talent – Resource Center

What do tech employment and hiring look like globally?

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 17:47:28 +0000

eTeki is proud to be a Bronze Sponsor of the World HR Summit in Goa, India (and NPA Worldwide in Tampa, FL, USA) this week. The conference will have a heavy future of work focus, and is intended to be for talent acquisition leaders who want to understand the emergent Asian marketplace as well as individual contributors looking to gain more of an understanding of the global tech marketplace and the global tech recruiting ecosystem.

Global Tech Employment: Some numbers and trends
This obviously varies greatly globally and there’s an important caveat: everything, to some extent, is a “tech industry” these days. We have “smart toasters” now. Does that mean that everyone who works in the toaster production industry is a “tech employee” now? No. We tried to limit these data sets to conventional engineering, R&D, IT, and developer professions.

In the United States, the tech sector employs about 7 million people — which is 4% of the total U.S. workforce and 5% of the private sector workforce. That said, it contributes about $1.3 trillion to the U.S. economy, which is roughly 8% of GDP.

The European Union varies more widely, but a broader sense can be found: In 2015, 33.9 million people were employed in the manufacturing sector in the EU 28, a figure which represented 15.4% of total employment. Of these, 2.4 million were employed in high-tech manufacturing, corresponding to 1.1% of total employment. About three times as many were employed in high-tech knowledge-intensive services, which accounted for 2.9% of total employment.

Specific Asia-Pacific data shows about 3.86M employees directly in the IT-BPM industry in India. India is an interesting case — it will be good to hear from TA leaders at the conference — because their IT sector laid off 56,000 people at the end of 2017, in large part because newer technologies have wiped out what used to be India’s tech core: maintaining servers and infrastructure. In other words, lower-cost options got replaced by AI needs, and that resulted in layoffs throughout India’s tech sector. Despite the layoffs, the IT sector in India is still worth billions of dollars — IT services spending within the country was $9.5B U.S. in 2017.

China is seeing 6.5% annual growth, of which 11-15% comes from human capital. There are more than 27,000 high technology companies in China alone, and while their tech companies are collectively worth only a third of what America’s are, populations including The Economist claim they’re catching up faster than expected — and could be the dominant tech employer in terms of both revenue generated and total number of employees within 15 years. Japan has been losing talent for years, and currently has 1.48 jobs for every applicant.

South America has seen a few of its urban hubs (such as Santiago) become global tech destinations, with Argentina getting tech investment up to 1.5% of GDP and employing about 115,000 in full-time equivalent “near-shorting” roles.

Hiring is on the uptick, although visa issues remain
Based on LinkedIn data at the end of 2017, 56% of talent acquisition executives from 35+ countries said their hiring volume is increasing, which speaks to an idea of an overall rise in hiring.

The key issue globally is visa clarity. With increased tensions in different areas of the world, simply moving top tech talent from Country A to Country B isn’t easy. It never was easy, per se, but it’s becoming more complicated.

Foreign tech workers interest in U.S. firms appears to be in decline, largely because of uncertainty around immigration policies of the current Presidential administration:

Moreover, as noted in research by Hired:
Forty percent of our survey respondents have considered relocating to another location since the 2016 election. Of those individuals, nearly one third cite Canada as their top choice (32%), followed by Germany (12%), Asia (10%) and Australia (10%). Furthermore, it appears as though Brexit has had a negative impact on tech workers’ decision to relocate to the UK. While 6% of respondents listed the UK as their top choice if they were to relocate, another 43% of respondents said that Brexit had made the UK a less desirable place to live.

This undoubtedly changes the game on how recruiters approach their role, especially if relocation to U.S.-based roles is (a) legally-challenging and (b) increasingly less desirable.

Startups also muddy the picture. When you combine the rise of startups with uncertainty about visas, you have an interesting intersection where the recruiting function might need to work more with the legal and compliance side in order to win the war for global talent.

