skills – Resource Center

Are You Combining Job Descriptions & Resumes Strategically When Interviewing?

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 13:25:28 +0000

A common cause of ineffective interviews and technical screens is something that many interviewers don’t think about: failing to strategically combine job descriptions and resumes.

This failure can lead to hiring candidates who don’t have the necessary skills or experience to perform given jobs, and turning away—or turning off—candidates who do have sufficient qualifications.

In this post, we’ll show you a three-step process for using job descriptions and resumes to conduct effective and candidate-pleasing interviews. First, however, let’s take a look at what can go wrong if you make the mistake of interviewing from just job descriptions or just resumes.

Problems with Interviewing From Just Job Descriptions

It’s bad for both the candidate experience and your employer brand. Since you’re not referencing candidates’ unique skills and experiences, interviews come across as impersonal. Candidates may wonder if you’ve even read their resumes, question whether you’re company, is actually serious about them, and have doubts about whether they want to come work for your company.

You can get an incomplete picture of candidates’ job-relevant qualifications. Sometimes candidates have experience that doesn’t match the experience sought in the job description, but is applicable to the position. A candidate’s resume, for example, might show that he or she has experience with various databases, but not with the particular database in the job description. That experience, however, would make the jump to learning the new database much easier.

Problems with Interviewing From Just Resumes

You could mislead candidates. If you ignore the job description and just focus questions on candidates’ resumes, you’ll make many believe those skills are what they would use at your company, whether that’s true or not. This can also inflate their idea of how likely they are to get the job.

You might not find out whether candidates’ have all of the skills they need to have to succeed. This is because you’re not determining if they have the qualifications present in the job description.

You’ll struggle to round out an entire team’s skillset. If you don’t use the job description, you may really like candidates and their skills, but they might not complement or augment where you have weaknesses in your existing team. You want to make sure their skills help fill in those gaps.

Using Job Descriptions and Resumes Together: a How-To
Here are the steps that we recommend for getting the most value from job descriptions and resumes in your interviews.

Begin by reviewing the job description

Identify core roles and responsibilities, and create a separate category for each (around five is a good number). Then for each category, identify the individual skills and experience that are necessary to perform well.

Here’s an example to show how this looks like. Imagine you are looking to hire a Java Engineer. You identify data structures/algorithms, Java language features/frameworks, design patterns, toolset and enterprise Java as a few of the categories. You would then break down each topic individually and delve into how candidate accomplishments (from resume) in these core competencies and what is required for the job (from JD).

Align questions to identify candidates’ qualification in the tactics that are critical for achieving the role’s core objectives.

For each tactic, you want to determine if candidates have relevant knowledge, skills and accomplishments. Create questions that address them as fully as possible, but don’t go overboard—keeping interviews to an hour or less is an important best practice.

Approach your questions by category. Plan to start with a warm-up question—using our example, something general about candidate’s relevant experience as a Java Engineer.

Then begin the conversation by discussing data structures/algorithms. These questions are designed to determine candidates’ qualifications in the associated job functions (tactics). The discussion will give you a better sense of the candidate’s skill level and allow you to determine the direction of the interview. If your assessment of the initial discussion was positive, you can plan on moving on to more advanced skill assessment.

Close the questions for each category by asking candidates if there are any relevant skills or experiences they want to mention.

Before meeting with individual candidates, review their resumes, and use them to personalize your questions to them.

At least an hour before a scheduled interview, examine the candidate’s resume for the job-relevant skills, experiences, and accomplishments they claim. Adjust your questions to reference these claims, inviting the candidate to discuss them. Also consider highlighting digitally or physically the most recent or complex experience related to each tactic, skill or tool.

Let’s say a candidate’s resume stated that he or she was responsible for managing IBM’s website. Your question might be, “What is the most complex website that you’ve been in charge of?” If the candidate responds with “HP’s site,” you could say, “I saw that, but I’m also interested in this IBM I see on your resume.” That way not only could you get two behavioral examples—one the candidate wants to talk about and one you find interesting—but you also show that you’ve taken the time to review the candidate’s resume and are taking the hiring decision seriously.

More Advice for Interviewers

It might help you to think of job descriptions and resumes as helping you create customized strategic plans for interviews. When you’re writing a strategic plan, you determine the objectives are and your tactics for accomplishing them. Your job description is a strategic plan for filling a job role with a successful new hire, and to do so you outline the objectives for the position, and the tactics and the tools necessary to carry those out successfully. Resumes, in turn, allows you to customize your interviews to best determine if individual candidates have the necessary qualification in those tactics and tools, while also delivering the candidates strong candidate experiences—which is also critical for achieving your strategic plan.

Also, we recommend recording interviews on video if possible, allowing for review. During your review, focus on where each candidate excels and falls short. Use this in creating a summary of how well or poorly each candidate’s qualifications align with the job description.

