interviewing – Resource Center

3 Advantages of Outsourcing Your Technical Interviews

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

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

Outsourcing Technical Interviews Advantages

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

1. Improve Quality of Hiring

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

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

Pre-Submittal Tech Interviews by Third Party Staffing Suppliers

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

Post-Submittal Tech Interviews by Hiring Companies

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

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

2. Decrease Time for All Stakeholders

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

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

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

3. Reduce Costs Substantially

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

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

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

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

4. Boost Revenue per Employee (BONUS Benefit)

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

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

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

Find out how much your company invests in technical interviewing.

Amanda Cole, Vice President at eTeki

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

The post 3 Advantages of Outsourcing Your Technical Interviews appeared first on Resource Center.

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.

" class="vc_single_image-img attachment-thumbnail ld-lazyload" alt="Amanda Cole" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" data-src="https://resources.eteki.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/amanda-150x150.jpg" data-srcset="https://resources.eteki.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/amanda-150x150.jpg 150w, https://resources.eteki.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/amanda.jpg 200w" data-aspect="1" />

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 How to Create a Top Candidate Experience for Tech Hires appeared first on Resource Center.

Pre-Screening Tips

Shabana — Fri, 15 May 2020 15:45:13 +0000

Pre-Screening Tips

Best Practices in Screening with eTeki partner

Download the WhitePaper

[contact-form-7]

Five Reasons to conduct a Pre-Screening Interview

Screening applicants is a great way to save both time and money by ensuring that employers don’t have to sit through time-consuming interviews with applicants that are plainly neither qualified nor suited to the open position.

One of the major recruitment problems experienced by businesses is finding employees that will end up staying on board for any serious length of time. Screening gives employers the opportunity to search out those recruits that seem to display qualities that will keep them at a job for a serious amount of time.

The screening process will give employers the opportunity to focus any further interviews on the things that matter, rather than spending valuable time asking questions that don’t really go anywhere. Any information revealed in the screening process should be put to good use and form the basis of further questioning.

Screening applicants will give employers an opportunity to send feelers out and see exactly what is happening in the recruitment world. It will give them an idea of whether they are hiring at a moment where there is a distinct lack of quality applicants or a period in which quality is exceptionally high.

Hiring the right workforce is an important part of running a business and will go a long way to ensuring future success. The screening process will help contribute to a recruitment process that helps employers find a suitable and sustainable workforce.

Download Whitepaper Now

The post Pre-Screening Tips appeared first on Resource Center.

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)

The post 4 Technical Recruiter Resources for Great Candidate Knockout Questions appeared first on Resource Center.

8 Interviewing Experts to Read on LinkedIn

admin — Thu, 11 May 2017 13:28:02 +0000

8 Interviewing Experts to Read on LinkedIn
We recently wrote a post on 11 interviewing experts whom employers should follow on Twitter. In this post we turn our attention to interviewing experts you should be paying attention to on LinkedIn. Before we begin, because we want to provide you with new names, we aren’t including any of the experts on our Twitter list (although some of them are quite active on LinkedIn).

Oleg Vishnepolsky

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishnepolsky/?ppe=1
The global CTO for the newspaper giant DailyMail, Vishnepolsky regularly writes on and communicates about employer issues on LinkedIn, including interviewing.

Lorenzo Pasqualis

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lpasqualis/
Pasqualis, the senior director of engineering at DreamBox Learning, recently announced that he’s starting a blog about “tech career advice, engineering organizational models, leadership and engineering patterns, women/minorities in tech and anything that can help software engineers in their journey.”

Mara Dibb

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maradibb/
Dibb, senior recruiting partner for Synchrony Financial, asks thought-provoking questions about recruiting issues, both from the employer and the candidate perspective.

Joshua Miller

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhmlifecoaching/
Miller, director of learning and talent development at PayPal, writes about a variety of workplace issues, including interviewing.

Matt Warzel

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjwcareers/
Warzel, president at MJW Careers, a resume writing, career coaching and outplacement firm, primarily focuses on interviewing from the candidate perspective.

