He’s our in-house expert for anything related to sourcing, tools or technology. A lead generation and brand buzz building machine, he has built superior funnel systems for some of the industries top HR Tech and Recruitment brands. He is a veteran to the online community and a partner here at RecruitingDaily.

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4 Technical Recruiter Resources for Great Candidate Knockout Questions

admin — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 13:53:46 +0000

Many IT hiring managers, as we’ve detailed, complain about technical recruiters’ lack of technical knowledge. One reason for this complaint: in many cases, too many clearly unqualified candidates advance to the technical interviewing stage, which can result in:

Wasted time for technical interviewers
Longer time to hire
Lower quality of hire

As a technical recruiter, you can improve your reputation and relationships with hiring managers by consistently screening out clearly unqualified candidates during pre-screening. One method is asking effective candidate knockout questions. This is possible even without strong technical knowledge. You just need to ensure:

The questions cover skills that are highly relevant and meaningful to the job.
You have the ability to evaluate candidates’ responses (as a result, questions with right or wrong answers are ideal, while questions requiring candidates to write code are ill advised if you lack coding skills)

In this post, we offer four recruiter resources that should help you with this effort.

Hiring Managers

In a perfect world, hiring managers will provide you with the knockout questions and answers for particular positions during effective intake sessions. Encourage them to do so. Since they are the ideal people to create questions that weed out weak candidates before the technical interviewing stage.
Unfortunately, you’re not always dealing with a perfect world, and hiring managers may be unwilling or unable to provide you with knockout questions (for example, they might not have the time). In this situation, you’ll need to identify questions yourself. However, it’s important to provide your questions to hiring managers to ensure that they approve them. If they don’t, it might prompt them to identify questions they believe are better—which is, of course, ideal, and also educational for you.

CareerCup and 3. the balance

Be realistic about your ability—or lack thereof—to have complex technical discussions and evaluate candidates based on them. If you aren’t a former tech professional, chances are this is outside your skill set. As a result, if you find yourself needing to identify questions, we don’t recommend trying to come up with questions in your head. Instead, take advantage of outside resources. Tech professionals often discuss technical interviewing questions online, and you can beg, borrow, steal, or modify those that are appropriate (i.e., whose answers you could evaluate) to use as knock out questions.
Two great places to find great technical interview questions that you can use are CareerCup and the balance.

CareerCup, founded by leading technical interviewing expert Gayle Laakman McDowell, helps IT workers prepare for technical interviews. It includes questions sorted by company, technical topic and job title. Examples of questions we found include:
For a Quality Assurance Engineer:

A bug was found in production, but not in QA. What are two possible reasons it wasn’t caught in QA?

For an Android Engineer:

Tell me about one Android API that you had difficulty using in a project. How did you resolve that issue?

For a System Administrator:

What is firmware? What is a device driver? How are they related and how are they different?

The balance, meanwhile, is a financial advice site but has run several articles on technical interviewing questions. Examples of questions we found there include:

Define authentication and authorization and the tools that are used to support them in enterprise deployments.
What is ETL, and when should it be used?
Describe the advantages and disadvantages of dynamic memory allocation vs. static memory allocation.
What is a VLAN?

Google

Google can be your ally in finding questions that are relevant and meaningful, because targeted searches enable you to find questions that are appropriate for particular roles. For example, what if you were trying to find a security analyst? When we Googled “technical interview questions for security analysts,” we found an InfoSec Institute piece by Kurt Ellzey titled “Top 50 Information Security Interview Questions [Updated for 2017].” Many of the questions have right or wrong answers, which is awesome. And we know they’re relevant to security analysts. Awesome again!

Of course, be smart with Google. Vet the reputability and quality of the source. And, of course, run any questions by the hiring manager to ensure that they are appropriate.

Setting Expectations with Candidates
While the primary purpose of this post is to offer resources for knock out questions, we’d be remiss if we wrapped up this post without mentioning the importance of setting expectations with candidates when you ask them your knock out questions.

The reason you need to set expectations is because top candidates enjoy demonstrating their skills and experience, and want to be asked challenging questions. Giving them a quality candidate experience is one reason we recommend technical interviewers ask tough questions.
So:

Acknowledge that you’re not a technical expert
Let candidates know that they might find your questions simplistic or rudimentary.
Explain that this is not a technical interview, but rather a preliminary round the hiring manager has asked you to conduct to help ensure only qualified candidates receive technical interviews.

By pairing effective knockout questions with this communication, you’ll be able to weed out weak candidates while keeping stronger candidates interested in the job.
photo credit: Club Paf Paf Boxing Gala 10.9.2016 via photopin (license)

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IT Hiring Managers Give Technical Recruiting Process, Recruiters Tepid Reviews

admin — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:30:35 +0000

A 2014 study by ERE Media found that hiring managers only give recruiters a C-plus grade for their effectiveness in filling open positions with talented employees.