What increased global hiring also means
For recruiters — and this is sure to be a big theme of the conference in Goa — there is a whole different set of skill assessments that need to be done on candidates. These include:

Can they work virtually?
How well do they work with team members who aren’t physically sitting by them?
What is their language aptitude relative to the rest of the team?
What tech stack will they be using where they’re based and does it speak to your org’s tech stack?
Where have they worked before?
Were those roles virtual?
How long have they stayed in previous virtual roles?

While some of these are age-old recruiting questions, some are much more relevant to an era of increasing global hiring.

Finally, there’s a cost factor. Global hiring is more challenging. How are you going to mitigate the cost of a bad hire? Are you going to turn to more contract recruiting? Are you simply going to award less headcount over time? What’s the plan for the bottom line?

What have you observed in your area with regards to tech employment and hiring? Will you be at World HR Summit to discuss? If not, feel free to tweet @eteki with any stats, charts, graphs, or data you’ve seen about either the global picture or in your area.

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Snigdha Masa
Business Development Manager, is a self-driven passionate consultative sales professional with ideas, initiatives and activities aimed towards making businesses better.

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What’s the answer to rising time to hire?

admin — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:25:35 +0000

The average hiring process in 2009 lasted about 12 days from initial screen to first offer, according to research that Glassdoor did for The New York Times.

In 2013 It was about 24 days. In about four short years, the time to hire doubled. Between 2013 and 2017, it didn’t double, but in many industries, it’s north of 30 days now. It’s increasing.

What happens as time to hire increases, especially in technical recruiting?

The tech hiring landscape now
Hardly an industry secret that the pool of talent is getting tighter and tighter. In fact, at a trade show recently, one of eTeki’s executives heard from a recruiter in the Denver area that locally, IT roles had roughly a 1% unemployment rate. While this is admittedly an anecdotal comment, it does reflect close to the reality in many markets. We all know getting the top tech talent is crucial — that part shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone — but what we sometimes forget in these discussions is why time to hire is a crucial part of the equation.

How tech projects are often structured
Many tech projects are complex, multi-stage processes. Most project management platforms, from enterprise level on down, are even set up in this way: the key idea is interdependencies, or “This can’t begin until that is finished.”

This is one area where the consequence of delayed time to hire impact effective operations..

Any large project can get completely thrown off track by not having the right people in place as the project is beginning. If Project A pushes back delivery, invariably Project B does, then Project C does, and suddenly a $30 million project spend can become a $50 million project spend. A few eTeki veterans have actually seen CIOs fired over this exact chain of events.

Oftentimes, the mindset of a corporate executive regarding technology is simple: “How do we leverage this towards our goals, growth, and competitive advantage?” That high-level view is translated into these massive projects, but because of their interdependent structure, all the personnel pieces need to be in place as each stage is commencing.

As a result, if you need a specific type of database engineer, you need that role now. This is where the time to hire metric becomes crucial.

If time to hire is crucial, why is the number rising?
The simplest explanation is typically that a hiring manager may be dealing with emerging technologies they are not that familiar with, or they may be hiring for a skillset that is not in their wheelhouse. The same could apply to their existing team leads, with the added consequences of pulling internal resources off time-constrained projects to perform multiple rounds of technical interviews.

You could call this “analysis paralysis,” although this takes a few forms. What’s universal about the idea of analysis paralysis in tech hiring, though, is that it all comes back to trust. (No surprise; some have argued trust is the currency of the whole economy presently.)

Consider this fictional example: if the hiring manager needed a cloud developer and the #1 cloud developer in the world was his/her best friend, the hiring manager would likely green-light that hire immediately. Trust drives the quicker decisions.
Without that trust — which is sometimes lacking in hiring manager/recruiter relationships, or hiring manager/knowledge of technical specs needed for role — doubt creeps in, and as doubt creeps in, time to hire rises.

That’s the core of the problem, and the problem’s primary consequence is when business critical projects are not successfully executed, essential business goals and objectives fail. So what’s the solution?

