hiring – 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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The Future of Technical Screening Could Look Much Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Types of Assessments

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

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

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

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

More Robust Professional Profiles

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

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

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

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

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How to Create a Top Candidate Experience for Tech Hires

Raj — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 15:22:07 +0000

Candidate experience is always a hot topic in HR, and deservedly so. It encompasses every touchpoint across the entire recruiting process, starting from the first interaction, human or digital, and continues through onboarding. The experience your company designs and delivers can be the difference between landing a top candidate and losing them to a competitor.

Given there are many touchpoints by various parties during the hiring process, we’ve outlined some of the most significant areas that impact candidate experience in technical hiring and how you can improve them.

Start with accurate job descriptions that tell a story

Although this step happens well in advance of the interview, accurate and clear job descriptions set the stage for success from the outset. The best descriptions outline clear goals and measurements, without a lot of buzzwords which can be a turnoff (particularly to many tech candidates). Be clear on both present and future expectations for the role, painting a picture of what is expected upon hiring as well as potential for growth.

A winning job description goes beyond roles and responsibilities to tell a compelling story of what the job entails, the work involved, and the team environment. According to Katrina Kibben, “the most important thing you can do in any job posting is to translate the skills required into everyday activities.”

Reduce data entry time for candidates

Recruiters and candidates frequently end up spending a lot of time entering information into applicant tracking systems (ATS). Using an ATS with a well functioning resume parser can increase efficiency by quickly entering unstructured data from a resume into your database and enabling advanced searches. It also improves the experience of the candidate by automatically filling forms that previously required manual effort, resulting in a lower bounce rate and more registrations. So the next time your company shops for the best ATS, make sure to evaluate the resume parsing functionality actually automates data entry for your candidates.

Streamline the hiring process

It’s important to be clear on the timeline and steps in your hiring process, and communicate that to everyone involved as well as the candidate. Time to hire is a key factor in landing competitive candidates, so it’s critical to reduce delays wherever possible.

Recruiters need to function as project managers, keeping the entire process moving forward across multiple teams. Appropriate intermediary steps and deadlines with owners should be set by working backward from the date the candidate needs to be hired. Key to accomplishing this is creating accountability between the hiring team and the recruiting team. The process starts with the intake with the hiring manager on requirements, and taking a strategic approach to the intake process can streamline the entire search.

Fast track the top candidates

The recruiter should be knowledgeable about available methodologies and have a productive relationship with the hiring manager, who should articulate their hiring needs accurately. For efficiency, the process should be designed so only the most qualified candidates are seen by the hiring manager, and top candidates should be fast-tracked. This means that technical screening should be performed before the candidate reaches the hiring manager. Appropriate knockout questions can weed out inappropriate candidates early in the process, and accurate scoring ensures the right candidates move forward.

Consider prequalifying a tech candidate’s relevant skills experience with an interviews-as-a-service partner (such as eTeki), to reduce the wait time between submittal and when the qualified IT professional actually meets with the hiring team.

For more tips on how to accelerate technical screening, see this article.

Use clear and frequent communication

Frequent and consistent communication is essential. Be clear about the next steps, and let candidates know about any delays or deviations from the schedule as soon as possible. While delays are often unavoidable, transparency from your side will go a long way in continuing a strong relationship between you and the candidate. Ghosting them can ruin the goodwill created during the entire recruiting process, so be sure to communicate, whether the news is positive or negative, in a timely manner.

The information that you communicate to the candidate can reveal a lot about your organization and provides another opportunity to showcase your company as well as filtering out candidates who may not be the best fit. The best recruiters are open about salary ranges but don’t pin down fixed numbers, which can save a lot of time by making sure a candidate’s salary expectations are in alignment with the organization.

Make scheduling smooth and efficient

Disorganized scheduling sends a bad message to candidates about what to expect when dealing with an organization. It’s important to be accommodating and to respect the candidate’s time. Tech interviews should be driven by when the candidate is available, not by the bottlenecks often caused by internal interviewing capacity. Avoiding the lengthy back and forth exchange which is so common becomes more feasible when partnering with a deep pool of experienced subject matter experts.