How do hiring managers feel in 2017? We decided to poll IT hiring managers we know—members of our eTeki technical panel and members of our network—to get their insights about the quality of the technical hiring process and the effectiveness of technical recruiters. The people we polled were:
Phani Shekhar Bhandaru
Richard Bullard
Awanish Golwara
Cesar Jimenez
Bhanu Kishore Mandava
Bala Nemani
Amrut Patil
Manas Ranjan
Heath Cory Renfrow
Deepti Vernal

Question 1: As a hiring manager, what are the biggest problems or pain points that YOU face during the technical hiring process?
Renfrow: The biggest problem I see is when scenario-based interview questions are used to gauge experience. To truly determine technical experience, we need technical interviewers to ask behavioral-based questions.

Bullard: The biggest problem I’ve had is finding qualified professionals to interview. Recruiters rarely understand mainframe requirements (e.g. z/OS is a language, right?). I had to read many resumes to select those I determined were fit to interview. Many had no discernable mainframe expertise on their resumes. In other words, much of the technical hiring process was a waste of time for me—and I was already overloaded with my own tasks.

Ranjan: Sometimes it’s very difficult to judge a candidate. So many candidates are unable to write code in pen and paper. As a result, interviewers can be uncertain whether the candidates really code in day-to-day life or not.

Golwara: Filtering the right candidates from a large list is the challenge.

Nemani: Instead of receiving qualified and shortlisted candidates, we receive a pile of resumes that are not relevant or not qualified.

Bhandaru: Choosing the right technical candidate is difficult.
Jimenez: One challenge is validating whether candidates have the technical experience that they claim to have. A second is working with all of the decision-makers to make time for interviews.

Patil: We need to find a way to assess technical knowledge in a better way.

Takeaways:

Selecting the right candidate—one who has the necessary technical skills and experience to succeed at the job—is the top challenge.
Effectively validating technical experience is critical for selecting consistently selecting the right candidate.
Using behavioral-based interview questions, rather than scenario-based questions, is important for validating technical experience.
Many employers can stand to improve their sourcing and screening of technical candidates.

Question 2: As a hiring manager, what are the biggest problems that you face when working with technical recruiters?
Jimenez: They often don’t understand the technical requirements for the job we’re looking to fill.

Mandava: Technical recruiters often don’t assess candidates using the proper requirements.

Nemani: Recruiters need to understand the job requirements and learn about the technical environment. Without understanding the job/role, it is difficult to effectively match candidates with it. Also, many “technical” recruiters are NOT technical.

Patil: They don’t have in-depth technical knowledge.

Verma: Many don’t have much technical knowledge.

Ranjan: While technical recruiters do a good job of finding the technical terms for which they are assigned, they don’t recognize when candidates use shortened versions or abbreviations. This can cause us to lose good, qualified candidates.

Bullard: The two biggest challenges were that most technical recruiters were inexperienced with understanding mainframe technology terms and requirements and had serious issues with the English language—both verbal and written.

Renfrow: They often lack the necessary technical knowledge to effectively weed out unqualified candidates.

Takeaways:

Hiring managers are often frustrated by technical recruiters’ lack of technical knowledge, finding that it can lead to ineffective candidate sourcing, screening and assessment.
Either the entire recruiting industry changes its approach and requires technical recruiters to have technical experience, or technical recruiters have to do more to understand the job and the environment.
To understand the job and the environment, technical recruiters need to work better with hiring managers. They need to work with hiring managers throughout the technical recruiting lifecycle to make necessary adjustments along the way. This begins with having more intensive, more strategic intake sessions. They can’t be afraid to ask questions, such as to learn about where potential candidates gather (online, at conferences, etc.) so they can properly source them. And they shouldn’t be ashamed to say they don’t understand a technical term or acronym. Technology is a language, and hiring managers shouldn’t expect technical recruiters to speak it at the same level as they do. But they do and should expect technical recruiters to find them quality candidates who meet the technical requirements for the job.
If recruiters and hiring managers at a company are having a difficult time working together, it’s important to respect each other’s professional boundaries and to find and use technology tools that help fill the gap.

Question 3: What overall grade would you give your technical hiring process, and why?
Renfrow: I’d give our process an eight on scale of one to 10, and that’s because we use background research and use technical experts to assess technical qualifications.

Bullard: D-minus. The best staff I could hire was pretty much inadequate, lacking requisite experience and skills. I felt I would be wasting my time to replace the worst staff members and, as the technical solution architect, I had no time available to train those who could be trainable. It was a serious train wreck.

