Technical Interviewing – Resource Center

In Marketplaces We Trust: What Makes Users Love Recruiting Marketplaces

Raj — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 16:31:31 +0000

In the lead up to the launch of eTeki’s new self service tech interview marketplace, we’ve looked hard at what makes a marketplace great. We studied other successful (and not so successful) marketplaces, and reached out to our own customers to find out.

Is it pricing? Convenience? Detailed user reviews? Amazing seller profiles? Security and data privacy?

As with most things, it’s complicated. Of course there are multiple factors that influence the success of a marketplace. But what’s the most important key to success? Read on to find out.

Cost
Value and transparency are the key here. The beauty of the marketplace model is that supply and demand dictate pricing, and higher quality sellers are rightfully able to charge a premium for their services. eTeki’s sellers (our expert technical interviewers) have a variety of backgrounds and experiences, so it’s always possible to find an interviewer with the required skills at a variety of price points.

Security and privacy
Keeping your data secure and private is essential, which is why eTeki’s technology platform for on demand interviews has been so focused on these areas as a priority. No marketplace can be successful unless its users can trust it 100%.

Seller profiles
Detailed information about each seller is key for users to be able to understand the product or service they’re getting. eTeki’s marketplace contains extensive information about the skills, background and work experience of each interviewer so that users can choose the best interviewer for the job. To avoid overwhelm and provide a great fit, eTeki’s algorithms suggest suitable interviewers based on a number of criteria.

User reviews
A big part of the marketplace experience is being able to trust you’ll get exactly what you expect. User reviews go a long way to help build that trust. Who better to provide detailed information about a product than other customers! This is one of the big reasons why Amazon was able to grow so quickly.

Ratings
User ratings are a transparent and non-biased way to help potential users understand whether a marketplace is worth using. If many users have a great experience, it encourages new users to try it out for the first time.

What’s the most important factor when it comes to trusting a marketplace?
When we surveyed our own users and the social stratosphere asked them what makes them trust marketplaces. The overwhelming response was user reviews, with nearly 70% rating it as the most important factor. It’s this detailed feedback from existing users that really inspires confidence in marketplaces and their sellers.

We’ve built transparent user reviews into the eTeki marketplace experience, along with many other features that we know our users will love. If you’re looking for help with unbiased technical on demand interviews from experts, we’d love for you to check out our new self service tech interview marketplace.

Amanda Cole, Vice President at eTeki

Amanda Cole has more than 20 years of experience developing innovative programs staffed by non-traditional workforce’s including freelancers, paid & unpaid interns, boards of directors, special event volunteers, and skill-based volunteer programs. The annual value of services rendered for the largest programs exceeded $18M. She is a communications professional with superior facilitation and training skills, an engaging public speaking presence, and a fanatic about synergistic business relationships.

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System Not Compatible: Staying a Step Ahead in Recruiting

Punita — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 16:03:14 +0000

System Not Compatible: What’s Shaping The Process on How You Are Getting Your Best Technical Hires

Fraught with competition, recruiting and hiring frequently get equated to military-style operations, and in the ongoing “war for talent,” no one wants to lose. This basic fact is a significant driver in the rapid and continued advancement of HR technologies. That, and a host of outside influences including low unemployment rates and an ever-widening skills gap.

Collectively, the need to improve recruiting and hiring feeds an expansive culture of innovation – and well-established marketplace. Do even the slightest research on HR or recruiting technology, and witness firsthand the sheer number of available solutions, designed to automate every last step in the process. To the point that some fear they may become obsolete. It’s overwhelming – and for a good reason.

There’s an obvious need.

Don’t become obsolete: Keep on evolving

Let’s take a moment to pause for introspection. Now, there are countless recruiting-related statistics out there in the world, but very little information about the people doing the hiring. Much like the roles that organizations look to fill, recruiters traverse multiple generations, potentially skewing towards the younger end of the spectrum, with the elders in senior positions.

