process – Resource Center

Is your recruiting process actually alienating top-tier candidates?

admin — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 09:33:38 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avoid alienation by…

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

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

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

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For Great High-Volume Tech Recruiting, Apply the KISS Principle

admin — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:26:44 +0000

UCLA coaching legend John Wooden famously said, “Be quick but don’t hurry.” A good principle for basketball. Equally good for high-volume tech recruiting. If you hurry the technical recruiting process, you’ll end up making bad hires that will harm rather than help your organization. If you drag out the process, your organization won’t have the talent it needs when it needs it.

To meet Wooden’s principle, we recommend applying an even more well-known principle: KISS — yes, Keep it Simple Stupid. Simplify the important steps of recruiting, and make sure you execute them at a high level. That’s how to consistently achieve quality high-volume tech recruiting results.

Of course, specifics matter. Below are some of our favorite tips that will help you stay consistent with the KISS principle.

Stay Organized and On the Same Page

Disorganization is your enemy. It leads to delays, confusion, mistakes and bad hires. And it’s more likely to occur when you’re trying to hire many workers at the same time.

So be vigilant about staying organized. This includes ensuring that you’re on the same page with hiring managers, and that you’re communicating when you need to with candidates. As a LinkedIn high-volume recruiting guide notes, “even the slightest disconnect” with hiring managers “can lead to wasted time and energy.”

Use Automation

Automation helps you stay organized, and ensures that certain key steps—such as candidate communication—are handled correctly every time. So when sensible, take advantage of it.

Use Technical Screening Tools

Technical screening tools are helpful for increasing speed and maintaining quality—especially when you’re hiring in volume.

When you’ve sourced many candidates, checking references is time-consuming and might not even be completed. Automated reference checking ensures all candidates’ references are checked with the same standard.

The technical interview stage can be another bottleneck. Interviews can take days or weeks to arrange, and conducting them takes valuable time away from your technical staff. Outsourcing your technical interviews to the right provider will ensure that interviews are conducted using best practices, that your technical staff’s time isn’t used up, and that results come in as little as 24 hours.

These are just a couple of examples. The ideal high-volume process will use a variety of processes and technologies to improve the organization, save time, and maintain quality.

Make it Easy to Apply

If you want to hire a good number of candidates, it’s important to facilitate a large candidate pool. Part of that is making it easy to apply by keeping any application forms short and simple, and pre-populated responses when possible. An Indeed survey found that 42% of job seekers say that lengthy applications are the most frustrating part of the application process.

Look at Metrics

Track how you’re doing to see what can be improved. Even if you use the other tips in this post, you’re bound to find some ways to fine-tune your process—if you take advantage of key recruiting metrics, including those available through technical screening tools.

As Jerome Ternynck, the founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, told SHRM, two important metrics to track are time to hire and time to start—as these will help you improve the speed of your hiring process.

“Competition for talent is steep and high-volume recruiters have realized that if they don’t hire faster than the competition, they are likely to lose candidates to the competition,” Ternynck said. “Determine internally what your time-to-hire should be and track it across your company to ensure you meet it.”

A variety of other sources discuss keys to success for high-volume recruiting. The focus of these sources is often on seasonal and retail hiring, but some are applicable to technical hiring. The remaining suggestions are some of our favorites from these sources.

Source Your Previous Candidates

When you’re trying to hire tech talent in bunches, you want to source a large number of good candidates. An often-underused source of good candidates is people who’ve applied for IT jobs with your company in the past.

As an Ideal article explains, according to a CareerBuilder survey, “One of the biggest complains employers have about their recruiters is the failure to look at candidates in their own database.”

Focus on Sourcing

A SHRM article notes that high-volume recruiters often need to go beyond the typical large job boards and take advantage of other resources to find quality talent. In the case of tech, great talent can often be found on sites where IT professionals congregate, such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, and online communities.

SHRM also notes the importance of referrals. Recruiting expert Rebecca Barnes-Hogg stated, “Referrals can make or break your search for high-demand talent. It’s too easy to forget relationship building when you’re under pressure to fill large numbers of positions quickly, but job boards and resume databases are no longer as effective as they once were and you need referrals to build a pool of candidates.”

—-8. Write Great Job Descriptions

LinkedIn’s high-volume recruiting guide points out that when you have a lot of open jobs, more candidates isn’t enough—you want to attract BETTER candidates. “One way to attract great talent is to write your job descriptions in a way that appeals to the caliber of people you’re looking to hire. ’Caliber’ doesn’t just mean the right kind of skills and experience, but also the right attitude and values.”

—-9. Assess Current Personnel, Onboarding and Training

An Avontis Group blog post notes the importance of remembering that members of your current staff could have the skills that you need. So don’t forget to see if your existing employees might be suitable for the roles you need to hire for since you already have a good idea of their work performance.

Also, when you bring in a good number of new hires, it’s also important to get new hires up to speed quickly. So evaluate your onboarding and training to ensure that the new talent you bring in will be as successful as soon as possible.

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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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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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3 Common Technical Interviewing Mistakes That Can Spoil Your IT Hiring

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 14:42:05 +0000

Are you unsatisfied with the caliber of your company’s IT hires? Are you losing top IT candidates to other employers?
If you answer “yes” to either of those questions, there’s a good chance your company is making one or more of the three biggest technical interviewing mistakes. Let’s check them out.