Lastly, remember that an interview—including a technical interview—is just one factor of many in the hiring process. So if you’re not making the hire/no-hire decision, refrain from stating whether a person should or shouldn’t be hired. Instead limit yourself to discussing the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and how they align with the role.

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Amanda Cole

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

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Navigating the New Norm: 10 Expert Tips on Tech Employee Remote Engagement

Raj — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 16:26:49 +0000

eTeki’s recent expert roundtable unearthed some surprising and innovative ways to deal with new challenges presented by Covid-19. Here I share some personal experiences of living through this unique time, as well as some of the panelists’ most important recommendations to make the best of this unique time, as well as avoid some of the potential pitfalls in your own organization.

1. Transform How To Celebrate Accomplishments and Milestones

Diane Valenzuela Allen of Ultimate Software recognizes the importance of celebrating milestones to keep teams socially connected and motivated. Her software company already had 50% remote employees before covid-19, and was very adept at working in a virtual environment. Before the shutdown, her teams would regularly celebrate individual and team accomplishments as well as personal milestones (such as having a child or getting married) together with in-person events. Their teams work hard, so they make sure to try to bring the fun to the work environment.

They recognized right away that many of their employees were not working in a normal remote environment, and were dealing with new challenges such as caring for children. In addition to regular team check-ins and normal one-on-ones, their teams have taken physical events like happy hours with food trucks and turned them virtual. For their new virtual happy hours, they would ship boxes with goodie bags to participants in advance. This helps with engagement and keeps things fun and different, so it doesn’t end up to be just another Zoom meeting.

2. Rethink Corporate Social Responsibility

Tyrone Smith’s organization Ryan used to regularly pull teams together to give back, bringing them together for a common mission. For the last 29 years, they have done a day of service where they typically go out into the community and give back. This year they’ve transformed their community service day to a virtual experience, as well as shifting into more skill-based giving versus episodic giving.

3. Create Opportunities for Socially Distanced In Person Meetings

Sam Velu and our team here at at eTeki look for ways we can hold small face to face meetings in safe environments where social distancing is possible, such as outdoors in a park. Depending on local regulations, it may be possible to hold meetings with small groups in well ventilated areas where appropriate distance can be maintained.

4. Systematize Mentoring

Mentoring is a valuable way to build skills and relationships in an organization, but when team members are not physically together, it can be difficult to create and sustain mentoring relationships. Yet when people are experiencing social isolation, building these relationships is more important than ever. Diana’s organization is rolling out a formal mentoring tool that will facilitate this important activity. Providing guidelines and programmatic support for mentoring within your organization can ensure everyone gets the most out of it.

In addition to building skills and furthering careers, virtual mentoring can be an effective way to prevent feelings of isolation and loneliness during this time by providing a safe space to discuss feelings and concerns.

5. Reinvent Corporate Learning

With travel restrictions in place, companies are not able to take advantage of their in person training teams. Employees often don’t have time for extended training sessions, and adding more Zoom meetings to an already packed schedule can be exhausting. Yet it’s important to continue to invest in your training budget, and this can be a great time to build organizational skills.

As a result, it’s important to evaluate your organization’s corporate learning initiatives, and find new ways to effectively and efficiently deliver content. In many cases, consuming learning in smaller bits and pieces fits much better into a virtual environment. At the same time, a more flexible environment can create a fantastic opportunity to upskill team members, such as working on achieving technical certifications. Be sure that learning opportunities can adapt to new needs and work schedules.

6. Adapt Skill Development

It’s important to look at how the skills your team currently possesses may need to evolve in a new virtual environment. Rose Schamberger’s organization, Front Door Home, includes some departments who already have experience working remotely, but other groups that are doing it for the first time. As a result, the challenges they face and the skills required are different.

For example, software engineers may not be able to communicate effectively in virtual meetings, although they may be more comfortable working independently in a remote environment than, say, your call center teams. Remote work often needs to be more asynchronous, which is something that many people need to learn.

Rose’s company has actually experienced a bump in productivity, which she attributes partly to the fact that people may be working longer hours at home. This is something they have to pay attention to since it is one of the main drawbacks of remote work besides the social aspect.

7. Build More Diverse Teams

One common trend our panelists all brought up is the fact that while it’s still just as critical as ever to ensure that teams fit with your organization’s culture, the new remote environment means that there are often fewer employee relations issues. A less than perfect fit with team culture is not as important compared to company culture. Unconscious bias is also less of an issue when people are not interacting face to face.

This provides a great opportunity to work on building more diverse teams. Virtual organizations have more reach across and even outside the country, and it can be easier to recruit and promote people with diverse backgrounds. This can be a great time to look at platforms for hiring women who are coming back into the workplace, veterans, and other diverse groups.

8. Leverage the Entire Continuum of Talent

It’s important to look at how your organization can fill skill gaps by utilizing the full continuum of talent, which includes not just full-time and contract workers, but crowdsourcing talented professionals, looking to external partners and exploring human machine partnerships.