Use great interviewers with appropriate skill sets

Bad interviewers can be a huge turnoff to candidates. Good interviewers are prepared and represent the hiring organization positively. It’s important to ensure internal interviewers have been trained appropriately. Do not assume that because interviewers are experienced, they will be good. Ongoing training is key even for your more experienced interviewers, to ensure they ask the right questions and consistently represent the organization in an accurate way.

It’s important to ensure that each interviewer is evaluating appropriate skills and not stepping outside their own area of expertise. Even experienced hiring teams frequently find this to be a challenge when it comes to evaluating skills in new and emerging technologies.

If you don’t have appropriate subject matter expertise in house, consider using an interview service with a deep pool of expert technical interviewers that are currently working in the field.

Don’t be afraid to seek help if you need it

If your hiring team has gaps in any of these areas, don’t hesitate to look for additional support, whether it be from internal teams or external partners. In addition to providing expert interviewers with deep technical skills, eTeki’s interview-as-a-service platform facilitates a tight, streamlined process that will positively reflect on your organization.

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Amanda Cole

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

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Delivering Real, Qualified Candidates in a Demand Driven Market

Shabana — Thu, 14 May 2020 09:49:05 +0000

Delivering Real, Qualified Candidates in a Demand Driven Market

Best Practices in Screening with eTeki partner

Download the WhitePaper

[contact-form-7]

Challenge

The demand for IT professionals has grown exponentially. The need for qualified candidates far exceeds the pool of technically qualified candidates. Further, accurately determining who is technically qualified is challenging—it’s more difficult than ever to identify whether candidates have cloud, MEAN stack, DevOps, SDET, Linux, project management and other niche skills

Situations

Staffing and recruiting professionals, often without current technical subject matter expertise, match hiring companies and technical people they believe to be qualified based primarily on keyword matches.

Since many candidates embellish their resumes, recruiters must validate all candidates’ employment dates, certifications, skill sets, educational accomplishments, and depth of experience before submitting shortlists.

Automated skills tests have limitations that make them unable to accurately determine whether candidates’ technical experiences exist at the levels required by job descriptions.

Many employers have their own technical employees conduct candidate interviews, but this frequently creates problems. For instance, while these employees work in technology, their expertise may not align with the position requirements, leaving uncertainty around fit. Plus, relying on internal employees to perform interviews can result in delays in submissions and in completion of business-critical IT projects.

Hiring managers waste limited resources on evaluating shortlists from multiple sources to increase their chances of getting a pool of technical qualified professionals to choose from later in the hiring process.

MEAN Stack Engineer Success Metric

6:1

Screened to Offer

Hires

$120K

Placement Fees

Download Whitepaper Now

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Does Regionalism Matter in Tech Recruiting? Maybe Not.

admin — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:32:45 +0000

eTeki is thrilled to announce our new podcast The Collective Voice, which will largely be based on conversations with national thought leaders on topics integral to the technical recruiting industry. Our initial focus will be a series about Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), one of the most relevant topics in our industry today.

D&I recruiting initiatives are no longer “nice-to-haves” for technology companies. D&I must be strategic and purposeful to create both incredible employee experiences and innovative products. Get an overview of the podcast by reading this blog or go directly to the bottom of the page to hear the podcast first.

There is no doubt tech talent is hard to find. According to Dice, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the industry’s unemployment rate hit 1.9 percent in 2018, down from 3 percent in 2015. That is incredible if you are a tech worker! It’s a potential nightmare if you are looking for highly-skilled tech talent or are working with a tight budget.

With that, tech companies are broadening their recruiting horizons to other regions. Recruiters are now on a global hunt and, as Johnny Cash would say, they’ve “been everywhere, man.” Companies are moving away from the tech mecca, Silicon Valley, to other US cities and different countries. According to research conducted by Jobbatical, 11 of the 31 Cities named most attractive for starting a (tech) business were European, including Tallinn and Estonia. Most American’s don’t even know where Tallinn is. And the 2019 Global Talent Competitiveness Index stated the top 5 countries positioned for the best competitive edge are Switzerland, Singapore, USA, Norway, and Denmark.

It stands to reason, smart companies and tech talent pros are incorporating D&I recruiting strategies that go beyond recruiting in San Francisco, California, and Austin, Texas.

