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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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17 #Talent42 Tweets That Caught Our Eye

admin — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 14:58:50 +0000

Started in 2012, Talent42 has become one of the most important conferences in technical recruiting.
While we weren’t able to attend this year’s event, held June 27-28 in Seattle, we enjoyed following the action on the conference’s Twitter hashtag. And plenty of action there was. More than 2,300 tweets from nearly 400 unique users included “#Talent42,” according to an HRmarketer conference report. Seventeen of those tweets caught our eye for different reasons. Let’s take a look at them.

Comment: Equal ownership by the driver (hiring manager) and navigator (recruiter) is essential for a successful route to select the right hire. If either fails to take ownership of his or her role, arriving at the best result becomes much more unlikely.

Comment: No one likes to be “closed.” The recruiter-hiring manager relationship should be a partnership, not just a client/service provider scenario. Create buy-in from the initial intake meeting, define the technical screen together, maintain strategy sessions for collaboration, and hold one another accountable.

Comment: Hiring managers need to do more than tell recruiters which skills/tools are needed. They should guide recruiters to understand how the skills/tools are used, and how advanced the right candidate needs to be in each skill/tool.

Comment: Taking a look at the image, some of hiring managers’ “unrealistic” desires are far from ideal. For example, 11 engineers on the interview team would create a horrible candidate experience. And wanting perfection is often the enemy of good—strive for perfection in screening for the core competencies, but accept good to adequate levels in skills current team members already possess.

Comment: “What is trainable?” indeed is an extremely important question to ask. To properly screen for competency and experience, a technical recruiter needs to understand which skills the right candidate must walk in the door with, and which skills are OK to develop over time and are trainable. This understanding must come from communication with the hiring manager.

Comment: It’s critical to be strategic as a technical recruiter. Being able to ask the right questions to reveal and understand what hiring managers really want allows a recruiter to serve as an advisor, make more quality hires, and develop better relationships with hiring managers.

Comment: Setting expectations with the hiring manager at the beginning of the recruiting cycle helps increase the hiring manager’s confidence in the talent acquisition team.

Comment: We love the second element of presenter (and Talent 42 co-founder) John Vlastelica’s slide here, particularly the term “sourcing sprints.” Why? Because it’s terminology IT hiring managers are comfortable with. In software development, a one-, two- or three-week development cycle is often called a “sprint.” By using the same term, a technical recruiter can help a hiring manager understand the similarity between sourcing and software development. It also can help increase the hiring manager’s confidence in the recruiter by showing that the recruiter is working strategically to find talent, rather than shooting in the dark.

Comment: Calibration should include agreeing on the technical screening steps for both early and late in the funnel. This includes which steps to automate as part of initial screening, and for candidates who advance through initial screening, which steps people will handle (e.g., technical interviews).

Comment: These are great questions for technical recruiters to ask hiring mangers, especially when there is an impasse in strategy sessions.

Comment: When hiring managers don’t feel responsible for hiring talent, they can easily become disengaged in the recruiting process. By making them responsible for hiring results, Netflix helps ensure they are properly engaged and involved in this critical effort.

Comment: Machines are capable of many things, but they aren’t capable of being human. While automated tools are becoming more and more powerful for assessing skills, only humans can effectively assess technical experience, which is critical for success in IT roles. So the human factor will continue to play a vital role in the technical hiring process.

Comment: We think a programmer competency matrix is great for IT professionals when they evaluate each other, but that it’s unrealistic to think this will change anything for recruiters who don’t have hands-on technical experience in the programming languages they’re recruiting for. It’s virtually impossible to properly evaluate programmers’ level of competency in those languages without having strong competency yourself.

Comment: We agree: diversity is a conscious choice. Design the hiring process for inclusion, and seek outsourced assistance to reduce internal bias.

Comment: It is possible to deliver speed and quality at the same time. The key is to eliminate unnecessary delays in the hiring process. For example, many employers rely on internal tech panels for technical interviews. While doing so can contribute to quality, the logistics involved (e.g., scheduling interviews, evaluating results) often results in delays of several days or even weeks. In comparison, technical interviewers available through eTeki assess technical suitability in 24 hours or less.

Comment: Consider the candidate experience at every stage of the process. In the case of technical interviews, use a interactive video platform with integrated tools (such as a code editor), have interviewers who possess the relevant technical expertise to have an effective technical discussion and properly evaluate candidates’ experience, and ask tough questions that enable top candidates to shine.