Leveraging a variety of talent sources gives organizations maximum agility and flexibility. As Bala Nemani, “It’s important to invest in core skills on your team, but also to reach out to the global pool of tech skills available through the gig economy.” He went on to mention that he’s seen an increase of demand for extended teams at his IT staffing and solutions company, Amzur Technologies.

9. Pay Attention to Mental Health

It’s well known that social isolation causes an increase in mental health issues, and even though many employees are able to spend more time with their families when working from home, the new environment brings new challenges to well being. Even if employees have vacation time, they may not be able to travel or do community activities that they used to do in their leisure time.

Even in a tech environment, it’s critical that the human element still remains. Make sure to communicate to your teams about the need to take personal time off, and provide creative ideas for them to practice self-care.

10. Re-evaluate How You Assess Performance & Productivity

As most employees have much less face time with their superiors, it’s more important than ever that team and individual performance is assessed based on results and outcomes. Measuring hours worked is not only more challenging, it is less relevant in this environment.

Now is the perfect time to really look at the measures your organization has in place to measure productivity levels, and adapt them as needed.

Position Your Organization for Future Leadership – Like during most times of transformation, this sudden shift to remote work presents many challenges as well as many opportunities. The organizations who are able to not only weather this storm, but actually look for new ways to thrive and grow will be the ones that come out ahead in the end. These innovative leaders in their industries were generous enough to take the time to share their own lessons learned and creative ways to navigate the new normal with us so we all can benefit.

Click here to watch the replay of eTeki’s Virtual Roundtable on Covid-19’s Impact on Technical Hiring.

Amanda Cole, Vice President at eTeki

Amanda Cole has more than 15 years 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 a superior facilitation and training skills, an engaging public speaking presence and a fanatic about synergistic business relationships.

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How-To Find the Best in Tech Across the Globe

Punita — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:22:18 +0000

How-To Find the Best in Tech across the Globe

As the New Year approaches, so does a brand new hiring season. With change and resolutions already on the brain, this affords the perfect opportunity to catch the eye of top tech candidates – active and passive alike. But getting in front of this in-demand talent pool takes more than repeating the same old story and hoping it resonates. Instead, organizations looking for tech talent need to refresh and recharge their recruiting strategy and give candidates a reason to believe in taking on a new opportunity. Consider the following six tips:

Look to the data – Remember the promise of Big Data? Now’s the time to use it; with 2018 rapidly disappearing, dig into the information collected throughout the year before making any significant adjustments. Just like crossing the street, look both ways and walk through the whole process to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what needs improvement. From there, define what matters moving forward and review with stakeholders, hiring managers, and executives to get everyone on the same page.

Explore key metrics like application drop off rate, time-to-fill, cost-per-hire
Map out the existing process to identify and account for any gaps
Set new goals based on hiring needs, market trends, and earlier results
Only 1 in 3 employers have applied to one of their companies’ jobs to see what the process is like.

Improve job descriptions – Writing impactful job descriptions is an art form, attempted by many, mastered by few. When it comes to finding tech talent, create a copy that demonstrates a clear-cut understanding of the role and responsibilities without unnecessary buzzwords. These candidates understand the esoteric nature of their work and want to work for organizations that do, too. Save the ping pong table for their first day and use the job description to get down to business: qualifications, skills, certifications, and a basic overview of compensation and benefits (that goes beyond “competitive”).

Include any specific tools or technologies used on the job
Pay attention to detail and get the facts right
Highlight company culture and meaningful perks
Shorter posts (1-300 words) get candidates to apply 8.4 percent more than average.

Enhance job advertising – Bringing science into the process, programmatic job advertising was once a nice to do. Today, it’s becoming a must, particularly when it comes to tech talent. Sure, it might seem obvious where tech talent hangs out online (social networks, GitHub, etc.) but going programmatic lets recruiters expand their reach without having to scour every corner for an untapped talent pool. Better yet, different payment models can stretch budget dollars while uncovering those hard-to-find skill sets.

Weigh the benefits of cost-per-click vs. cost-per-applicant
Run test campaigns to find the right approach
Maximize ads with simple, straightforward content and formatting
By 2020, 86.3 percent of digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.

Automate recruitment marketing – Like most parts of the recruiting process, even marketing can – and should – be automated. In the case of tech talent, marketing automation is another way to attract and engage job seekers who could otherwise go undiscovered. Rather than bombard highly-sought after talent with impersonal and irrelevant messages, automation will offer up curated content and personalized interactions, nurturing these candidates and keeping them interested.

Build campaigns around specialized hiring needs
Promote a well-defined employer brand to a broader audience
Save recruiters the hours spent calling or sending out individual messages
Nearly 70 percent of enterprise companies are investing in recruitment marketing capabilities.