Mandava: For ability to assess technical knowledge, I’d rate our process five out of five.

Nemani: Poor to average. Problems include poor job descriptions from the hiring managers/team, lack of understanding about the job from the recruiter, and poor screening techniques from the sourcing/recruiting team. Overall hiring quality is poor, and it takes too long to bring someone onboard.

Jimenez: I’d give our process a C. Managers are exhausted during the interview process, and they always have the challenge of losing candidates to other opportunities because the interview process takes too long.

Takeaways:

Although some time has passed since the ERE hiring manager survey findings, many hiring managers remain dissatisfied with recruiters and their hiring results.
Properly assessing required technical qualifications and completing the hiring process in an efficient amount of time are both keys to achieve hiring manager satisfaction with the technical hiring process.

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4 Commitments Recruiters Need From Hiring Managers to Achieve Great IT Hiring Results

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 11:52:33 +0000

We’ve been writing recently about return on interview, a new recruiting measure. In our last post, we provided a seven-step process for recruiters to deliver qualified shortlists so that IT hiring managers enjoy a great return on interview.
Consistently achieving a great return on interview leads to benefits such as:

Strong time-to-hire and quality-of-hire metrics.
Stronger IT department performance
Increased company profits

But here’s the rub: as a recruiter you can’t achieve this goal alone. You need IT hiring manager to buy into the process, and do their part as well. In this post we examine four commitments recruiters need from hiring managers to achieve great IT hiring results.

Set Expectations

As a recruiter, you need to know the candidate qualifications IT hiring managers are looking for. Otherwise, you are left guessing, which leads to the wrong candidates advancing to the final interview stage, and possibly even being hired.
As a result: you need hiring manager to:

Give you fully thought out technical job descriptions for each position that list the specific experience and skill requirements, and list preferences separately. (If they need a good primer on writing technical job descriptions, see Dave Fecak’s post “Writing Job Descriptions to Attract Technical Talent.”)
Take the time during intake sessions to clarify any questions you have.

It’s also important to agree with hiring manager on what’s expected of each of you during the hiring process, so everybody’s clear on what they’re supposed to do.

Be Accountable

It’s easy for IT hiring manager to prioritize other demands (e.g., project deadlines) over hiring. As a recruiter, you need hiring managers to commit to being accountable in the hiring process.
Most importantly, you need hiring managers to respond quickly when it’s time to take action. For example, hiring managers can’t delay in setting up interviews after you deliver your shortlist. Given the intense competition for top tech talent, any delay could lead to losing out on potential quality hires.

Collaborate on Candidate Screening

IT hiring managers need to commit to serving as advisors during the candidate screening process. When they collaborate on screening—instead of just leaving screening up to you as the recruiter—it helps the right candidates emerge on the final shortlist.
Hiring managers can be helpful during the screening process by:

Prioritizing screening steps. Do they want you to see if candidates have contributed on Stack Overflow? On GitHub?
Contributing to the technical interview process. For example, we recommend IT hiring manager to provide the areas they’d pick to cover if they were the ones to perform the technical interview.

Give Timely Feedback

The recruiting process rarely runs perfectly, so it needs to be adjusted and fine-tuned. As a recruiter, you need IT hiring managers to provide quality, timely feedback to make proper adjustments. After all, you can’t read their minds.
For example, you want IT hiring managers to tell you:

What they like and dislike about the qualifications of the candidates on your shortlists.
Whether they’re satisfied with the amount of time it’s taking to deliver shortlists.

Only by knowing IT hiring managers’ insights can you properly tweak job requirements and the screening process to deliver better candidates or to deliver candidates in less time.

Work as Partners
Recruiters and IT hiring managers need to be partners. All partners have clear expectations of each other, own their own parts of the process, and provide feedback to each other.

Ultimately, the success or failure of your partnerships with IT hiring manager will go a long way to determining the success or failure of recruiting efforts. Research by Bersin by Deloitte shows that a strong relationship between the recruiter and hiring manager is the “most influential predictor” of talent acquisition performance outcomes—four times more than any other factor.

Strong time-to-hire and quality-of-hire metrics.
Stronger IT department performance
Increased company profits

Set Expectations

Give you fully thought out technical job descriptions for each position that list the specific experience and skill requirements, and list preferences separately. (If they need a good primer on writing technical job descriptions, see Dave Fecak’s post “Writing Job Descriptions to Attract Technical Talent.”)
Take the time during intake sessions to clarify any questions you have.

It’s also important to agree with hiring manager on what’s expected of each of you during the hiring process, so everybody’s clear on what they’re supposed to do.