Understanding Regional Differences is Important, But Don’t Forget The Basics.
So, should recruiters understand cultural differences when interviewing candidates from other countries? Of course. As this LinkedIn Talent Blog article shares, following customs, norms, and temperaments is crucial.

However, as my podcast below with William Tincup highlights, when hiring regionally, don’t forget the basics. We have to look beyond literal geographical differences and incorporate a more inclusive holistic approach. An approach that looks beyond the cultural “differences” and focuses on the candidate ability, no matter where they are from, to rally around business basics. To achieve this recruiter must:

Understand your company’s overall goals and deadlines.
Understand the realities of your budget and adjust your requirements accordingly.
Determine if your corporate culture allows for remote work arrangements.
Most importantly, assess someone’s “suitability” for the job versus just their “eligibility.”

To learn more about this topic, you’ve got to tune in to our wonderful conversation with William Tincup regarding “regionalism” in the tech recruiting equation. We know you’ll enjoy it as much as we did recording it!

Does Regionalism Matter in Tech Recruiting? Maybe Not. Podcast

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Fixing the Hiring Process – Once and For All

Punita — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 14:17:56 +0000

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.

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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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System Not Compatible: Staying a Step Ahead in Recruiting

Punita — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 16:03:14 +0000

System Not Compatible: What’s Shaping The Process on How You Are Getting Your Best Technical Hires

Fraught with competition, recruiting and hiring frequently get equated to military-style operations, and in the ongoing “war for talent,” no one wants to lose. This basic fact is a significant driver in the rapid and continued advancement of HR technologies. That, and a host of outside influences including low unemployment rates and an ever-widening skills gap.

Collectively, the need to improve recruiting and hiring feeds an expansive culture of innovation – and well-established marketplace. Do even the slightest research on HR or recruiting technology, and witness firsthand the sheer number of available solutions, designed to automate every last step in the process. To the point that some fear they may become obsolete. It’s overwhelming – and for a good reason.

There’s an obvious need.

Don’t become obsolete: Keep on evolving

Let’s take a moment to pause for introspection. Now, there are countless recruiting-related statistics out there in the world, but very little information about the people doing the hiring. Much like the roles that organizations look to fill, recruiters traverse multiple generations, potentially skewing towards the younger end of the spectrum, with the elders in senior positions.

In terms of understanding and leveraging recruiting technology, this is an important distinction.

For some, there is no life before technology. Period. For others, the digital transformation happened in front of their eyes. As a result, some are quicker to adopt than others, despite a possible divide between those doing the buying and those doing the using. To avoid a prospective hurdle, recognize technology as a means to an end, vs. the other way around. One that requires regular updating, recurrent monitoring, and periodic appraisal to stay compatible, compliant and valuable to the organization.

A tall order, indeed. But one with meaningful, measurable hiring outcomes.

Stay Compatible: Ways to stay in the know

To accomplish this, on top of everything else in one’s job description, there needs to be time set aside for thinking and reading. Famously, Warren Buffet reads more than 6 hours each day.

Here’s a few key ways to ensure you remain in the know.

Keep up with industry news. Put aside time for learning. This doesn’t have to be in the evening. Learning is part of your job and should be incorporated into your day.
Understand the key players in your industry. Go local, go national, go global. The idea is that you are following thought leaders in the industry that you are targeting. You cannot expect to have intelligent conversations with top talent if you are not educated.
Engage an analyst. An analyst can help sort through the solutions and steer a clear path to the best tech for the organization’s hiring needs. But ultimately, how this happens is less important than getting in the habit.

See that’s the key. Like running system updates, reviewing and refreshing tech is ongoing. By the time a solution gets up and running, there’s a new integration available, a new strategy to support or, new legislation changing the rules of the game. This is where those military references come into play again. With recruiting operating as a game of risk and reward, however, the only way to stay a step ahead is to continue changing stance.

Readily available tech resources

We’re not talking about subscribing to the next big ATS or marketing automation tool. We’re talking about arming yourself with the resources to break standard. Whether physically subscribing to newsletters or securing research from outside experts, the information is there for the taking.

Content and experiential tactics for technical hiring

We get it. How does reading an online publication help to land your next great technical hire? On the surface, it’s hard to make the connection. Indirectly, the plethora of knowledge is substantially more than spending your time “liking” the latest “how to” video on Facebook.