Comment: At eTeki, we don’t want to replace recruiters with our outsourced technical interviewing services. We just want to help them submit the right candidates to hiring managers, and improve hiring results.

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How Tech Recruiters Can Win Applause From Hiring Managers

admin — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 13:11:50 +0000

The benefits for tech recruiter using independent technical professionals to screen IT candidates are clear. Better results. Period. But how do you get your hiring managers on board?

Some IT hiring managers prefer to handle technical interviews internally—personally and/or using trusted members of their teams. They want to be confident that new hires possess the technical qualifications to be assets, rather than liabilities, in given job roles.

Hiring managers are all too familiar with the problems bad IT hires can cause, such as:

Making major mistakes that delay or imperil important projects
Failing to meet important deadlines
Requiring extensive hand-holding and management
Lowering team performance and morale

Technical interviews conducted internally may fail to use best practices, resulting in poor evaluations of candidates. Internal interviewers can knowingly or unknowingly be biased toward candidates with similar backgrounds, which reduces diversity. Some internal interviewers may not approve a highly qualified candidate because they are worried about their own job security. And the difficulty in finding time to fit interviews in busy schedules can slow down the hiring process by a week or likely more.

More and more employers and tech recruiter are avoiding these problems by outsourcing technical interviews to independent IT professionals who specialize in technical interviewing. But to be successful it’s important to turn hiring managers’ reluctance to outsource into support. Below is a four-step process that will help tech recruiter overcome hiring manager reluctance.

Identify Forward-Thinking Hiring Managers to Discuss Outsourcing Technical Interviews

The most powerful ally to gaining IT hiring manager buy-in to use independent technical interviews is one of their peers who believes in the value. When a fellow hiring manager extols the virtues of outsourced technical interviews for candidate screening, other hiring managers are much more likely to listen and be swayed.

Your first move is to identify a good hiring manager to approach. The ideal hiring manager to pitch outsourced technical interviews to:

Is receptive to others’ ideas
Shows flexibility and a willingness to experiment and make changes
Respects your input and works well with you

Once you’ve identified the hiring manager, arrange a meeting to discuss the value of outsourcing technical interviews.

Meet With Hiring Manager to Explore Benefits of Outsourced Technical Interviews

You need to convince the hiring manager that outsourcing technical interviews to independent IT pros will—or at least could—work better than handling them internally. To accomplish this, discuss the benefits both for your organization and for the hiring manager personally.
You could discuss:

Shortening time to hire. Outsourced interviews can be scheduled, conducted and scored quickly, often within 24 hours with a service like eTeki. This means a lower likelihood of losing top candidates to other companies.
Improving the quality of hire. A number of factors enable outsourced technical interviews to help organizations—and hiring managers— screened by experts.. unbiased. Their sole goal is to properly screen candidates’ relevant technical qualifications. Acquire more effective IT talent when fit between qualifications and requirements
Reducing bias within tech out process. Independent interviewers with relevant technical qualifications screen candidates for competencies and experience. Their insight untainted by personal preferences focuses on actual qualifications.
Separating the contenders from the pretenders. Best practices in technical interviewing put candidates at ease, showcase the candidate’s accomplishment and provide the greatest understanding of future on the job behavior.
Saving time. Instead of taking hours of time to plan for, conduct and evaluate technical interviews, the hiring manager and his or her team can focus on their core jobs, and get projects done.

Do A Trial of Outsourced Technical Interviews With Hiring Manager

When you have the hiring manager interested in outsourcing technical interviews to independent IT professionals, suggest a trial run with one or more open positions. It’s essential here to use interviewers who have the technical qualifications to make the evaluations for these positions. Choosing the wrong interviewers will spoil the results.

Discuss the results of the trial run with the hiring manager. He or she will be confident after a few weeks if the candidates whom the outsourced interviewers approved have the skills and experience that he or she is seeking. If the hiring manager finds that the hires are strong, you should have a strong ally when you pitch the idea of outsourcing technical interviews to other IT hiring managers.

Pitch Outsourced Technical Interviews to Other Hiring Managers

If the trial is successful, elicit the help of the hiring manager to encourage other IT hiring managers to try delegating technical interviews to external interviewers. You might do this slowly—one to a few hiring managers at a time—or in a large group. It’s a judgment call. Over time, using these four steps can help outsourced technical interviews become a valuable part of your organization’s hiring process for IT roles.