Be Accountable

Collaborate on Candidate Screening

Prioritizing screening steps. Do they want you to see if candidates have contributed on Stack Overflow? On GitHub?
Contributing to the technical interview process. For example, we recommend IT hiring manager to provide the areas they’d pick to cover if they were the ones to perform the technical interview.

Give Timely Feedback

What they like and dislike about the qualifications of the candidates on your shortlists.
Whether they’re satisfied with the amount of time it’s taking to deliver shortlists.

Only by knowing IT hiring managers’ insights can you properly tweak job requirements and the screening process to deliver better candidates or to deliver candidates in less time.

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The Twin Consequences of Relying on Traditional Interviews for Hiring

admin — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:50:53 +0000

The title of a recent New York Magazine article declared, “Job Interviews Are a Terrible Way to Find the Right Candidate.”

The article’s criticism of job interviews: “We see what we want to see. We’re great at quickly forming first impressions, but we’re pretty terrible at changing our minds when new information comes in after the fact.”

Research largely backs this criticism up. A 2014 CareerBuilder survey found that nearly half (49%) of employers know within the first five minutes of an interview whether a candidate is a good or bad fit for a given position, while 87% know within the first 15 minutes. A 2015 study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, meanwhile, found that 60% of interviewers made their hiring decision within the first 15 minutes, a somewhat lower but still significant portion.

The Twin Consequences of Relying on First Impressions in Hiring
There are twin consequences of relying on job interviews driven by first impressions.

Bad hires—personality, not job suitability, drives hiring decisions

As the New York Magazine article points out, interviewers are drawn to candidates whom they like—typically those with strong personal, aka “soft” skills. Soft skills have value in the workplace, but candidates must have aptitude in technical and other skills that are necessary to succeed at a given role, or they’ll end up as bad hires.

Less diverse candidates tend to be hired

In addition to bad hires, relying on job interviews leads to biased hiring. The reason: Interviewers are drawn to candidates who are like them. The same gender, the same ethnicity, the same sexuality, the same background, the same interests, etc. This leads to fewer opportunities for diverse candidates, but also contributes to lower performance and creativity and less innovation for employers, as there is less thought diversity.

How Can Employers Avoid These Consequences?
Employers can take a number of actions to mitigate these twin consequences, including:

Educating hiring managers and other interviewers about interviewing biases.
Instituting diversity and inclusion programs, and sticking to them.
Using screening tools (reference checks, background checks, skills assessments, intelligence assessments, etc.) aggressively to filter out candidates who aren’t good fits—before the job interview stage.

The Extra Action for Tech and IT Hiring
Technical skills and experience are especially critical for new hires to succeed in tech and IT hires. While a sales person might succeed based on their interpersonal skills, having stellar soft skills isn’t enough in tech. You must have technical chops.

As a result, it’s critical that employers NOT rely on first impressions from traditional interviews for making tech and IT hiring decisions. Of course, tech and IT don’t have the best reputation for diversity, which is another reason not to rely primarily on traditional interviews.

Fortunately, in addition to the screening tools available for filtering out candidates for other positions, in your tech and IT hiring, you have another powerful tool: the technical interview. Technical interviews evaluate whether candidates have the necessary technical skills and experience to perform a given job. Best performed as the last step in the candidate screening process, before candidates are delivered to hiring managers, technical interviews weed out the technically unqualified. Three of the benefits of technical interviews are:

Better return on interview for hiring managers—they don’t waste their time interviewing unqualified candidates.
Better hiring quality—even if hiring managers’ final hiring decisions are guided by their first impressions, they’ll still be hiring qualified candidates.
Improved hiring diversity—your gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. don’t matter in technical interviews, as they focus on skills and experience, not personality and cultural fit.

Just how big of a difference can technical interviews make? According to a landmark University of Notre Dame study, technical interviews are 5.5 times more predictive of future on-the-job behavior than traditional interviews.

Take a Multi-Faceted Approach
Ultimately, to get the best hiring results, you need to use the various tools at your disposal, and to take a considered, multi-faceted approach. There’s still a place for traditional interviews at the end of the process, but due to their limitations and shortcomings, it’s critical to take other actions that support hiring quality and diversity.

photo credit: aqua.mech Beautiful woman with grimace beacuse of bad smell. Isolated on white. via photopin (license)

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Reacting to LinkedIn’s Global Staffing Trends 2017 Report

admin — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 15:16:44 +0000

Like many in the recruiting space, we were excited to see the results of LinkedIn’s Global Staffing Trends 2017 report. In this post we look at some of the key insights from the report, and offer our reactions.