Brendan Reid

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmatthewreid/
Reid, senior vice president of marketing for Ceridian, occasionally writes and shares articles about interviewing and recruiting.

Richard L. Burton III

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardlburton/
Burton, the co-founder of Verson 2, a software development company, writes and communicates about software and recruiting issues, including interviewing.

Andrew LaCivita

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlacivita/
LaCivita, chief executive of milewalk, an executive search firm, is a prolific author of articles on interviewing and hiring, primarily targeted at candidates.

For more interviewing insights and suggestions, follow us on LinkedIn.

The post 8 Interviewing Experts to Read on LinkedIn appeared first on Resource Center.

5 Tips for Growing Into a Successful Technical Interviewer

admin — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:09:54 +0000

More and more employers are turning to using outsourced technical interviewers to save time and money, and to remove bias from their technical assessments of candidates.

This trend explains the growth of on-demand technical interviewing platform companies, like eTeki, that address the challenges of technical screening for IT talent acquisition.

Which means now is a great time for IT workers to consider joining the eTeki technical interviewer team – an ideal side gig and a flexible, low-stress way to earn extra money while making yourself more attractive to employers, among other benefits.

What are our tips to growing into a successful technical interviewer? Let’s take a look.

Broaden Your Technical Skills and Experience

Interviewers need technical skills and experiences that are relevant to the particular job. Without them, you can’t have effective technical conversations with candidates, ask the right questions, or properly evaluate candidates. By broadening your technical skills and experiences, you’ll be qualified to be a technical interviewer for a greater breadth of technical roles.

Perform More Technical Interviews

Practice makes perfect applies to technical interviewing. The more technical interviews you conduct and evaluate, the better you will become at conducting and evaluating them. So while you’re developing as a technical interviewer, take as many opportunities as you can. Even consider conducting mock technical interviews if you’re just getting started.

Be Prepared

The Boy Scout motto also applies to technical interviewing. To be a high-quality technical interviewer you need to prepare yourself for success before the interview—both for your sake and to deliver a good candidate experience. Key examples of this include:

Cross-reference the candidate’s resume with the job description/requirements to identify the right questions to ask.
Have questions ready.
Perform a complete tech check (e.g. webcam, microphone working)
Perform a complete environment check (e.g. camera positioned correctly, lighting adequate)

Develop Your Communication Skills

Hone your verbal and written communication skills. You’ll be speaking with candidates, and being able to ask questions smoothly and understandably enhances your professionalism. Meanwhile, you’ll also be writing written reports about candidates, so developing your writing will help improve your reports—making you more attractive to employers.

Work with eTeki

No need to hunt down technical interviewing jobs. We’ll find them for you, work with your schedule, and ensure that they fit your skills and experience. Plus, we’ll give you the tools you need to succeed, and help develop you as an interviewer. Typically each interview require a commitment of just 45-60 minutes. Learn more about being a successful technical interviewer with eTeki. We’ll help you grow.

The post 5 Tips for Growing Into a Successful Technical Interviewer appeared first on Resource Center.

11 Interviewing Experts Employers Should Follow on Twitter

admin — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 16:59:00 +0000

A great way to get better at a challenging task is to take advantage of tips from experts. It’s true of hitting a baseball. It’s true of playing the piano. And it’s certainly true of interviewing people for jobs.

A free way to get access to interviewing experts is to follow them on Twitter. Here are 11 interviewing experts employers should follow.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/gayle
Why follow: Gayle Laakmann McDowell is one of the foremost experts in technical interviewing, and regularly tweets about technical interviewing challenges, both for candidates and employers. A former Google, Apple and Microsoft developer, she is the founder and CEO of CareerCup, and is the author of “Cracking the Coding Interview,” “Cracking the PM Interview” and “Cracking the Tech Career.”

Lou Adler

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/LouA
Why follow: The CEO and founder of The Adler Group— a hiring training and search firm—Lou Adler is a veteran recruiter and the author of “Hire With Your Head” and “The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired.” He tweets and writes often about interviewing.