The solution is finding a trusted partnership
Once trust is part of the process, a lot of the issues around time to hire and analysis paralysis begin to reduce or completely fade out. Budget bloat is minimized, there’s less infighting over project timetables, and no one is getting the ax . A win-win for all.

There are several technical interview solutions available. Try them all. Then select the one that best provides the deliverables that create the trust factor that minimizes time to hire, and eliminates analysis paralysis.

Check out these 7 tips to improve the hiring manager’s Return on Interview, a sure fire way to bolster trust between the two of you.

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Robert Miner
Chief Revenue Officer at eTeki, helps businesses increase revenues and decrease internal costs by providing state of the art technical screening.

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The Road That Technical Recruiters Should Follow—Every Time

admin — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 20:19:27 +0000

In the “Wizard of Oz,” we’re repeatedly reminded that Dorothy must “follow the yellow brick road” to find the wizard and get home to Kansas.

As a technical recruiter, you also have a road that you must navigate successfully to reach your goal—delivering quality tech talent to the hiring manager. But this road:

Isn’t made of yellow bricks, making it harder to travel
Must be traveled quickly to reduce time to hire

Let’s take a look at the key stages in the journey that technical recruiter need to get right. Failing in any of these stages could make your chances of delivering quality talent melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Stage 1: Get Hiring Manager Buy-In
You can’t successfully navigate the road to better tech talent alone. Just as Dorothy has traveling companions, you need the hiring manager on your journey.

The hiring manager should be your partner during the technical recruiting process. You need an intensive intake session with the hiring manager to get details about the job and agreement on the technical screening tools and process that will be used, and you need him or her to communicate with you during the process as events dictate.

Since the goal is to find a successful new hire for the hiring manager, it would seem he or she should want to be invested. But that’s not always the case—especially if you fail to make having a quality relationship a top priority.

Stage 2: Define the Job
If you don’t know enough about the talent you’re supposed to find, you’ll have to be extremely lucky to find it. You can only gain this clarity with input from the hiring manager. No intake session with a hiring manager is complete until you’re clear about what the job is, and the skills and experience strong candidates will have.

IMPORTANT: The “perfect candidate”—a candidate who meets every qualification—often isn’t out there. As a result, it’s vital to separate the “must-have” from the “nice-to-have” skills and qualifications.

Effectively defining the job helps the writing of an effective job description and guides your candidate screening. It also nurtures the hiring manager’s engagement, because it raises their confidence in the process and in your abilities.

Stage 3: Sourcing for the Right Talent
Once you know the talent you’re looking for, you need to go and find it. Easier said than done considering the intense competition for tech talent.

It’s critical to diversify your search—go beyond job boards and find talent at places where tech professionals congregate, such as industry conferences and online communities such as GitHub and Stack Overflow. You might consider targeting passive candidates as well, especially if your company has a strong employer brand.

Be careful not to shut out certain candidate groups. With many organizations looking to improve diversity, the ability to find talent from groups that are underrepresented in IT, such as women, can be highly valued. And, of course, they add to your overall candidate pool.

Stage 4: Screening for Synergies
Once you’ve sourced talent, begin the screening process to eliminate candidates who clearly aren’t a good fit.
It’s important to screen for both eligibility and suitability factors.
Eligibility factors might include:

The candidate’s salary demands are within your range
The candidate lives near or is willing to move to the job location
Required certifications
Required skills are listed on their resume, LinkedIn, etc.

Suitability factors are considered less objective, yet the insight generated is the most predictive of future success in IT roles. Parts of suitability screening include:

Knockout questions (administered by recruiter)
Automated skills assessments
Workstyle assessments
Behavioral technical interviews

In your screening, consider speed and quality, the candidate experience, diversity and inclusion, and whether the screening is legally compliant. Because of all of the different factors and tools, screening can be complex and can slow down the hiring process significantly if you’re not careful. We recommend using a screening checklist (we’ll provide an example next week) that technical recruiter agree upon with the hiring manager during intake.