In terms of understanding and leveraging recruiting technology, this is an important distinction.

For some, there is no life before technology. Period. For others, the digital transformation happened in front of their eyes. As a result, some are quicker to adopt than others, despite a possible divide between those doing the buying and those doing the using. To avoid a prospective hurdle, recognize technology as a means to an end, vs. the other way around. One that requires regular updating, recurrent monitoring, and periodic appraisal to stay compatible, compliant and valuable to the organization.

A tall order, indeed. But one with meaningful, measurable hiring outcomes.

Stay Compatible: Ways to stay in the know

To accomplish this, on top of everything else in one’s job description, there needs to be time set aside for thinking and reading. Famously, Warren Buffet reads more than 6 hours each day.

Here’s a few key ways to ensure you remain in the know.

Keep up with industry news. Put aside time for learning. This doesn’t have to be in the evening. Learning is part of your job and should be incorporated into your day.
Understand the key players in your industry. Go local, go national, go global. The idea is that you are following thought leaders in the industry that you are targeting. You cannot expect to have intelligent conversations with top talent if you are not educated.
Engage an analyst. An analyst can help sort through the solutions and steer a clear path to the best tech for the organization’s hiring needs. But ultimately, how this happens is less important than getting in the habit.

See that’s the key. Like running system updates, reviewing and refreshing tech is ongoing. By the time a solution gets up and running, there’s a new integration available, a new strategy to support or, new legislation changing the rules of the game. This is where those military references come into play again. With recruiting operating as a game of risk and reward, however, the only way to stay a step ahead is to continue changing stance.

Readily available tech resources

We’re not talking about subscribing to the next big ATS or marketing automation tool. We’re talking about arming yourself with the resources to break standard. Whether physically subscribing to newsletters or securing research from outside experts, the information is there for the taking.

Content and experiential tactics for technical hiring

We get it. How does reading an online publication help to land your next great technical hire? On the surface, it’s hard to make the connection. Indirectly, the plethora of knowledge is substantially more than spending your time “liking” the latest “how to” video on Facebook.

Start by perusing tech news sites like TechCrunch. In addition to covering giants of industry, it also profiles tons of startups, new business, and emerging products.
Up until 2015, TechCrunch ran Crunchbase, now a separate entity, an incredibly useful site for learning more about the particulars of both public and private companies.
For “tech news you won’t read anywhere else,” there’s The Information, a subscription-based option that offers yearly packages ranging from $199 for young professionals to a $749 all-access account.
Other tech sites worth a follow include Recode, VentureBeat, WIRED and the list goes on.

With traditional media focused solely on big organizations that help move the market up and down, turning into any of these online publications will provide a more in-depth and immersive tech education. Aside from general tech, look for niche outlets that focus in on specific talent acquisition topics. Tech trends and vendors get to play here, too.

Beyond the headlines

Beyond browsing headlines, don’t overlook the more interactive experiences. Many publications host local events, meetups, large-scale conferences and online functions like webinars and social chats. Find and follow writers that resonate. If a question needs an answer, ask it. Without following the conversation, there’s no way to comprehend its impact on everyday operations. Without staying informed, there’s no way to unlock that competitive advantage everyone’s chasing.

Knowing what’s out there shaping the process, supports finding exactly who is out there, talent-wise. It’s the only way to play to the game, or in this case, win the war.

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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 System Not Compatible: Staying a Step Ahead in Recruiting appeared first on Resource Center.

Personalization Experts: What You Need to Look For

admin — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 14:22:11 +0000

Patty McCord was the Chief of HR for Netflix during some of their highest-growth periods in the early stages; she helped co-create their famous “Culture Document” that some have called “the most important document in Silicon Valley.” In early 2018, McCord wrote an article for Harvard Business Review on why you should stop hiring for culture fit.