Amanda Haddaway

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/ahaddaway
Why follow: An HR consultant and corporate trainer, Amanda Haddaway is managing director of HR Answerbox and the author of “Interviewer Success.” She tweets about a variety of HR topics, including interviewing.

Paul Falcone

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/PaulFalconeHR
Why follow: Author of 10 books published by the American Management Association and SHRM, Falcone tweets about a variety of HR topics, including behavioral interviewing. One of his books is “96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire.”

Ron Fry

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/theRonFry
Why follow: Ron Fry is the author of 30 books in the areas of education and careers, and the founder and president of Career Press Inc. He regularly tweets about interviewing, mostly—but not entirely—from the candidate perspective.

Susan Heathfield

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/SusanHeathfield
Why follow: Susan Heathfield is a former HR and management consultant who wrote About.com’s Human Resources site, and currently writes for TheBalance.com. She regularly writes on a variety of HR issues, including on interviewing questions.

Liz Ryan

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/humanworkplace
Why follow: Liz Ryan is the founder and CEO of Human Workplace, an HR publishing, coaching and consulting firm. According to Human Workplace, Ryan is “the world’s most widely-read career and workplace authority.” Ryan tweets often about interviewing, sometimes from the employer perspective.

Johanna Rothman

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/johannarothman
Why follow: A consultant, Johanna Rothman is the author of “Hiring Geeks That Fit.” She writes primarily about agile leadership and management in tech, but touches on interviewing.

Laurie Ruettimann

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/lruettimann
Why follow: A writer, speaker, consultant and influencer, Laurie Ruettimann tweets often about a variety of topics, HR and otherwise. And from time to time she writes fun posts on interviewing.

Maren Hogan

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/marenhogan
Why follow: Founder and CEO of Red Branch Media, Maren Hogan writes often about HR and recruiting issues, including interviewing.

Meghan M. Biro

Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/meghanmbiro
Why follow: Meghan M. Biro is the CEO of TalentCulture, a well-known industry influencer and a frequent writer on HR and recruiting topics, including interviewing.

For more interviewing insights and suggestions, don’t forget to follow us at @eTeki_Inc.

The post 11 Interviewing Experts Employers Should Follow on Twitter appeared first on Resource Center.

Strong Tech Candidates Can Pick and Choose. How They’re Evaluating Your Company

admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 11:54:55 +0000

It’s commonly accepted that competition for top tech talent is sky-high today. Examples of statistics that show this (there are so many) include:

The rate of tech job creation is growing at twice the average for all jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
By 2020, the BLS projects more than 1 million computer science-based jobs won’t have qualified college graduates to fill them.
90% of executives in the C-suite report that recruiting IT talent is a top challenge for their companies, according to an Appirio study.

Add in that 90% of recruiters (an all-time high, according to an MRINetwork study) say we have a candidate-driven market overall, and it’s safe to say the candidate-driven market in tech is extreme.

As a result, strong tech candidates—the ones you actually want to hire—can afford to pick and choose extremely carefully. As an employer, this means that every offer, every communication, every interaction, every process, matters when it comes to landing the tech talent you need.

But there are some factors that are more important than others in candidates’ overall evaluation of your company, as revealed by the following data:

According to a 2014 Glassdoor survey, the top five considerations for candidates before accepting a job offer are:

Salary/compensation
Career growth opportunities
Work-life balance
Location/commute
Company mission, vision, values

According to a 2013 Corporate Responsibility Magazine/Allegis Group survey, 69% of job seekers would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed. Meanwhile, 84% would consider leaving their current jobs if offered another role with a company that had an excellent corporate reputation. And most in $75-100K salary range would only require a 1-10% salary increase to consider such a move.

According to a 2015 Software Advice survey, job seekers say: the following are among the primary causes of negative candidate experiences:

Unclear application instructions—93% said it would significantly or somewhat worsen their candidate experience.
Long hiring process—83% said it would significantly or somewhat worsen their candidate experience.