Implement video screening – With tech talent scattered around the world, video is one way to speed up the screening process and conduct interviews without incurring travel costs. By removing borders and boundaries, the video also makes it easier to get the meetings scheduled and shared between team members for feedback and next steps. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) further enhances the possibilities of video, adding valuable features for collaboration and analysis.

Create a resource about what to expect to help candidates prepare
Consider both live and pre-recorded interview options
Optimize video interview questions as needed using the insights provided
Recruiters can do 20 video screens in the time it takes to do one phone screen.

Evaluate and assess candidates – Incorporating pre-employment assessments into the process works two-fold, giving tech candidates the chance to show off their talents while validating capabilities and showcasing personality and behaviors. Reinforcing this with input from interviewers versed in the technical skills needed to complete the role in question can help separate the maybe from the definite hires. Simultaneously creating a highly personalized candidate experience, tech talent gain a stronger sense of the potential employer and feel for the job.

Develop assessments for both hard and soft skills as well as culture fit
Appraise candidates before advancing top contenders to hiring managers
Streamline hiring, with a more efficient, less time-consuming process
Organizations using pre-employment assessments improve the quality of hire by 68 percent.

In a competitive hiring landscape, recruiting the best in tech goes beyond just being there. It takes focus, determination and a handcrafted approach built around best practices and proven strategies – with serious tech know-how.

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Amanda Cole

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

The post How-To Find the Best in Tech Across the Globe appeared first on Resource Center.

Engaging your hiring manager to make the most impactful hires

admin — Thu, 24 May 2018 16:10:37 +0000

One of the most talented individuals I ever managed would never get hired in today’s workforce, and that makes me sad.

When I led a team at IBM some years ago, our team was comprised almost entirely of computer science graduates, as you might imagine. That is, except for one woman with a PhD in medieval French literature. Because she had a background that was entirely different than the rest of us — and because that background was academic and required her to defend theses and dissertations for years — she was absolutely great at thinking outside of her realm and knowing how to problem-solve. In short, she could see the things that the rest of us, weighed down with technical tunnel vision, had problems seeing. She was a superb addition to the team.

In the modern hiring manager-recruiter relationship, though, I doubt she’d find her way onto that team. Much of recruiting right now comes down to lists of 30 or more technical skills. The candidate with the most checkboxes wins (or, sadly, the candidate that has the most checkboxes and the least salary cost). This isn’t the right way to get the best people.

But the hiring manager-recruiter relationship is a perennial question, and most organizations have still yet to solve it. Can it be solved? Yes. There are a few key approaches.

Ask the hiring manager about the scope of personal action for this hire
Is the hiring manager thinking that the new hire will be someone who fulfills assignments, or is someone who is going to take a technically creative lead on his/her team? This is a crucial question. Most people with the right pre-existing skill sets can enter roles where their main function is fulfilling assignments. But only people with the right combination of logic and thinking skills can be a lead for the department moving forward.

I once managed a man named Mike at the Dimension Data offices in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’d call Mike an “intuitive simplifier.” He was a good coder, yes, but he was also good at getting to the heart of what our systems needed to do. Without fail, he delivered simpler, more elegant systems instead of the bulkier, more complex ones we were used to building. We found Mike, who was a tremendous early career hire for us, by asking this series of questions of candidates and hiring managers:

To the candidate: “How and when have you solved a problem using ideas and techniques outside the realm of the problem? How and when have lessons you’ve learned outside your discipline (for example, software development) helped you in your discipline?”
If a candidate can walk you through this successfully, they likely have the analytical skills and creativity you need in a future anchor for the department. If you just need someone to hit their marks — that is, execute against precise instructions — this question is less important.

To the hiring manager: “How much learning does this role involve? How technologically fresh do they need to be? What scope does this role allow for creativity”
This is important to understand: in 2000 or so, the “game changing” technologies appeared every 1.5-2 years. That gave recruiters enough lead time to locate the talent their hiring managers needed. Now, game changing technologies emerge in under a year. With so much change afoot companies and candidates easily get distracted, not knowing what technologies to embrace and which to ignore. Does your business require swift adaptation to technology or other emerging trends (such as shifts in social media usage and platforms)? If so, your hiring needs to focus more on adaptability and the wise embrace of change than on ephemeral skills lists that rapidly go out of date. Do you need someone with the potential to learn and grow quickly? If so, you need to look to the candidates’ background — have they shifted industries, teams, roles, responsibilities?

As an aside, in the past we looked unfavorably on candidates that moved between industries and technology platforms. But with the way the tech stack and business overall move now, adaptability in a candidate can be a good sign. If they have good recommendations, technical skills, and can answer questions about how they learn, their past history of shifting industries shouldn’t automatically count against them. In fact, past experiences that demonstrate adaptability and growth are good signs your candidate will do well in today’s fluid environments.