MISTAKE NO. 1: Your Interview Questions Aren’t Behavioral-Based
It’s critical for employers to identify during interviews if candidates will succeed in a given role. Yet, as Google HR Guru Laszlo Bock details in a fascinating article, “Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People,” some employers ask questions that are worthless in determining if candidates are the right fit. Some examples: “What is your greatest strength?” “What is your greatest weakness?” “How many golf balls would fit inside a 747?”
Others make more of an effort to learn about candidates’ skills, but commit the error of focusing on theoretical questions. Quality answers to such questions only show that candidates understand theory, and have limited value in helping determine if candidates can successfully perform the job.

Instead, ask behavioral questions. The common-sense idea behind this approach is that the best indicator of future job performance is past job performance. What are behavioral questions? They are often introduced with phrases like “Tell me about a time…” Here are two examples Bock provided:

Tell me about a time your behavior had a positive impact on your team.
Tell me about a time you effectively managed your team to achieve a goal. What did your approach look like?

The behavioral approach is vastly superior to traditional-style interviews, studies have consistently found. For example, a University of Notre Dame study found that behavioral interviews are 55% predictive of future on-the-job behavior, compared to just 10% for traditional interviews.

MISTAKE NO. 2: Your Interviewing Process Takes Too Long
A 2017 Glassdoor study found that the average job interview process in the United States takes 23.8 days. Meanwhile, as we noted in a recent post, IT professionals in high demand receive four to six job offers per week, according to Robert Half.

Combining the data, if you have an average-length interview process, IT pros in high demand could receive close to 20 other job offers during the process. So clearly, having a long interviewing process can make it harder to land top IT talent.
Here is a list of some of the key consequences of an overly long interviewing process:

Lower quality hires—Key talent goes to other employers.
Worse candidate experience—A slow process frustrates candidates. Delayed interviews also can indicate to candidates that they aren’t a priority, especially when other employers schedule interviews quickly.
Lower acceptance rates—Other employers have more time to poach candidates.
Reduced productivity—Longer time to hire means projects don’t get completed.

A common cause of overly long technical interviewing processes is it can take a week or more to determine when members of internal interviewing panels can fit in an interview. If you decrease the length of time it takes to schedule, conduct, and score a candidate’s technical skills, your company will gain a competitive edge in the war for the best and brightest technical talent.

MISTAKE NO. 3: Shortcutting the Process
While you want to have an efficient technical interviewing process, it’s essential not to use shortcuts that spoil the results of the process. Shortcuts include not having standards for your technical interviews (e.g., not having common questions, not having common rating scale) or even not having technical interviews at all.

The consequences of spoiling the results are severe: you end up hiring the wrong people. With IT hires, that leads to frustrated co-workers, frustrated customers, key projects not getting completed, etc. Eventually it leads to higher turnover, the cost of which alone is estimated at 100-150% of annual salary for technical positions. SHRM has estimated that, factoring in the various consequences, the cost of a bad hire could be as high as five times the amount of the bad hire’s salary. Assuming an average IT salary of $100,000, in IT, the cost could be $500,000 for each bad hire.

Next in this series – How To Stop Playing the Interviewing Guessing Game

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Top 5 Tactics of Conducting Successful Interviews

admin — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 10:42:12 +0000

Conducting successful interviews is never an easy task. It is important in the hiring process to create an agenda and an interview structure. After winnowing the resumes, recruiters should be ready to interview candidates in a timely manner. They should be armed with questions to assist with fact finding and assess problem solving and creative thinking. A well-prepared recruiter thinks seriously about the interviewing process when determining the right fit for the organization. Candidates have a number of options in the current employment market and getting the perfect candidate for the job has become increasingly difficult. Therefore, the interview process for an organization should be strong enough to attract the best talent.

Let’s check out the top 5 tactics of conducting successful interviews:
1. Set Questions by Evaluating Top Performers

Evaluate the qualities of top performers in your organization, make a list of desired attributes in your new hire and then compare the two. Think about how the top employees are executing their roles in a resourceful manner for the organization. Assessing their traits will help you to construct relevant interview questions to hire new candidates.

2. Make the Interviewees Feel Comfortable

Try to reduce the stress level for the candidates during an interview. Candidates cannot perform at their best if they are stressed by the fear of unknown questions. Make them feel comfortable by revealing the topic of discussion before the interview. This will reduce nervousness and allow you to engage the candidate in a productive conversation. Also, schedule the interview at a convenient time for the interviewee.

3. Ask Candidates to Solve Real Problems

Assess the problem-solving capabilities of the candidates by asking them to solve a real problem pertaining to the job. Explain the problem in detail, so that the candidate can identify inefficiencies and come up with possible solutions. This reveals the candidate’s power to think in critical situations and allows you to assess communication skills.

4. Adopt a Conversational Tone instead of an Interrogation

Make the interviewing process conversational rather than interrogating the candidate. Listen to the candidate carefully and speak with a professional and welcoming tone — this will allow the candidate to open up and encourages open communication. Actively engage the candidate — this shows that you are paying attention.

5. Involve 3 Members during the Interview

While making a hiring decision, try to involve trusted team members who can conduct multiple checks. You might want to have 3 team members be a part of the interview — for instance, a senior recruiter, the HR manager and the team leader. Peer interviewers also work well in this regard, as they can assist you in hiring the right candidate and, at the same time, make sure the candidate is comfortable.

These tactics can surely help you gain a competitive advantage. Remember that an interview is not about you, but about the candidate you are speaking with. As a recruiter, your primary job is to evaluate the actual candidates, not to critique them. Create a positive interview experience, so that the candidate looks forward to working with your organization.