Meanwhile, according to the same survey, candidates’ No. 1 suggested improvement to improving the application process experience is more communication.

When the first two elements above (compensation, benefits, growth opportunities, employer reputation, etc.) are relatively equal, which is common, the candidate experience becomes a major differentiator. Effective communication, efficiency and professionalism during interactions, well-performed interviews with relevant questions, all combined in a smooth process—help seal the deal.

With tech roles, a unique and important piece of the candidate experience is the technical interview experience. The technical interview experience actually helps answer many important questions for questions that are key in their overall evaluation of a company, and their decision on whether to accept an offer. Some examples include:

Am I a priority for this company? A quickly scheduled technical interview shows that the candidate is important to you. Side benefits: faster interviews show efficiency (your company gets things done) and help keep the hiring process brief.

Will fellow tech team members be of high quality? Having a seasoned technical interviewer asking challenging, relevant questions—along with intelligent follow-ups—reveals whether candidates have the necessary skills and experience to succeed. It’s a key indication to smart candidates that only qualified people get hired. In contrast, less-than-challenging technical interviews leave smart candidates unsure about the quality of your hires.

Is the company technologically up to date? Using quality technical interviewing tools (such as virtual code editors) shows that your company believes in using the right tools for the job. Not having such tools, meanwhile, not only creates communication frustration for candidates during technical interviews, it also can make candidates wonder what other technical tools your company lacks.

So when trying to make your company appealing to strong tech talent, pay special attention to the technical interviewing experience you provide. It can play an important part in candidates’ overall evaluation of your company. Get it right, and it will help you attract better talent. Get it wrong, and it could prevent you from acquiring the talent your business needs to succeed.

The post Strong Tech Candidates Can Pick and Choose. How They’re Evaluating Your Company appeared first on Resource Center.

6 Reasons Technical Interviewing Is an AWESOME Freelancing Gig

admin — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:53:50 +0000

Fifty-seven million people, or 35% of the total U.S. workforce, are choosing to freelance this year, according to a survey commissioned by Upwork and the Freelancers Union. Of these, 60%, or 14.8 million, are moonlighters—professionals who have a primary job (contingent or traditional) who moonlight with a side job. For tech workers who freelance, or want to freelance, technical interviewing is an awesome freelancing gig. Below are six reasons why.

Low, flexible commitment.

Being a freelance technical interviewer fits your life. This is because you conduct as few or as many technical interviews as you’d like. You can conduct 10 technical interviews one week, and two, three, or even none the next week. So if your workload in your primary job is going nuts, there’s no worry that this freelance gig will at the same time.So if your workload at your primary job is going nuts, don’t worry; you’ll be able to pick up this freelance gig right where you left off. Other freelance work (such as IT projects) often does not have the same workload flexibility.

It’s not more of the same from your day job.

Adding more IT projects—coding, for example—often means more of the same of what you’re doing at your day job. It can be easy to burn out, on both the freelance gig and your primary role. With technical interviews, you might conduct them from time to time in your regular job, but they aren’t core to it. As a result, with technical interviewing freelance work, there’s far less chance that it contributes to burnout. Especially given the low, flexible commitment involved.

Help pick the best and brightest.

You may not be able to pick who you work with at your primary job, but with freelance technical interviewing, you get a key role in determining the people who are getting employed in the tech profession. You get to use practices and make decisions how you wish your hiring managers and directors would. This can be a highly satisfying experience.

As part of this effort, you can have a hand in promoting diversity, by ensuring that those under-represented in the tech industry (e.g., women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ, etc.) get equal treatment and an equal chance during your interviewing and evaluation process.

Work in your existing contact sphere.

In many cases, the people you conduct technical interviews on behalf of are people you know—which helps keep the process comfortable for all parties. A typical scenario is the person next door from another company who trusts your technical expertise asks you for input to help evaluate an IT candidate. Why not take advantage of this and earn supplemental income from your technical skill and interviewing experience? It’s, of course, also possible to extend your technical interviewing freelancing to contacts of friends, or even completely outside your contact sphere—especially as word about your technical interviewing services spreads.