To the hiring manager: “How much supervision is this role going to need? Would you consider someone with more experience and offer a higher salary for the role?”
Fresh-out-of-school candidates — which my colleague Amrut will address in a future eTeki article — and junior candidates tend to need more supervision as they develop. Many hiring managers are busy people who want projects finished and delivered on time. But if they’re too busy to supervise and develop, their less experienced teammates may fail to develop as they should, causing frustration on both the manager’s and employees’ parts.

Don’t shy away from considering advanced candidates who are further along in their career. Granted, experience often comes with a higher price tag that can put the candidate out of reach. But here, too, a broader perspective can help. Higher salary costs can be offset by shorter ramp up time after hiring, greater team velocity (meaning that the team is more productive), and lower supervision costs. If you take into account the entire lifecycle of an employee’s contribution to your company, you may find that advanced candidates cost less overall than less experienced ones, especially for roles that require a lot of autonomy.

This discussion can be awkward for hiring managers, because for a variety of reasons they may harbor reservations about taking on employees with more advanced skills than they have. Likewise, they may feel constrained by rigid budget rules. Nevertheless, the discussion is worth having.

Recruiting-hiring manager relationships are about building shared trust. Today’s highly competitive employment market demands flexibility and creativity of both recruiters and hiring managers. I’ve repeatedly been asked why my engineering teams stayed together for so long, continuously reinventing themselves to meet new challenges and adapt to new technologies. My answer, after giving credit to luck and good fortune, is this: I learned to look past what the candidate can do for me today to imagine what their creativity, independence and problem-solving skills could do for me in the future tomorrow I could only barely imagine.

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Reed Hyde, eTeki Tech Advisory Panel
Reed Hyde brings a globe-spanning mix of business and technology expertise. While serving as the product owner of the NTT / Dimension Data worldwide cloud, he and his team relaunched the company’s public cloud and grew the company’s portfolio with new private and hybrid cloud, reversing the company’s decline in cloud sales.

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Recipe for Success: Startup Founders and Tech Skills

admin — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:04:40 +0000

The failure rate for startups varies by which data set you use, but it’s definitely over 50% — likely somewhere between 60% (low end) and 90%+. There are obviously any number of different factors and contexts from business model to industry to initial partnerships to funding, etc.

One thing held constant across startups, though, is that they’re founded. They’re created from nothing by one person or multiple individuals. The sheer act of being “founded” is one of the only commonalities across Startup Land.

As such, there’s north of 7 million Google results for articles with headlines “The Most Successful Startup Founders Have These Skills.” (Almost all of these articles will begin with “The Most Successful Startup Founders,” as an aside.)

Because there are 7 million+ of these articles, combing for valuable information about what startup founders need to do in the initial stages can be a time-consuming process. We tried to do some of the lifting for you. Here are a few big things we discovered.

Lessons from Apple
Despite the “started in a garage” narrative, the fact is Apple never actually started in a garage — but it did begin in Los Altos, California as a startup. That startup now has the largest market capitalization in the world, so it’s a logical place to try and draw founder lessons from.
You probably know these guys:

That’s 1977.
While the conventional modern narrative is about Jobs’ brilliance and design thinking, the actual picture may be more nuanced and give a lesson to startup founders looking for initial partners.

Here’s what Wozniak himself has said:
“People who are very similar in personalities and values can work better together. Steve and I were very similar in values [wanting] to use technology to improve the lives of human beings and make them more masters of their destinies. In personality, he wanted to be out in front, be master of a company, make something in life, and be important, while I really just wanted to design computers and be a great engineer. I wasn’t into all the politics and the way businesspeople think, whereas Steve was. You need both of those, but you need other disciplines as well. Our company was not just two people.”

First brick in this building:

Values the same
Personalities different

The role of technical skills for startup founders
This is an interesting discussion question that eTeki has kicked around because of their role in the technical hiring space: namely, do founders or early-stage employees need to have a greater mix of technical skills or business development skills? What’s going to be more crucial to building the business effectively?

Turns out there has been recent research on this, based on notable German startups. The ultimate conclusion of the paper is that the most effective, scaled startups begin with technically-skilled founders who then hire business-focused people.

As the authors note:
“One theory for why technical skills seem to matter more for a founder is simply that the average technical founder has better business skills than the average business-trained founder has technical skills.”

The research is interesting, but the important takeaway is one you might have known before the research: a business absolutely needs both technical skill/leadership and business development/leadership in order to successfully grow

… and the other bottom line (via research)
… is this: based on research across 5,300 startups from 1992 to 2007, the No. 1 predictor of success is the initial slate of hires after the founders. (It can vary by number, but give or take it’s the first 10-15 hires.)

When launching a new venture, then, the first dozen or so hires you make might be the absolute make-or-break for the first few years. You need to get it right.

In reality, you always need to get hiring right — but an enterprise company hiring Employee No. 102,738 is a lot different than a startup hiring Employee No. 6.