Pay particular attention to this part about skills, rivalries, and compensation. The setup is that Netflix needs to make a big hire, but Google wants the same person:
But I woke up one morning and thought, Oh, of course! No wonder Google wants him. They’re right! He had been working on some incredibly valuable personalization in recruiting technology, and very few people in the world had his expertise. I realized that his work with us had given him a whole new market value. I fired off another email: “I was wrong, and by the way, I went through the P&L, and we can double the salaries of everybody on this team.” That experience changed how we thought about compensation. We realized that for some jobs we were creating expertise and scarcity, and rigidly adhering to internal salary ranges could harm our best contributors, who could make more elsewhere. We decided we didn’t want a system in which people had to leave to be paid what they were worth. We also encouraged our employees to interview elsewhere regularly. That was the most reliable and efficient way to learn how competitive our pay was.

The lessons of that paragraph:

Don’t rigidly adhere to internal salary ranges
Don’t be afraid of letting employees interview elsewhere and report back
Tools are incredibly important for personalization in recruiting

This last one isn’t the main idea here, no — but it’s a big takeaway. And especially for Netflix — they need world-class personalization technology in order to make sure you keep watching and paying them for your subscription. They need to personally recommend what you’d like.

Netflix is a specific business model, yes, but more and more companies are trying to personalize (and thus humanize) their marketing, sales, and operational approaches. You need personalization experts. It’s becoming an increasingly important field of tech hiring.

So if you need a personalization expert for your business, how are you going to find that person?
The approaches:

Standard practices for any technical expert hire

Research the background
Look for gaps
Look for roles held
Ask for multiple references
Use a third-party screener to vet the technical skills
Determine the team size they were on — could they “hide?”
See what LinkedIn connections may overlap and get a deeper perspective on the candidate

On that last one — we actually worked with a client who needed a personalization expert. Based on the initial screening and sourcing, it was down to four to be presented to the hiring manager. All four had overlaps with current employees. One was immediately removed because the current employees he had previously worked with all said he was dishonest with teammates. Work the connections. It can help.

Deeper practices for personalization

Ask them for a sample work project
What metrics do they use when assessing the success of personalization?
What languages are they coding personalized features within?
How would you explain what you do to someone else?
How would you make them see the value of it?
Where is the bottom-line implication of personalization residing?
What’s your take on psychographics?
How do you approach audience segmentation?
What’s your background in Google Query Explorer?

This is a start — you can also work with eTeki to make sure any expert, personalization in recruiting or otherwise, is vetted on the technical skill side.

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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 Personalization Experts: What You Need to Look For appeared first on Resource Center.

IT Hiring Managers Give Technical Recruiting Process, Recruiters Tepid Reviews

admin — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:30:35 +0000

A 2014 study by ERE Media found that hiring managers only give recruiters a C-plus grade for their effectiveness in filling open positions with talented employees.

How do hiring managers feel in 2017? We decided to poll IT hiring managers we know—members of our eTeki technical panel and members of our network—to get their insights about the quality of the technical hiring process and the effectiveness of technical recruiters. The people we polled were:
Phani Shekhar Bhandaru
Richard Bullard
Awanish Golwara
Cesar Jimenez
Bhanu Kishore Mandava
Bala Nemani
Amrut Patil
Manas Ranjan
Heath Cory Renfrow
Deepti Vernal

Question 1: As a hiring manager, what are the biggest problems or pain points that YOU face during the technical hiring process?
Renfrow: The biggest problem I see is when scenario-based interview questions are used to gauge experience. To truly determine technical experience, we need technical interviewers to ask behavioral-based questions.

Bullard: The biggest problem I’ve had is finding qualified professionals to interview. Recruiters rarely understand mainframe requirements (e.g. z/OS is a language, right?). I had to read many resumes to select those I determined were fit to interview. Many had no discernable mainframe expertise on their resumes. In other words, much of the technical hiring process was a waste of time for me—and I was already overloaded with my own tasks.