Stage 5: Validating Your Shortlist
Although we noted behavioral technical interviews in the last step, they bear special mention here. A landmark University of Notre Dame study found that behavioral interviews are 5.5 times more predictive of future job performance than traditional interviews.

As such, scored behavioral technical interviews—which evaluate how well candidates’ technical skills and experience meet the requirements for the job—should be the last step before submitting your shortlist to the hiring manager. It’s essential, however, that the interviews are conducted using best practices.

Stage 6: Submitting to the Hiring Manager
You’ve completed your work. Now it’s time for the hiring manager to finish the hiring process, including making next round interviewing decisions, working with HR to extend an offer, and making a hire.

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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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8 Cool Talent Acquisition Technologies That Recruiters Need to Consider

admin — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 15:51:59 +0000

What are the reasons that some recruiters aren’t taking advantage of talent acquisition technologies?

Cost is certainly one. A minority might be afraid to modernize. But for most non-adopters, the issue comes down to ego—thinking that they don’t need talent acquisition technologies for work they’re perfectly capable of doing.

Let’s quickly address each of these reasons:

Cost—Technologies often aren’t as expensive as you think. Especially when you consider personnel time invested in the recruiting cycle, deadlines which can be missed due to manual processes, poor decisions resulting from lack of predictive data, and the like.
Fear—It’s difficult, if not impossible, to be an effective recruiter today without using technology. Almost all recruiters use applicant tracking systems, job boards, and resume parsers. It’s not a scary jump to move into many of the other available tools. Pace your implementation to realistic time frames and get training tailored to your learning style.
Ego—Many recruiters are capable of doing most of what talent acquisition technologies do, but these technologies increase your efficiency and enable you to focus on efforts and skills that technology can’t replicate. Don’t let your ego get in the way of using tools that can help you recruit better, raise your status and earn more.

Let’s examine eight talent technologies that can help your recruiting career.

Temporary Labor Marketplaces

While most recruiters use job boards to find talent, temporary labor marketplaces aren’t as widely used. Even though, as of 2020, companies like Intuit realize 40% of the U.S. workforce is made up of contingent workers.

Given the size of the contingent worker population, the value of sourcing quality talent from one of these sites is great.
Example of provider: TopTal

Crowdsourced Recruitment Services

Crowdsourced recruitment involves the use of pools of independent recruiters to source qualified candidates for a fee. This enables you to spend more time on other key tasks, such as wooing promising candidates or working with hiring managers.
Example of provider: Crowdstaffing

Social Search Tools

Social search providers enable you to effectively mine the tremendous number of potential candidates on social media and other searchable sources, such as your organization’s recruiting data.
Example of provider: SwoopTalent

Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

Given the high volume of talent that recruiters work with, even highly organized recruiters can forget key communication with candidates. As every recruiter knows, effective communication is essential for creating positive candidate experiences. On the other hand, as Jack Kelly has detailed, poor communication is at the heart of candidates’ top complaints about the hiring process.

CRMs will help you manage communication with both passive and active candidates, as well as previous applicants, to ensure no important emails are left unsent. Some might be thinking that applicant tracking systems can be used for this. True, to an extent. ATSs manage the applicant process, and as such help organize the communication with applicants only.
Example of provider: Beamery

Automated Skills Assessments

Ideally, especially in skills-driven jobs like IT, applicants will already possess key skills for the position you’re recruiting for. Automated skills assessments can help ensure that the talent you’re considering has basic qualifications. A wide variety of these assessments are available, and some are quite specialized. For example, Lytmus offers simulated tech environments that enable employers to effectively evaluate candidates by how they solve real engineering tasks.
Example of provider: Lytmus

Video Interviewing Technologies

Video interviewing is simply a more efficient way to interview candidates. It gives you more insights about candidates than phone interviews do (and provides a better candidate experience), without the time and expense associated with on-site interviews. Combine the convenience of video interviewing with subject matter experts coached to also be professional interviewers and now you’re talking an undeniable competitive edge above other recruiters.
Example of provider: eTeki