Social recruiting, candidate screening and candidate automation are the trends defining the future of recruiting

Of this, the No. 4 takeaway of the report, LinkedIn notes, “Using social and professional networks to generate new business and recruit more diverse candidates are on top of recruiters’ wish list. Another prominent trend is the automation of the screening and hiring process.”
Our reactions:

Using freelance technical interviewers could help with expanding diversity and inclusion initiatives. Internal interviewers, because they might work with candidates if they are hired, can be biased in their evaluations. Freelance interviewers, meanwhile, offer unbiased, independent opinions on technical skills—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, etc.

As companies look to increase candidate diversity, they may need assistance in screening in other languages and time zones.

While automation has value, the human factor is needed to delve into candidates’ technical experience. Only interviewers can ask probing questions and follow-ups to ensure that candidates have the necessary technical experience to succeed in a given role. With eTeki, for example, employers get the automation of submitting jobs, candidates, but with a human freelance interviewer who does the technical assessment based on automated criteria—all just as fast as a computer-based test. This process allows automation for the benefit of the recruiter and face time for the candidate, combining more accurate technical screening results with a higher-quality candidate experience.

68% of staffing firms expect to grow in 2017, with 79% expecting an increase in the volume of candidates placed.

Our reaction:

With 83% of staffing firms saying their average time to place is less than three months, recruiters need to figure out how to screen and place candidates faster to maintain that speed.

IT and engineering roles are the top two priorities to place for clients.

Our reactions:

Recruiters can’t forget about maintaining candidate quality. You need a workflow that, while increasing volume, does not sacrifice candidate quality and nurtures the candidate experience. If candidate quality slips, you risk eroding your relationships with hiring managers.

You need to be sourcing broadly to deliver enough talent. To do so, you need the additional support of a quality technical screen, not just a rapid technical screen. Many candidates are exaggerating or even faking IT and engineering resumes, so it’s critical to clamp down on technical screens to ensure you are delivering quality candidates.

Client Retention Year Over Year and Number of Candidates Placed Are the Most Important Metrics for Measuring Success.

Our reactions:

It all comes down to the fundamentals of meeting submission deadlines and providing enough quality candidates to hiring managers.

A key concept here is increasing hiring managers’ “return on interview.” The idea: by delivering candidates who are qualified—meaning qualifications, certifications and technical experience are all checked—hiring managers get more value from the interviews they conduct.

Final Thought
Ultimately, the reality is this: So what if you can source fast and submit fast. You’re not going to maintain positive relationships with hiring managers if the candidates you submit aren’t any good. An important part of ensuring high candidate quality is having candidates undergo a proper technical screen with a qualified interviewer. Remember, this can be part of an automated process, and occur just as fast as a computer-based screen.

The post Reacting to LinkedIn’s Global Staffing Trends 2017 Report appeared first on Resource Center.

Here’s What Tim Sackett Has to Say About eTeki

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 11:33:17 +0000

Questions often asked by talent acquisition professionals and leaders are around finding a technology that will help them make better technical hires. In his popular blog Tim Sackett, a well known name in the HR Tech industry stated that “There are some ‘test’ type technologies on the market, but those are really difficult to actively select from and the tests are usually super generic.”

Tim also opined that it is no secret that most HRs, talent acquisition professionals and leaders have little functional knowledge when it comes to technical positions. Internal IT teams are stretched thin, so using one’s own staff as part of the selection process becomes a huge hindrance to most organizations. Still, hiring managers expect talent acquisition departments to do a better job at screening candidates for technical experience.

Tim Sackett thinks eTeki might offer a brilliant solution to the above scenario. He says “Along comes eTeki, an interviewing platform that uses screened functional IT talent to do live interviews. It’s like ‘Uber’ for selection. Need to interview a developer? eTeki will partner one’s organization with a developer skilled in the same technology one has, plus skilled in interviewing technical candidates.”

In his review of eTeki, he has mentioned what he liked the most:

– eTeki provides detailed scoring and comments based on the technical skills that are to be assessed. Since eTeki interviewers have no vested interest in who gets hired, one get more of an unbiased assessment than with one’s internal team.

– Every eTeki interview is recorded with video, so hiring managers can go through and see the entire thing if needed. Also, the interview platform has a collaborative code editor which enables the candidates to demonstrate their coding skills.

– Super simple to use for all three parties, the candidate, the company and the interviewer. A coded personal link is sent to the candidate with a password, face to face video, nothing to download, mobile enabled.

– Crowdsourced interviewer rating system ensures the interviewers who are using can actually do what they say they can do. one can see comments from other organizations who have previously used these interviewers to screen their talent. Currently, they have over 1200+ interviewers in their marketplace, 80% are U.S. based. Basically, experienced technology professionals looking to supplement their income by doing interviews (where the Uber comparison comes into play).

– The platform gives freedom to the interviewers to dive into skills they see a candidate has, as well, that is asked, but will find valuable based on the role and job description one provides them, on top of assessing all the stuff one asked them to assess as well.