Start by perusing tech news sites like TechCrunch. In addition to covering giants of industry, it also profiles tons of startups, new business, and emerging products.
Up until 2015, TechCrunch ran Crunchbase, now a separate entity, an incredibly useful site for learning more about the particulars of both public and private companies.
For “tech news you won’t read anywhere else,” there’s The Information, a subscription-based option that offers yearly packages ranging from $199 for young professionals to a $749 all-access account.
Other tech sites worth a follow include Recode, VentureBeat, WIRED and the list goes on.

With traditional media focused solely on big organizations that help move the market up and down, turning into any of these online publications will provide a more in-depth and immersive tech education. Aside from general tech, look for niche outlets that focus in on specific talent acquisition topics. Tech trends and vendors get to play here, too.

Beyond the headlines

Beyond browsing headlines, don’t overlook the more interactive experiences. Many publications host local events, meetups, large-scale conferences and online functions like webinars and social chats. Find and follow writers that resonate. If a question needs an answer, ask it. Without following the conversation, there’s no way to comprehend its impact on everyday operations. Without staying informed, there’s no way to unlock that competitive advantage everyone’s chasing.

Knowing what’s out there shaping the process, supports finding exactly who is out there, talent-wise. It’s the only way to play to the game, or in this case, win the war.

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Amanda Cole

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

The post System Not Compatible: Staying a Step Ahead in Recruiting appeared first on Resource Center.

Don’t Be SAD: How Recruiters Beat Holiday Recruiting Blues

Punita — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 14:02:39 +0000

SAD About Holiday Recruiting?

Here’s Something to be Jolly About

For recruiters and job seekers both, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can be exacerbated by the Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day holiday season. A depression brought on by the change of seasons, SAD most often appears during the fall and winter, when days are shorter and sunshine scarcer. For those alone and out of work, the holidays can be an especially lonely, stressful time. For recruiters with urgent jobs to fill, it often seems the worst time of year.

What’s the Holiday Hiring Problem?

Recruiters face three obstacles:

Many job seekers take a job-hunt hiatus, to travel for family gatherings;
Hiring managers and other decision-makers are out on holiday break;
The greatest obstacle, however, is a large number of candidates who don’t search for jobs because they’ve been told that employers aren’t hiring during the holidays.

If you can surmount these obstacles, however, the holidays can be your best-ever hiring season. It’s the ideal time to engage warmly, even humorously, with active and passive candidates, and a great opportunity to showcase your diversity emphasis.

Tech recruiters, who typically focus on May, June and July recruitment of spring graduates and have, by far, the steepest uphill recruiting climb, shouldn’t despair of finding holiday hires, either. Key points to remember: Most employees in technical positions are not full-time graduates. While you probably can’t rearrange hiring manager vacations, you can bring reluctant and vacationing job seekers into your hiring fold during the holiday season. Should your technical recruiters be the vacationing decision makers, you might turn to recruitment services such as eTeki, which offers industry experts as savvy video-interview stand ins. Passive candidates are especially ripe prospects. Many will have easier workloads, with supervisors away from the office. They’re likely to respond quickly to an intriguing career contact without waiting until break time.

Here, then, are Ideas “yule” find helpful in stuffing your stockings with quality candidates.

CELL-ebrate

Ramp up your mobile application. Prospective candidates in airports, train terminals, and bus stations will be glued to their smartphones, with time to kill. Intrigue them with the right “jolly ol’” message, complete with or gruesome grinch caricature or romping reindeer, and you’ll likely get an application.

Hiring for a tech position or one requiring critical thinking and problem-solving skills? Invite candidates to create a seasonal avatar and screen name, solve a holiday-themed puzzle, and be recognized, rated and even rewarded in an online community of competitors.

Whether an app or mobile-optimized career site, make the application succinct, with no more than 5 pre-selection questions, and easy resume upload. Remember, 85 percent of job candidates search openings on their smartphone, and their number one complaint is the cumbersome process. Don’t drive them to your job post only to have them be one of the 60 percent that drops off midway because it was too lengthy or too difficult. Consider bypassing the resume request, and opt instead for a link to their LinkedIn or GitHub profile. Automate a confirmation, inviting the candidate to an immediate one-way on-demand video interview, with the opportunity to schedule for later if they’re about to board, or the background is bedlam. Include a faith-agnostic holiday greeting and easy redirect to employee day-in-the-life videos. Better yet, get those employees to do their holiday garb, the funnier the better.