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6 Strategies to Get Hiring Managers to Buy Into Your Recruiting Process

admin — Thu, 18 May 2017 12:19:47 +0000

You know what many hiring managers hate to do? Hire new employees.

There are many reasons they find hiring distasteful, as Humetrics’ Mel Kleiman points out. A couple notable ones: It gets in the way of their “real job,” and past poor hiring results can make them pessimistic about making quality hires.

But as a recruiter, as Facebook recruiter Allison Mackay observes, you must work and partner with hiring managers. For this partnership to work, you need hiring managers to buy into your recruiting process and be committed to their role in it. Achieving this requires both effective communications, and as Mackay notes, showing to them “your worth as a partner.”

Let’s take a look at some specific steps for getting hiring managers to buy into your recruiting process—and you as a partner. Perform them well, and perhaps hiring managers may even change their opinions about hiring.

Achieve Clarity on Core Skills and Experience During Intake Sessions

The perfect candidate—one who has all of the skills and experience the hiring manager is looking for—often isn’t out there. So as a recruiter, for a given job, it’s vital to know which skills and competency areas are critical for candidates to meet requirements in, and which are “nice to haves” but not essential. Getting clarity about this should be a primary goal during your intake session with hiring managers. It helps with the writing of an effective job description, guides your candidate screening, and encourages’ hiring manager confidence in the recruiting process.

Get Agreement on Screening Tools and Process

Hiring managers also should be involved in determining the tools and process that will be used to screen candidates for a given job. Should a skills test be used? A coding challenge? Do candidates undergo technical interviews? Is it a combination depending on the quality and quantity of candidates submitted? Having more screening steps adds to the length of the hiring process. Having agreement on the screening steps helps ensure that hiring managers are satisfied with the candidate screening process—that it is both sufficiently rigorous and does not cause unnecessary delays.

An important component is identifying minimum thresholds or scores that candidates must meet on screening assessment tools. For example, with technical interviews conducted by eTeki interviewers, it’s common for hiring managers to require a 3.8 (out of 5) average score or higher on required skills.

Provide Hiring Managers With Updates About Screening Process

Keep hiring managers updated about the status of the screening process. It keeps them engaged and shows them that you are doing your job and that the process is moving forward.

Here’s an example of a way to update hiring managers: Send them occasional notes about how many candidates are advancing through the screening steps, and also about how many are eliminated because they didn’t perform up to the minimum threshold. This way you can discuss if the number of candidates advancing through screening is too low or two high and can lead to discussion and agreement on adjustments to the process—such as decreasing or raising minimum thresholds on screening tools.

If Working with Multiple Hiring Managers, Use Focus Groups.

If you work with multiple hiring managers (for example, if you’re responsible for technical recruiting as a whole), it’s a great idea to occasionally get hiring managers together to discuss and evaluate the screening process. This enables you to get feedback from hiring managers about what’s working and what’s not, about the most important competencies for given roles, and about the best screening tools. This doesn’t just help you—it helps the hiring managers, too. If one hiring manager speaks highly of a screening tool, others might be more willing to try it and get positive results.

Develop Your Understanding of the Areas You’re Hiring For

If you show that you have subject-matter knowledge, hiring managers are going to have more confidence in your ability to properly screen candidates. In other words, they will be more likely to see you as an effective partner and will be more eager to work with you.

Provide Data

As Mackay notes, you want to offer data that hiring managers need to know. Some examples she offers:

How many candidates in the pipeline
How many people in interviews
Time to hire (if hired for the role previously)

When you provide hiring managers with information that helps them, they’re going to listen to you and will be more likely to buy into the recruiting process.

Building and Sustaining Trust

Ultimately, to get hiring managers to buy into your recruiting process, you need them to trust the effectiveness of the process and to trust in you. The importance of communication in building and maintaining that trust can’t be overstated. So often when trust breaks down it happens over misunderstandings about processes, tools, and procedures. The suggestions in this post will help eliminate those misunderstandings, thereby improving your relationships with hiring managers and encouraging hiring managers to fully buy into your recruiting process.

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

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

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

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

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

Set Expectations

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

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

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

Be Accountable

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

Collaborate on Candidate Screening

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

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

Give Timely Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set Expectations

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

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

Be Accountable

Collaborate on Candidate Screening

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

Give Timely Feedback

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

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

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Reacting to LinkedIn’s Global Staffing Trends 2017 Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our reaction:

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

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

Our reactions:

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

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

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

Our reactions:

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

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

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

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3 Benefits of a Quick, Quality Technical Interview Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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