Ranjan: Sometimes it’s very difficult to judge a candidate. So many candidates are unable to write code in pen and paper. As a result, interviewers can be uncertain whether the candidates really code in day-to-day life or not.

Golwara: Filtering the right candidates from a large list is the challenge.

Nemani: Instead of receiving qualified and shortlisted candidates, we receive a pile of resumes that are not relevant or not qualified.

Bhandaru: Choosing the right technical candidate is difficult.
Jimenez: One challenge is validating whether candidates have the technical experience that they claim to have. A second is working with all of the decision-makers to make time for interviews.

Patil: We need to find a way to assess technical knowledge in a better way.

Takeaways:

Selecting the right candidate—one who has the necessary technical skills and experience to succeed at the job—is the top challenge.
Effectively validating technical experience is critical for selecting consistently selecting the right candidate.
Using behavioral-based interview questions, rather than scenario-based questions, is important for validating technical experience.
Many employers can stand to improve their sourcing and screening of technical candidates.

Question 2: As a hiring manager, what are the biggest problems that you face when working with technical recruiters?
Jimenez: They often don’t understand the technical requirements for the job we’re looking to fill.

Mandava: Technical recruiters often don’t assess candidates using the proper requirements.

Nemani: Recruiters need to understand the job requirements and learn about the technical environment. Without understanding the job/role, it is difficult to effectively match candidates with it. Also, many “technical” recruiters are NOT technical.

Patil: They don’t have in-depth technical knowledge.

Verma: Many don’t have much technical knowledge.

Ranjan: While technical recruiters do a good job of finding the technical terms for which they are assigned, they don’t recognize when candidates use shortened versions or abbreviations. This can cause us to lose good, qualified candidates.

Bullard: The two biggest challenges were that most technical recruiters were inexperienced with understanding mainframe technology terms and requirements and had serious issues with the English language—both verbal and written.

Renfrow: They often lack the necessary technical knowledge to effectively weed out unqualified candidates.

Takeaways:

Hiring managers are often frustrated by technical recruiters’ lack of technical knowledge, finding that it can lead to ineffective candidate sourcing, screening and assessment.
Either the entire recruiting industry changes its approach and requires technical recruiters to have technical experience, or technical recruiters have to do more to understand the job and the environment.
To understand the job and the environment, technical recruiters need to work better with hiring managers. They need to work with hiring managers throughout the technical recruiting lifecycle to make necessary adjustments along the way. This begins with having more intensive, more strategic intake sessions. They can’t be afraid to ask questions, such as to learn about where potential candidates gather (online, at conferences, etc.) so they can properly source them. And they shouldn’t be ashamed to say they don’t understand a technical term or acronym. Technology is a language, and hiring managers shouldn’t expect technical recruiters to speak it at the same level as they do. But they do and should expect technical recruiters to find them quality candidates who meet the technical requirements for the job.
If recruiters and hiring managers at a company are having a difficult time working together, it’s important to respect each other’s professional boundaries and to find and use technology tools that help fill the gap.

Question 3: What overall grade would you give your technical hiring process, and why?
Renfrow: I’d give our process an eight on scale of one to 10, and that’s because we use background research and use technical experts to assess technical qualifications.

Bullard: D-minus. The best staff I could hire was pretty much inadequate, lacking requisite experience and skills. I felt I would be wasting my time to replace the worst staff members and, as the technical solution architect, I had no time available to train those who could be trainable. It was a serious train wreck.

Mandava: For ability to assess technical knowledge, I’d rate our process five out of five.

Nemani: Poor to average. Problems include poor job descriptions from the hiring managers/team, lack of understanding about the job from the recruiter, and poor screening techniques from the sourcing/recruiting team. Overall hiring quality is poor, and it takes too long to bring someone onboard.

Jimenez: I’d give our process a C. Managers are exhausted during the interview process, and they always have the challenge of losing candidates to other opportunities because the interview process takes too long.