Tim has expressed that the platform continues to evolve as more and more organizations use it and have different requests for additions, and eTeki has shown they’ll work to evolve the platform even more in the future.
He concludes, “Well worth a look if you are in need of a great technology screening tool and need to move candidates through the process quicker.”

The post Here’s What Tim Sackett Has to Say About eTeki appeared first on Resource Center.

Avoiding Technical Interview Pitfalls: Practical Tips from Technical Interview Experts

admin — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 14:29:42 +0000

There are good interview practices and there are bad interview practices – both on the part of the interviewer and interviewee. Bad practices lead to bad hires and missed job opportunities. Here at eTeki, we don’t want that to happen. We want you, the interviewer, to get the candidate you need and you, the candidate, to get the job you want.

To help point out some of the dos and don’ts of technical interviews, from both the candidate’s perspective and the hiring manager, we asked eight tech-recruiting experts the following two questions:

What are the most common mistakes candidates make during technical interviews?

What are the most common mistakes hiring managers (or recruiters) make during technical interviews?

Our panel included:

Their answers are below:
What are the most common mistakes candidates make during technical interviews?
During technical interviews many candidates struggle to give specific examples of how they’ve used the skills they’re being interviewed about. Also, many will give broad answers about projects they’ve worked on, but not specifics about what their role was on those projects. This is the time to get into the weeds, during the technical interview, and show your actual skills.

Tim Sackett, SPHR, SCP
President, HRU Technical Resources http://hru-tech.com/
https://twitter.com/TimSackett
Not drawing a picture of the overall software architecture, then drilling down in greater detail into where they work while talking about the stack, problems, barriers, deliverables, etc. That picture demonstrates that you can articulate what you really do. Being able to code is great but being able to communicate what you do to those on your and other teams really separates you from those who can’t.

Steve Levy
Recruiting Inferno Consulting https://recruitinginferno.com/
https://twitter.com/levyrecruits
Tech candidates may not be presenting themselves in their best light. In some cases, they may not have to: it’s such a tight market. In other cases, they don’t necessarily know what they need to walk in with. But here are the areas that could be covered better:

Know how to tell your own story, and fast. I mean present an organized picture of yourself, including about how you acquired and mastered the skills you have — and what skills those are, but also how you problem solve, how you learn.

Understand how you work with others. You’re not a solitary, disconnected entity: you’re being hired to work with teams. Be sure to have something to say about that. How do you collaborate? How do you communicate?

Be clear with the specs and requirements of the job itself. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions. This is one field where candidates run the show: there’s incredible demand and it’s growing every day. Don’t skimp on knowing what you’re about to get into. It’s not arrogant to ask about salary and requirements and benefits. It shows, too, that you know you’re getting hired into an organization.

Be ready to show your chops. Before the interview, bone up. Walk in ready to go for it. Experienced candidates will know this: they’re used to the drill. But newer candidates may not: you’ll be asked to show your skills. So make sure you’re clear-headed, and familiar with the tools they want you to work with. Try to get a sense of what you’ll be asked to do before you go in. And then you can prepare.

Meghan M. Biro
CEO, TalentCulture #WorkTrends http://www.talentculture.com
https://twitter.com/MeghanMBiro
Not asking enough questions about project, role, team, culture and company. It helps a great deal to do the research in learning about company, culture and job/role etc. before meeting.

Bala Nemani
Founder & CEO, Amzur Technologies, Inc. http://www.amzur.com and eTeki, Inc.
https://linkedin.com/in/balanemani
Making the mistake of thinking they need to memorize technologies, tools and frameworks so they can answer questions about them, but really they need to come prepared to show how they help solve critical problems through collaboration and a clear and repeatable process.

Sunil Bagai
Founder & CEO, Crowdstaffing http://crowdstaffing.com and ZenithTalent http://www.zenithtalent.com
https://twitter.com/bagaisunil
When your skill set isn’t a perfect match for a position, it’s important to tell recruiters about your related skills. For instance, if you’re familiar with C, it’s relatively easy to learn C++. Technical recruiters are able to see that link, and may move you forward based on your previous experience and ability to pick up the new language.

Kim Benedict
CEO & Co-Founder, TalentMinded Inc. http://www.talentminded.ca
https://twitter.com/kimbenedict44
A common mistake made by candidates is not telling the truth about their correct role in a current project. When this actually comes out during the detailed interview it looks bad for the candidate. One more mistake is taking the 10ft view of their current project before the interview. Where this project exactly fits in company strategy/vision will actually help in explaining about their work to interviewers. They have to do a good job at selling themselves to the interviewers. Knowing about their project work in detail and its benefits definitely goes a long way.