Ask for text opt-in, to provide scheduled status updates. CareerBuilder was told by 81 percent of the 5,000 U.S. and Canadian job seekers that took part in its Candidate Experience Study that continual communication of status updates would do much to Improve their application experience and attitude towards the employer. Ready to invite to a live interview? Automate the scheduling, and then text the confirmation.

A traveling job seeker who applies in O’Hare Airport’s Gate A-23 waiting room, records her one-way video interview while waiting to board, gets a warm holiday greeting and invitation to live interview while visiting mom and dad in Trenton, and can schedule that interview when vacation is over, is far less likely to be wooed by others during this same time frame. He is also far more likely to share the pleasant hiring event with friends, family, and other prospective candidates.

Consider a scheduler prompt that says something like “About to board that plane, start that road trip? Have a great holiday. Click here to let us know when you’ll be back to talk. We too might have a gift for you!”

Be of Good Cheer

Everything you do to connect with prospective candidates should be holiday themed, with variation to take in all major holidays, starting with Thanksgiving. Remember, this is an opportunity to be diverse! Beyond Christmas, December celebrations include the Mexican Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe; the Swedish St. Lucia Day; Hanukkah, a Jewish celebration; Boxing Day in Canada and Australia; the African-American Kwanzaa; Omisoka, a Japanese festivity; and the two pagan feasts of Yule and Saturnalia. You might post socially to commemorate and explain each, and even include with your pre-screen or one-way on-demand video interview a tongue-in-cheek’ request for “holiday horror story” or “worst gift ever.” It would send a message that you’re a fun group of folks and provide feedback on the candidate’s originality and personality.

Giftwrap your job posts! Include, with automated confirmation of successful pre-screen, a gift wrapped box which, when clicked, gives them their choice of free Udemy course, or online subscription. Tech opening? Offer “Upgrading your C++ skills class” or a three-month subscription to Wired. Hiring an RN? Perhaps the latest white paper on telemedicine or a digital copy of Davis’ Drug Guide for Nurses.

For a subtler approach, turn this on its head a bit, making the offer the primary approach: “Unwrap our gift to you.” Highlight the class or subscription, but include an announcement that you’re hiring, and one-click to the application and/or social share. Your own paid Webinars or podcasts might make great cost-free gifts, or you might approach sites, publishers, online tutors, Fiverr entrepreneurs, and so forth, about a bulk discount to you for their opportunity to market themselves to your candidates.

Remote-jobs online marketplace leader FlexJobs put together a simple but emulatable online holiday contest, to engage non-subscribers.

“For our November contest, we want to know what your holiday job search plan looks like,” the FlexJobs folks posted. “Leave a comment with your ideas for keeping your job search on track during the holidays, and you might win this month’s prize!”

Rather than making it about the best comment, they held a random draw of publicly-posted entries, with the five picks winning a free one-month FlexJobs subscription.

Your career site and talent community, your social profiles, even your company home page, would be great places to promote something similar. You might also gather entries at the mall, as part of the promotion we mention below. The prize might be your own product or something valued by job seekers, such as business card printing, resume makeover, or one-hour career-coach session. Offer as many prizes as your budget allows.

Take to the local mall, with holiday-themed sandwich boards announcing your openings. As shoppers rack up credit card bills, in the back of their mind might be thoughts of paying them after the holidays. These promoters could have a grab bag of holiday trivia questions which, when answered correctly (so easy they’re laughable), qualifies the contestant to step into the nearby privacy booth to apply, and perhaps be redirected to their one-way video job interview.

Laugh it up

Host a “holiday horror story” or “ugliest holiday sweater” contest on your talent community, mobile job apply app, and career website, and include a link to the contest with every job announcement. Give every registered site member a vote, including your current employees, and let them get to know each other. Draw the contest out, narrowing down the contestants a la American Idol. Even more amusing would be a singing application, to the tune of their favorite holiday song. You will, of course, assure them that “No, your application won’t be withdrawn if you can’t carry a tune.”