If you come from a more business-centric background (development, plan modeling, etc.) and you need technical talent to bolster your end product or service, you absolutely need a plan for finding that technical talent.

One of the biggest challenges for business development professionals is simply that, while their idea may be potentially worth billions, they might not understand the full scope of the technical skills needed to make it a reality.

eTeki helps evaluate gaps in expertise — and thus help you avoid bad hires. While they do work with some enterprise on volume hiring needs, they’ve worked with early-stage startups to make sure they have the right people in place to begin their scaling process.

Extending the discussion
We’d like to hear from you on social media after reading this post. Use the hashtag #etekistartups and tell us what combination of founders and early-staff skills you think is important. We’d love to hear how people think about the personal side of building out a new idea.

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

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Is Your Bench of IT Experts Deep Enough? Probably Not.

admin — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 15:02:18 +0000

In tech, to acquire quality talent with consistency, you need an extremely diverse bench of tech talent to properly screen applicants, particularly if you plan to innovate with new and emerging technologies. The widely used staffing term “bench strength” is borrowed from baseball. Just take a look at IT teams. Having strong depth allows teams to overcome talent losses, and multiple professionals with specialized technical abilities can be invaluable. Let’s show you what we mean.

The 15 Categories of Technical Expertise
First, it’s important to recognize that there are many distinct areas of IT expertise. We’ve identified the following 15 categories:

Application/Software Development
Big Data and Data Science
Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse
Cloud Technologies
Cyber Security
Databases & Database Management
DevOps / Infrastructure & Data Centers
Enterprise Applications
Machine Learning / AI
Internet of Things
Mobile Technologies
Networking, Voice & Data Communications
Project, Program & Product Management
Quality Assurance & Validation
UI/UX Design

This is important because professionals in these categories aren’t interchangeable. The skills and tools a software developer needs to have, for example, are quite different than those required of a cyber security professional.

This reality has major ramifications for technical screening. In particular, to properly evaluate candidates’ technical experience for IT positions, the interviewer must have current skills and experience in the particular category. This means to effectively screen candidates for cyber security roles, the interviewer needs to be well skilled in the latest cyber security protocols.

Technology Stacks and Job Levels
Having an IT professional in the same expertise category conduct technical interviews often isn’t sufficient alone. Why? Two reasons:

The professional performing the technical screen should have experience with the skills and tools used in each element of the tech stack used in the position to be filled.
The professional performing the technical screen should be of the same or similar job level as the position to be filled.

Let’s look at each reason a bit more closely.
A technology stack consists of the tools and technologies that are used in a role (to learn more about what a technology stack looks like, we recommend this post). Ideally, you want a 100 percent match—between interviewer and each component of the stack. So, for example, if a development role calls for expertise in – Python, REST, MySQL, Version Control, and Django – the professional performing the technical screen should have strong expertise in the same. Resist the urge to have someone without direct relevant experience evaluate candidates because it will affect the accuracy of screening results.

Meanwhile, many employers make the mistake of using professionals of the wrong job level to conduct technical screens. While few would think of using junior IT professionals to evaluate candidates for senior-level roles, it’s highly common for employers to blunder by using senior IT professionals (such as hiring managers) to evaluate the technical qualifications of candidates for junior and mid-level roles.

Why is this a mistake? While different ranks may interact with the same elements of the stack, they typically require differing levels of experience in the tools, and they often use them differently. In the case of hiring managers, they often aren’t using the tools in the same hands-on fashion as someone presently employed in a similar stage of their career. A network engineer knows the nuances, pros and cons of approaches, and procedures intimately and thus can effectively evaluate candidates for the same role.

The Required Talent Adds Up
In summary, for ideal technical screening results (and thus ideal hiring results), you need the professionals conducting technical interviews to:

Have their technical expertise to be in the same category as the open position.
Possess skills and experience in each critical element of the stack to be used in the open position.
Be of the same job level as the open position.

And when you add these requirements up, companies looking to compete with tech in today’s fast-paced marketplace, need to engage technical interviewers with the above traits and more. IT salaries, like top AI talent, in some cases rival major league sports figures. So, while it’s tempting to send candidates to an IT professional without preferred screening credentials, accurate results should count more than familiarity with an interviewer.

The post Is Your Bench of IT Experts Deep Enough? Probably Not. appeared first on Resource Center.

For Critical Tech Projects, Smart Workforce Planning Includes Hiring for Skill

admin — Thu, 25 May 2017 13:28:00 +0000

“Hire for attitude, train for skill.”
“Hire for cultural fit, train for skill.”
We hear these ideas all of the time from hiring and recruiting experts. But the truth is, it’s often imperative to hire for skill—especially for tech roles.

Here’s a quick story that’s highly revealing about why training for skill can be a bad idea. An HR technology company we know is aiming to put out a new product in time for the HR Technology Conference in the fall. To achieve this goal, the company recognizes it needs to hire another developer, one capable with the PHP web application framework Symfony.