Takeaways:

Although some time has passed since the ERE hiring manager survey findings, many hiring managers remain dissatisfied with recruiters and their hiring results.
Properly assessing required technical qualifications and completing the hiring process in an efficient amount of time are both keys to achieve hiring manager satisfaction with the technical hiring process.

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Are Your Technical Interviews Fostering or Hindering IT Diversity?

admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 14:59:44 +0000

One of the best ways to show your company’s commitment to diversity is to have diverse tech teams.

After all, perhaps no field is known more for poor diversity than tech. When you create a positive, inclusive tech culture—with different genders, ethnicities, sexual preferences, etc., all represented and welcomed—it makes a statement that positively impacts your entire organization.

Plus, you’ll reap the well-established benefits of diversity and inclusion, including increased creativity, innovation, and even profits. As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said, “Any time you bring together diverse perspectives, it just creates a bunch of potential that you weren’t expecting.”

Tech diversity begins in the hiring process. That means, of course, that you need to source diverse candidates. But in this post we’ll focus on another key: you need technical interviews to be objective.

How Bias Occurs in Technical Interviews
Tech’s poor diversity reputation is, unfortunately, well deserved. The high-paying field is largely dominated by white men—women, for instance, make up only about 30% of the tech industry.

And, of course, there are the telling anecdotal stories that seem to regularly crop up, often related to the field’s “bro culture.” Just this week a former Uber engineer wrote in a blog post that when she reported receiving unwanted sexual advances to HR and management, they decided not to punish the offender because he “was a high performer.” (The ride-sharing company’s CEO has since said that he’s instructed the company’s chief HR officer to investigate the allegations, Reuters reported.)

We bring this information up to show that talent from groups that are underrepresented in tech and IT often don’t compete on a level playing field. The tilt in the playing field, even for companies that want to increase tech diversity, often begins in the hiring process—with biased technical interviews an especially common cause.

Technical interviews, of course, are a critical component for consistently making quality tech and IT hires. Employers shouldn’t make these hires without evaluating candidates’ relevant skills and experience, but technical interviews can lose much of their value when they’re biased. Unfortunately, many companies’ technical interviews are inherently biased because they rely on internal interviewers or internal interviewing panels. These interviewers—by necessity, techies—are likely to consciously or unconsciously be biased because:

They could have to work regularly with the new hire, making them more likely to be biased in favor of someone whom they like, or who has a similar background as them.
They could even have referred a candidate for the job. Not only does that bias them for that candidate and against other candidates, but the candidate they referred also is likely to have the same background as them.
They could want to maintain the status quo in their tech micro-culture.

Experts have found that homogenous teams feel more comfortable. Conversely, a 2106 Harvard Business Review article found that the reason diverse teams perform better is precisely because they feel less comfortable. So if your tech teams lack diversity, and perhaps feel a little bit too comfortable, perhaps it’s time to examine your technical interviewing process to see if it’s time to make a change.

The Benefits of Using Freelance Technical Interviewers
To reduce bias in the technical interviewing process, you need the interviewers to come from outside your organization.

Some employers use consultants—typically a techie who conducts interviews as a favor of sorts. But there are problems with this approach. It can take a week or more to schedule interviews. And because the process is informal, there can be significant variability in interview quality, there’s unlikely to be a common scoring or reporting system, and there’s no guarantee the interview process is legally compliant.

Today, more and more employers are finding success using freelance interviewers from a technical interviewing provider. The advantages of using freelance interviewers include:

As independent third parties, they don’t have the bias of an internal technical interviewer. They give the hiring manager the input of a techie without the bias of an internal techie.
They are trained in technical interviewing best practices, which help prevent any personal biases from coming into play. For example, candidates are asked standardized questions and evaluated on common rating scales.
Their performance evaluation is solely based on their ability to consistently identify technically qualified candidates.
Interviews can be scheduled quickly, often within 24 hours.
Using them allows internal tech talent to focus on projects instead of being distracted by or fatigued with interviewing.