Rewards for best (maybe top ten) song, story or sweater? Invitation to the company holiday party. If the timing is not quite right, throw an after-holiday or Super Bowl party. Don’t make it about those who qualified to move forward with their application for this particular job. Focus instead on creating your candidate and referrer database, for this or future openings. Even passive candidates will see this as a super opportunity to mingle with your staff and management in a non-threatening environment. Remember, too, that your current employees are likely your best cheerleaders. What better way to introduce your great firm to prospective candidates than having them party with your staff?

Focus your holiday recruiting on giving gifts of information, career help, humor, and warm invitations to your company family, and your seasonal recruitment will be far less SAD.

The post Don’t Be SAD: How Recruiters Beat Holiday Recruiting Blues appeared first on Resource Center.

Recruiters and Assumptions: Where’s the Line?

admin — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 15:51:52 +0000

Have you seen Silence of the Lambs, or just heard this expression? (Sorry, it might offend a few people.)
When you “assume,” what happens?
You make an “a**” out of “u” and “me.”
Sounds true, right?
In technical recruiting, it is more true than almost anywhere.

The explosion of the tech stack
In the last 5-10 years, the tech stack has gone crazy. This is good for productivity and the ability of companies to get projects done, but it’s made the technical recruiting space very complicated. It used to be that a new skill set would develop over a 3-5 year span. Now, oftentimes, companies need a skill set that’s only been en vogue at other companies for six to eight months. You need to find someone from a specific sub-discipline that’s essentially nascent existence-wise.

It’s very challenging. We get it. We’ve worked with hundreds of technical recruiters and companies looking for all types of roles, from conventional (C++) to far more nuanced (advanced personalization models).

The shortcut some recruiters take
… is the assumption. We all are guilty of this to some degree.
Let’s say you see “JAVA” on a resume. You assume it naturally flows to “Javascript.” (It does not.)
Or — and this one is a bit more nuanced — you’ve heard and seen online that Python basics are somewhat similar to Ruby basics, so you think you can “fudge” a candidate with a background in Python over for a Ruby role. You assume it’ll be close enough and the rest of the team can get him/her up to speed.

The problem with assumptions in technical recruiting
Hiring managers, project timelines, and budgets all require the person to have the specific skills to begin contributing right away. Otherwise, there’s a ton of brushback, fire drills, and issues. No one wants that.

What’s the better answer?
Step 1: Don’t assume.
Step 2: Talk to the hiring manager about what they want/need and make notes. Summarize those notes in a one-pager. Confirm you’re on the same page.
Step 3: Continue to not assume.
Step 4: Talk to people currently in your company (on the team this open role will join) about what they need, and specifically what skill sets and areas they’re lacking. Ask them some questions they might ask to assure technical skill.
Step 5: Again, do not assume.
Step 6: Do some of your own research on this role, where it’s being hired, and anything you can find about how they’re vetting the skill set, new as it may be.
Step 7: Again push assumptions to the background.
Step 8: Consider contacting a third-party technical vetting service to make sure the technical side of the hire is being evaluated comprehensively.

But, are there times a recruiter should assume?
There are moments where the assumption has some logical value, but the assumption should be backed by some type of conversation or search for broader context.

A classic example is resume gaps. Oftentimes sourcers/recruiters see them and assume “Oh, this person was out of work during these two years.” That is a reasonable assumption (you can trust in your gut and ability to read a resume) but you still need to verify the information and the context of it. Was it due to a family member being sick? Was there some professional assignment they didn’t list for some reason? What’s the full story?

In terms of technical skills, if something isn’t listed but related skills are, don’t simply assume “Oh, this person lacks this skill.” Ask. Ask what they know about it. Turn it into a discussion around where they’ve been and what they’ve accomplished. Trust your gut but verify it too.

The bottom line
Never make assumptions as a technical recruiter. It just leads to trouble. Work the steps. Work the system. Talk to hiring managers. Communicate. Follow-up. Understand what you need. It’s going to end much better for all.

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Amrut Patil
Amrut is a seasoned software development professional with over 12 years of experience in designing and building the architecture around mobile applications. Amrut has worked across different technologies and different business verticals. He is passionate about learning new technologies.

The post Recruiters and Assumptions: Where’s the Line? appeared first on Resource Center.

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.

Here’s how we help

Learn More

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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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