Make yourself a more attractive hire.

In two ways, technical interviewing can be valuable for landing future job opportunities. First, the people you perform technical interviews for will be familiar with your technical skill, and you likely will be high on their list of potential candidates if you’re interested. Second, putting technical interviewing on your resume is attractive to all employers, as it is indicative of technical skill and experience, as well as communication ability. As a technical interviewer, you both interview candidates (verbal communication) and write reports on candidates (written communication).

6. It’s great networking.

When you conduct freelance technical interviews, you get to know key people at client companies, as well as interviewees. Many of these can be valuable contacts in your own career. Talking to fellow IT pros can be enjoyable. Interactions with candidates, fellow freelancers, and industry leaders alike can be valuable for both sharing expertise and learning.

Related: Keeping Your Employer Satisfied with Your New Freelance Gig
Interested in freelance technical interviewing through eTeki? Contact us at info@eteki.com or 813-513-7722.

The post 6 Reasons Technical Interviewing Is an AWESOME Freelancing Gig appeared first on Resource Center.

Stop Losing Candidates Because Your Technical Interviewing Takes Too Long

admin — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 13:54:33 +0000

Note: This is the third post in a four-post series on the biggest technical interviewing mistakes commonly made by employers.
Read the intro post to the series here.
Read about Mistake No. 1 here.

An Aug. 17 USA Today headline just about says it all: “Job seeker to employer: Well? I don’t have all day.” Hiring Process
In today’s tight labor market, top candidates often have multiple options, so employers can’t afford to dawdle in their hiring process or they’ll risk losing them.

For tech hiring, the problem is particularly acute. IT professionals in high demand are getting four to six job offers per week, according to Robert Half. And according to the USA Today article, the average hiring time frame for IT specialists has been shaved from close to two months to two to three weeks.

Given this situation, you don’t want to be the employer with a longer hiring process. This is why “Your Interviewing Process Takes Too Long” is one of the three biggest technical interviewing mistakes.

After all, take a look at few of the consequences of a long hiring process:
• Lower quality hires—Top talent goes to other employers.
• Lower acceptance rates—Worse candidate experience, and other employers have more time to poach candidates.
• Reduced productivity—Longer time to hire means projects don’t get completed.

How can you speed up your technical interviewing process, and your hiring process as a result, without sacrificing quality?

That last part, “without sacrificing quality,” is important. You don’t want to shortcut technical interviews and make them ineffective for determining if candidates have the skills and experience to succeed at given roles. That will just result in more bad hires, and all the negative consequences that come with them.

Instead, consider focusing on reducing scheduling delays, which can be a week or longer if you use technical interviewing panels—typically three members of your IT team, as they have the necessary technical experience. It can be hard to find times when all three members can prep for an interview with a candidate, perform the interview and evaluate the interview, considering the mission-critical and/or revenue-generating projects they’re working on.

Here are three possibilities for reducing scheduling delays:
1. Make Technical Interviews a Top Priority for Internal Technical Interviewers. Require they make time for interviews within three days. Drawbacks of this are pushback from IT staff on the panel, and urgent projects not being completed in time.

2. Use an Internal IT Consultant. A consultant typically can make time for interviews quickly, and has sufficient IT knowledge. Common drawbacks here are lack of common structure, no guarantee that the interviews are compliant, no common rating scale and inconsistency in questions from candidate to candidate.

3. Outsource the Interviews. Use a service provider, such as eTeki, that will schedule candidates for interviews within 24 hours with external IT pros who are certified in technical interviewing. These interviewers use best practices, so candidates’ skills are appropriately compared and compliance is ensured.

We’ll close out the series with Mistake No. 3, How Technical Interviewing Shortcuts Derail Your Tech Hiring

The post Stop Losing Candidates Because Your Technical Interviewing Takes Too Long appeared first on Resource Center.