Amrut Patil
eTeki Technology Advisory Panel – Mobility
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patil-amrut
A common mistake candidates make during technical interviews is being unprepared to discuss all the skills and technology that are listed on their resumes or in the job description. In preparation for an interview, candidates should review previous technical projects they have worked on, especially those explicitly listed on their resumes, and be prepared to talk about them. Additionally, when answering specific coding questions many interviewees don’t take the time fully understand the question and/or do not carefully read the requirements. Take your time, ask for clarification and don’t ignore information/instructions given. In many cases, they are there for a very specific reason.

Ms. Michael M. Moon, PhD
CEO and Principal Analyst, ExcelHRate Research & Advisory Services http://www.excelhrate.com
Principal Consultant, MMM & Associates http://www.michaelmoonhcm.com
https://twitter.com/mikemmoon

What are the most common mistakes hiring managers (or recruiters) make during technical interviews?
Most interviewers fail to ask the question that’s in their head during a technical interview. “Well, that didn’t sound quite right? Can you give me more specifics around such and such?” Instead they let it go, not wanting to seem pushy, but in the end not hiring the candidate because they didn’t answer that question very well. Interviewers need to be that jealous boyfriend and girlfriend and dig into every little piece of the answer that doesn’t make sense. Also, many interviewers fail to recognize how the candidate’s skills, which may be different than what you exactly need, will fit into the needs of the company. “Well, they say said they are super strong in front-end development and I really need back-end.” Well, did you ask them specifically about their back-end experience?

Tim Sackett, SPHR, SCP
President, HRU Technical Resources http://hru-tech.com/
https://twitter.com/TimSackett
Not understanding the true deliverables of the position and associated career paths. Hiring Managers: The disease of perfectionism – without rank ordering what you really need in a person who will be successful in the role, you cannot accurately or effectively assess a person. You end up “feeling” rather than “thinking” and making decisions based upon everything but performance.

Steve Levy
Recruiting Inferno Consulting https://recruitinginferno.com/
https://twitter.com/levyrecruits
I’m going to talk about the human side of this. There are a few habits I see that all add up to possible hiring mistakes:

The like attracts like syndrome. Perfectly natural: When someone reminds us of ourselves we naturally gravitate toward them then ease off on the hard questions. There’s an unconscious bias there, to be sure, but many hiring managers are already well trained to overlook it. But unconscious familiarity is something else. So stick to the script. Have a list of questions and don’t gloss. And don’t let that familiarity keep you from digging in. If you’re not getting a clear answer on something, find out more.

The “we need you more than you need us” syndrome. Because the big organizations tend to be really big, and really well-funded, there’s so much of an underdog mentality in smaller firms. And this is a really candidate driven market. But don’t compromise. Go for the best candidates. Again, no assumptions here: don’t assume that you’ll get passed up for a fancier package. Tech is about growth and innovation, and a smaller-scale means there may be more room to do that. Share the story of the firm. (I’m big on employer brand for a reason: it’s an imperative now.) Demonstrate you want someone by moving fast. Schedule an interview quickly and don’t mull it over too much. That shows commitment and may just add to your appeal.

The mechanics are everything problem. We’re not robots or AI or just a series of codes. So make sure there’s room in the interview for getting a sense of just how the candidate solves problems and faces challenges. Can they think on their feet? Get the subject of adversity going, even if it’s not in a tech gig (some of these kids are young and fresh out of nowhere). How do they tackle problems that come up? Walk through a potential issue. It might be good to prepare yourself with a known scenario from the firm you’re hiring for and see what, if anything, the candidate would bring to that situation. This will also give you a sense of how they communicate, which is important.

Meghan M. Biro
CEO, TalentCulture #WorkTrends http://www.talentculture.com
https://twitter.com/MeghanMBiro
Asking questions from Google Search and trying to qualify a candidate for a job. Interviews should be conversational in understanding the job and candidate’s experience. Review practical scenarios and how they have been addressed.

Bala Nemani
Founder & CEO, Amzur Technologies, Inc. http://www.amzur.com and eTeki, Inc.
https://twitter.com/balanemani
A common mistake hiring managers make during a technical interview is when they focus solely on technical aptitude instead of on the process used to come up with solutions.

Sunil Bagai
Founder & CEO, Crowd staffing http://crowdstaffing.com and Zenith Talent http://www.zenithtalent.com
https://twitter.com/bagaisunil
The biggest mistake recruiters make in technical interviews is not being educated on the field and position they’re hiring for. You may miss out on a great candidate if you can’t see the links between fields. For example: a QA analyst may be an excellent automation specialist if they have experience in automated testing.