Behavioral Assessments

Behavioral assessments help you determine if candidates have the personality traits that you’re seeking for a given position. Often times, these traits are important for job success. For example, PeopleAssessments.com—whose co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Tom Janz, is an eTeki advisor—evaluates integrity and enthusiasm, both key qualities for most successful hires.
Example of provider: PeopleAssessments.com

Automated Reference Checking Tools

Reference checking can be a frustrating and time-consuming process, especially if you’re having difficulty getting in touch with candidates’ references. Automated reference checking provides a quick, fuss-free and legally compliant way to verify references.
Example of provider: aRefChex

More Ideas
The list above certainly isn’t exhaustive. There are many technologies—and seemingly new ones popping up all of the time—that can benefit recruiters and recruiting at companies of all sizes.

If you’re looking for more ideas, check out this Inc. article on apps that help boost recruiting and retention by business and technology author Minda Zetlin,

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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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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.

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Quiz: Are Your Technical Interviews Up to the Test?

admin — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 18:15:13 +0000

Quality, quick technical interviews are tremendous assets in the effort to make the best tech hires.

Two key words here are “quality” and “quick.” If your technical interviews aren’t properly conducted, they won’t do nearly as good a job of telling you whether candidates have the technical skills and experience necessary to succeed in a given role. And if your technical interviews aren’t scheduled, conducted and scored fast enough, you could be losing in-demand IT talent to your competitors.

To find out whether your technical interviews are as good as they need to be, take this 10-question quiz.

Helpful Resources
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can improve your technical interviews, and make better IT hires, some of the following blog posts should be useful:

Interested in a no-obligation demo of eTeki? Click here to request.

photo credit: squishythings I GOT ON JEOPARDY via photopin (license)

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Beyond the ATM: 4 Critical Talent Trends Driven By Banking and Financial Technology

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 15:01:52 +0000

Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Digital currencies, Fintech. Mobile and online apps.
Thanks to technology, the banking and finance industries are almost unrecognizable from 20, 10 or even five years ago, when business was done via brick and mortar and handshakes. With the impact of some of these technological developments just beginning to be felt, much more change is coming.

All of this change has a tremendous impact on talent needs and priorities. In this post, we examine four critical talent trends for banking and financial institutions that are being driven by technology.

High Demand for Tech and Tech-Savvy Job Roles

The rapidly growing need for IT professionals is the top talent development in the banking and financial industries. These industries are now clearly tech companies’ biggest competitors for tech talent.

It’s easy to see why. Someone needs to build and maintain all of this hot banking and finance technology. Plus, as Geoff Fawcett of recruiting provider Hays points out, companies have a greater need for risk control, especially in regard to cyber security—and that means “information technology engineers and security officers will be, once again, very much in demand in 2017.”

We fully expect this need for IT talent to continue to grow. Global investment in the financial technology sector increased 67% from the first quarter in 2015 to the first quarter in 2016, according to Accenture. There’s tremendous room for growth in areas like digital currencies, given that most of the world still deals with cash, checks and plastic. Plus, traditional banks are exploring incubators. And fintech companies are trying to use tech to differentiate themselves. We could go on…

In addition to IT talent, another talent need we expect to see grow is for lower- to mid-level talent who are as comfortable with technology as they are with financial clients. The reason: we expect more and more banking and financial services like H&R Block’s model for doing taxes, in which tech tools drive the process and provide the recommendations. Of note here: because of what the tech tools will be doing, these professionals won’t necessarily need financial expertise—proficiency will be good enough.

Less Demand for Some Traditional, Highly Trained Roles

The flip side of tech tools sparking growth in technologically proficient lower- to mid-level talent is they could decrease demand for certified financial planners and other highly trained financial professionals. While this could take some time, the more tech tools drive investment/finance decisions, it could mean the less need there will be for those with high levels of financial expertise.