A talent supplier suggested a candidate, saying the individual met all of the technical requirements. “This is the guy. Hire him.” The engineering team looked at his resume. They see he graduated from college with a computer science degree just a few years earlier, and are skeptical, as there’s a big leap from being an expert from a textbook to successfully programming enterprise HR technology software. They set up an interview anyway, and finally got the candidate on the phone. They spent an hour and discovered that their hunch is right. The candidate has potential but doesn’t have the skills or experience they need. The talent supplier says, “Just give him two weeks and if it doesn’t work out we can find another candidate – but we’re confident it will work.” The engineering team said no, with one developer and potential future co-worker to the candidate telling the company CEO, “I don’t think you’re paying me to run a university here.”

And the company’s not. It’s paying the engineering team to get the new product completed expertly and on time. And it doesn’t want progress slowed, or even stopped so that a new developer can be properly trained. As a result, the company is smartly hiring for skill and experience, and being choosy in its efforts to find the right person.

Smart Workforce Planning for Critical Technology Projects
When you’re conducting critical technology projects, you need to have the required talent with the right skills or the projects likely will fail. This means that it’s imperative to identify any potential points of failure from a workforce planning or staff allocation perspective, especially within your IT department. After all, you can’t afford for these projects to fail.

For effective smart workforce planning of your tech resources, consider following these three steps.

Perform an inventory of your company’s in-house technical expertise and experience. Knowing which skills and competencies your tech team members have enabled to you both allocate them effectively, and to identify any needed or lacking skills.

Determine what expertise is needed to carry out your business-critical technology projects. If your current talent doesn’t have the necessary skills to deliver the results you need, then you’ll know that you’ll need additional resources. It’s also a good idea to look ahead to future business-critical projects to have an idea of upcoming talent needs you’ll have.

Have a viable backup plan for supplementing or replacing technical team members. What will you do if key people leave in the middle of projects or if projects require more people than originally thought? This is the question your backup plan answers. You need to know what you’re going to do and be confident that those actions will prevent critical departures or additional talent needs from hampering the projects. Some examples of possible backup plans: using a particular staffing company, an IT services firm, or a consultant who specializes in the technology that you’re relying upon.

The Third and Fourth Platforms
One way of determining how important effective smart workforce planning is for the success of a business-critical project is to evaluate whether the required technical skills to complete the project are difficult to find or in high demand.

The computer platform model (coined by International Data Corporation) can help here. We will explain how in a moment, but first, let’s look at the platforms:

First Platform: Mainframe computers (1950s to present)
Second Platform: client/server (mid-1980s to present)
Third Platform: social, mobile, cloud and analytics (early 2010s to present)
Fourth Platform: no clear definition, but many experts say artificial intelligence, quantum computing, Internet of Things (present to future)

The good news for projects in the first and second platforms is that many IT workers should be capable of helping. So it should not be overly difficult to find tech talent with sufficient relevant skills and experience, which means that attitude and cultural fit can be important parts of your hiring decisions.

Business-critical projects, those that are most likely to bring revenue to a business, are much more likely to be associated with the third and fourth platforms, as these are the platforms of innovation today. The skills associated with these projects aren’t widespread, so it can be highly challenging to find the talent that you need. As a result, effective smart workforce planning is imperative for these projects. And, when you do add tech talent to your team for these projects, you absolutely should hire for skill. Because skill is what you need.

The post For Critical Tech Projects, Smart Workforce Planning Includes Hiring for Skill 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.

Hire Great Tech Talent With Quality Technical Interviews

admin — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:26:21 +0000

In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that 65% of CIOs report a tech skills shortage, the highest percentage since the 2008 recession.

This is troubling given how critical quality tech talent has become for businesses’ success. PricewaterhouseCooper’s 2015 Global CEO Survey report noted, “The rapid pace of technological change—seen as a challenge by 58% of CEOs—is … highlighting a shortage of key skills that could imperil growth.”

But too often new hires’ skills are lacking or don’t fit given employers’ particular needs. According to a Robert Half Finance & Accounting survey, 36% of CFOs reported that the top factor leading to a bad hire, other than performance problems, is a poor skills match.

Companies Turn to Technical Interviews in Hiring
So how can companies’ identify tech talent that have the skills they desperately need?
For many leading companies, the answer is with quality technical interviews. Among them are Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which rely on them when hiring their software engineers, according to tech hiring author Gayle Laakman McDowell.

Technical interviews strike a balance between determining competency on key technical concepts, demonstrating skills in real-time, and providing assurance of hands-on project experience. They are designed to reveal whether candidates have the chops to succeed at a given role. This allows employers to identify people who can come in from day one and plug into mission-critical or revenue-generating projects.

An essential component for successful technical interviews is that interviewers must have applicable hands-on technical knowledge and be able to ask the right questions and effectively evaluate answers. Only then will candidates’ experience and abilities—or lack thereof— become clear.