Kim Benedict
CEO & Co-Founder, TalentMinded Inc. http://www.talentminded.ca
https://twitter.com/kimbenedict44
More emphasis on knowing actual code/language rather than on evaluating the person on their logical reasoning and foundation of technical understanding. Once you have the basics right you can learn any language you want easily.

Amrut Patil
eTeki Technology Advisory Panel – Mobility
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patil-amrut
The primary mistake that hiring managers make when interviewing for technical roles is over-valuing current skills and under-valuing future impact and subsequently a candidate’s ability to grow. Recruiters and hiring managers shouldn’t be hiring employees solely based on what they already know, rather they should be thinking about the candidate’s ability to learn new skills. Would you want to hire someone because they can do exactly the thing you need them to do today? Which I guarantee is a smaller pull of candidates. Or do you want to hire a group of people who are smart enough to be good at that job and who can adapt and grow to a company’s changing needs?

Additionally, when too much emphasis is placed on technical white boarding – a technique used to give candidates a chance to demonstrate their technical knowledge when presented with a coding problem – other important attributes are often under-valued or even ignored. While certainly important, coding skills are not always the most important skills that a software developer needs. And in many cases, perfectly good candidates may slip through the cracks because they simply do not test well under pressure. As an alternative or supplement, consider giving a candidate a piece of code and asking them to review it. What do they think it does? What do they like about the code? What might they do differently? Even more importantly, hiring managers must also be willing give more weight to things like communication style, personality, prior experience, and cultural fit in the selection process. When technical attributes are prioritized above all others, the result is a homogeneous, similarly-skilled team of employees who may or may not actually be able to perform their jobs.

Ms. Michael M. Moon, PhD
CEO and Principal Analyst, ExcelHRate Research & Advisory Services http://www.excelhrate.com
Principal Consultant, MMM & Associates http://www.michaelmoonhcm.com
https://twitter.com/mikemmoon
Do you have any technical interviewing tips? If so, go to the comments section of this blog and enter them. We would love to hear them.

The post Avoiding Technical Interview Pitfalls: Practical Tips from Technical Interview Experts appeared first on Resource Center.

3 Benefits of a Quick, Quality Technical Interview Process

admin — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:55:35 +0000

Having a quick, quality technical interview process can make a, perhaps surprisingly, powerful difference for employers hiring tech talent. We detail three of the most significant benefits below.

1. It improves the relationships between recruiters and hiring manager.
“Broken.” “Toxic.” “Difficult.” Those are common ways the relationships between recruiters and hiring managers are described. In fact, the breakdown of these relationships is seen as one of the biggest problems in talent acquisition. At the core of the dysfunction: most hiring managers aren’t happy with the candidates recruiters are delivering to them. In fact, in ERE’s State of Talent Acquisition Survey 2016, hiring managers on average gave their internal talent acquisition teams a C-minus grade.

The use of quick, quality technical interviews is a great way for tech recruiters to achieve a higher grade in your hiring managers’ eyes. The reason is simple. Quality technical interview process allow your tech recruiters to deliver better talent, by ensuring that the candidates have the necessary skills and experience to do the job. Little is more frustrating for tech hiring managers than interviewing—or worse, hiring—someone who clearly doesn’t have the necessary technical chops.

Meanwhile, getting technical interviews conducted quickly is essential. The reason, candidates are delivered more quickly, a big plus for hiring managers, who are eager to fill open positions in order to maximize productivity.

2. Hiring managers’ time is used more efficiently.
Hiring managers have a lot on their plate. They’re responsible for overseeing employees, managing products, ensuring customers’ expectations are met, etc. Interviewing, meanwhile, isn’t at the core of their job—it’s a distraction, a time suck, albeit a necessary one. Quality technical interviews mean that hiring managers won’t waste their time interviewing candidates who don’t have the necessary skill and experience to succeed. Speedy technical interviews, meanwhile, help quicken the hiring process, minimizing the time positions are open, giving managers more time to focus on their core objectives.

3. Quicker time to hire and improved quality of hire.
It’s easy to see how speedier technical interviews allow you to speed up the hiring process and achieve a quicker time to hire. But speedy technical interviews also reduce the likelihood that you’ll have to reopen a position for applications—a time-to-hire magnifier.

This latter fact deserves a little more explanation. The key here is that competition for top IT professionals is intense. Research by Robert Half reveals that IT professionals receive four to six job offers per week. And a Dice survey details record demand for tech talent in 2016, What this all means is the longer your hiring process, the more competitors you’ll have for top IT candidates. By using speedy technical interviews, however, you’ll keep the number of competitors to a minimum, increasing your chances of landing these top candidates. The result is you achieve both quicker time to hire and improved quality of hire. And you’re less likely to have to reopen a position for applications, a big step backward that nobody wants to take.

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