However, technology doesn’t always eliminate jobs; sometimes it changes them. Take bank tellers. Despite the proliferation of online banking and ATMs, employment of tellers is projected to only drop a modest 8% by 2024, according to the Department of Labor. And teller employment was on the rise until recently. As an interesting article by the American Enterprise Institute points out, bank tellers’ jobs, instead of being largely eliminated by technology, have instead become more marketing oriented.

Focus on Tech Hiring

As technology becomes more and more important for business success, having a strong IT team will become a critical business priority. This means banks and financial institutions will need to focus on hiring measures such as:

Quality of hire. With all the uncertainty occurring due to technology and global events, having stability in your tech team helps your business and technology be more agile. Stability begins with having high-quality talent, so hiring the right people is essential. This means candidates need to be screened carefully, with special attention paid to whether they have the technical skills and experience necessary to succeed in the roles they’re being hired for…
Time to hire. If your IT team goes understaffed too long, it will impact performance and innovation—and could reduce cyber security. As a result, strong talent sourcing and efficient hiring processes for IT roles become even higher priorities.

Competition for Tech Talent

Financial institutions and banks are going to need more tech talent. Tech companies are going to need more tech talent. Other companies need more tech talent. Everybody needs more tech talent. Where’s it all going to come from?

It’s a huge question. After all, for 2016, 91% of companies anticipated some (56%) or a significant (35%) increase in competition for talent, according to a Mercer study. And no role is harder to hire for than tech. According to a recent CareerBuilder report, five of the top 10 jobs that companies can’t find enough qualified employees for are tech jobs.

The result of it all is, unless the tech talent shortage disappears somehow, those companies who are able to identify and hire the tech talent they need are going to have a major competitive advantage.

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Here’s What Tim Sackett Has to Say About eTeki

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 11:33:17 +0000

Questions often asked by talent acquisition professionals and leaders are around finding a technology that will help them make better technical hires. In his popular blog Tim Sackett, a well known name in the HR Tech industry stated that “There are some ‘test’ type technologies on the market, but those are really difficult to actively select from and the tests are usually super generic.”

Tim also opined that it is no secret that most HRs, talent acquisition professionals and leaders have little functional knowledge when it comes to technical positions. Internal IT teams are stretched thin, so using one’s own staff as part of the selection process becomes a huge hindrance to most organizations. Still, hiring managers expect talent acquisition departments to do a better job at screening candidates for technical experience.

Tim Sackett thinks eTeki might offer a brilliant solution to the above scenario. He says “Along comes eTeki, an interviewing platform that uses screened functional IT talent to do live interviews. It’s like ‘Uber’ for selection. Need to interview a developer? eTeki will partner one’s organization with a developer skilled in the same technology one has, plus skilled in interviewing technical candidates.”

In his review of eTeki, he has mentioned what he liked the most:

– eTeki provides detailed scoring and comments based on the technical skills that are to be assessed. Since eTeki interviewers have no vested interest in who gets hired, one get more of an unbiased assessment than with one’s internal team.

– Every eTeki interview is recorded with video, so hiring managers can go through and see the entire thing if needed. Also, the interview platform has a collaborative code editor which enables the candidates to demonstrate their coding skills.

– Super simple to use for all three parties, the candidate, the company and the interviewer. A coded personal link is sent to the candidate with a password, face to face video, nothing to download, mobile enabled.

– Crowdsourced interviewer rating system ensures the interviewers who are using can actually do what they say they can do. one can see comments from other organizations who have previously used these interviewers to screen their talent. Currently, they have over 1200+ interviewers in their marketplace, 80% are U.S. based. Basically, experienced technology professionals looking to supplement their income by doing interviews (where the Uber comparison comes into play).

– The platform gives freedom to the interviewers to dive into skills they see a candidate has, as well, that is asked, but will find valuable based on the role and job description one provides them, on top of assessing all the stuff one asked them to assess as well.

Tim has expressed that the platform continues to evolve as more and more organizations use it and have different requests for additions, and eTeki has shown they’ll work to evolve the platform even more in the future.
He concludes, “Well worth a look if you are in need of a great technology screening tool and need to move candidates through the process quicker.”

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