You might be thinking, why can’t you instead just look at candidates’ resumes to see if they have the skills you need? First, technical interviews provide much more insight into candidates’ skills in particular key technologies for the employer. Second, resumes can be unreliable. Candidates have motivation to exaggerate their abilities, and often do. Embellishing skill sets is the most common area where job seekers lie, according to a 2015 CareerBuilder survey of employers.
(It’s also notable that technical interviews are valuable for IT staffing companies, too, allowing them to more consistently deliver validated, high-quality talent to clients.)

Avoid Bad Hires
In addition to helping identify superior candidates, technical interviews also reduce bad hires. Tech hires without the necessary skills rarely succeed.

Bad hires, whether they quickly wash out or stick around as low performers, are extremely costly. The average cost of a bad hire has been estimated as 2.5 times the hire’s salary. With an average IT professional earning $100,000 per year, that’s a cost of $250,000. In high-salary areas like California, the cost is even higher.

Why is the cost so high? Here are some impacts commonly seen from bad tech hires:

Projects delayed or not completed
Reduced morale among IT staff
Unhappy or lost customers, leading to lost revenue

In fact, bad tech hiring can cause damage to a brand by making the organization seem technologically inept.

Unsatisfied with Tech Hires?
Conducting quality technical interviews is critical for successful tech hiring. If you’re unsatisfied with the quality of your tech hires, consider adding technical interviews to your screening procedure, or look at ways you can improve your technical interviews. The better they are, the better your results will be.

The post Hire Great Tech Talent With Quality Technical Interviews appeared first on Resource Center.

Top 5 Ways of Handling Talent to Cope with IT Skill Gap

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 17:02:40 +0000

Information Technology consists of data, software, hardware, technical professionals and several other factors. All of these combined and working optimally provide a basis for a company’s success, however, it’s the brainpower of the IT professional that is ultimately responsible for accomplishing the company’s goals. Many companies are lagging behind their goals due to a deficiency of knowledgeable, experienced technical talent. Organizations seek to make competitive strides by leveraging technologies such as big data, mobile and AI, but a shortage of IT candidates with these skills exist. How do you deal with an IT skill shortage? An ideal way to handle the IT skill gap issue is revamping hiring strategies and talent retention procedures to drive business growth.

Select candidates as per IT roles – Instead of advertising a job with a list of desired skills and waiting for the right candidate to apply, focus on recruiting someone experienced with the specific role. When creating your job posting think about what’s essential to build a competent team and the type of specific talent that can recognize the organizational goals. Once you have selected the top three to five candidates that are “qualified on paper,” schedule a technical interview to be conducted via eTeki’s on-demand technical interviewing platform.

Quarterly performance review – Evaluate technical skills of your team quarterly and find out where they need to improve their skills and where the team excels. By reviewing skills periodically, you can show executives your technical team is up-to-date on new technological advancements to meet the coming business objectives. Undertaking this approach can aid in detecting skill shortfall in your IT team early, so you can make plans for professional development for your existing staff and identify the most critical roles and skills to screen for when hiring in the future.

Provide training to employees – Once you have identified gaps in each employee’s skill set, you can collectively review the technical gaps of the team. Arrange training for the individual, or the entire team when appropriate, in the specific area of need to increase overall understanding and competency. Keep in mind, it’s your talented team whose efforts are the foundation for business growth in your company. Empowering your team with professional development opportunities to increase their skills will move your company to the next level of success.

Build a progressive career path – It seems that retaining quality employees is sometimes harder than recruiting them. In order to keep your top IT talent, plan a progressive career path for them. Set standards for specific technical skills that will allow your talent to move ahead to the next level of their IT career. Be sure to consider how compensation, benefits, and incentive packages are structured to reward current employees who accept the challenge to grow as professional. This type of an environment creates positive team morale and increases retention rates.

Brainstorm methods for retention – Put yourself in the shoes of IT professionals at your organization and come up with ideas to keep your technical talent from considering a lucrative job offer elsewhere. Consider the obstacles they face on a daily basis and take steps to establish solutions to remove areas of frustration from their work lives. This can be a challenging process, but it’s absolutely essential when dealing with retention during a widespread deficit of IT talent and a demand for businesses to technologically advanced business practices.

These 5 strategies will help you to handle technical talent and close the IT skill gap. Rethink how you currently hire IT professionals and step out of your conventional recruitment strategies. There are times you may only have to change a few facets of your current practice, but at times you may need to overhaul the entire staffing procedure. Don’t be afraid to make changes for the benefit of your company. Embrace change and make the most of your business returns by hiring and retaining top notch technical talent.

eTeki can help you pre-qualify the technical skills of your prospective new hires by pairing a hands-on experienced IT professional with your potential employees to conduct a technical interview. eTeki certified interviewers make sure that the skills outlined in the candidates’ resumes are skills that the candidate has experience applying to technical projects.

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