It’s beyond time for diversity to come into tech. Help foster tech diversity at your organization by reducing bias in your technical interviews.

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The Startup Executive’s Quick Guide to Technical Interviews

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 14:54:25 +0000

If you’re with a startup, this guide on technical interviews is for you. Here’s how:

It’s quick (we know you’re probably pressed for time)
It highlights technical interviewing lessons that are especially relevant for startups

Lesson 1: Interviewers need relevant technical experience, and technical interviewing experience.
Relevant technical skills and experience are necessary for interviewers to evaluate answers effectively and ask the right follow-up questions—both keys for technical interviews that reveal candidates’ skills and experience.

Meanwhile, technical interviewing experience helps in every aspect of the interview, from asking quality questions to avoiding pitfalls to evaluating candidates. An underrated benefit: experienced interviewers are able to put candidates at ease, allowing for free-flowing conversations that more fully reveal what candidates have to offer, and whether they are the right fit for the particular role your organization is hiring for.

Why important for startups: You need to hire the right tech employees from the beginning, or else you’ll have a tough time getting off the ground. It’s important that you have qualified technical interviewers performing your technical interviews, so that you know that your tech hires have the technical skills and experience necessary to succeed.

More information: 9 Keys for Highly Effective Technical Interviews

Lesson 2: Provide a high-quality candidate experience during your technical interview process.
Competition for tech talent is sky-high—90% of executives in the C-suite report that recruiting IT talent is a top challenge for their companies, according to an Appirio study. Providing a high-quality candidate experience that demonstrates the professionalism and competency of your company can help sway candidates to accept your offer over a competitor’s. For tech roles, the quality of the technical interviewing experience you provide is an important part of candidates’ overall experience.

Why important for startups: You need high-quality talent, and providing a high-quality candidate experience can help you beat more established companies for it. By being more personable, being organized, scheduling technical and other interviews quickly, and by having a smooth hiring process, you can demonstrate to candidates that they are important to you, and that while a new company, yours is a high-quality organization that they would feel excited to be a part of.

Lesson 3: Don’t just focus on candidates’ current skills during technical interviews; also evaluate for growth potential.
For your company to grow, you need your employees, especially those in tech roles, to grow along with it. As Michael M. Moon, ph.D., CEO and Principal Analyst of ExcelHRate Research & Advisory Services, explained in our recent roundtable post on the top technical interviewing mistakes, hiring managers’ “primary mistake … is over-valuing current skills and under-valuing future impact and subsequently a candidate’s ability to grow. Recruiters and hiring managers shouldn’t be hiring employees solely based on what they already know, rather they should be thinking about the candidate’s ability to learn new skills. Would you want to hire someone because they can do exactly the thing you need them to do today? Which I guarantee is a smaller pool of candidates. Or do you want to hire a group of people who are smart enough to be good at that job and who can adapt and grow to a company’s changing needs?”

Why important for startups: Startups, especially, need people who can grow with them. Plus, if there are quality candidates that more established companies are missing, being able to identify them can be of great value to the future of your company.

More information: Avoiding Technical Interview Pitfalls: Practical Tips from Technical Interview Experts
Check out SlideShare Presentation

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6 Reasons Technical Interviewing Is an AWESOME Freelancing Gig

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

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

Low, flexible commitment.

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

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

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

Help pick the best and brightest.

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

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

Work in your existing contact sphere.

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

Make yourself a more attractive hire.

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

6. It’s great networking.

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

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

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3 Critical Reasons Why Banks Need to Conduct Quality Technical Interviews Rapidly

admin — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 17:43:05 +0000

For leading tech companies, quality, efficiently conducted technical interviews that include coding challenges are at the core of their tech hiring.
It’s easy to see why. Studies and practical experience show that technical interviews are by far the most predictive for tech professionals’ future job performance. And conducting them properly and efficiently helps ensure that the quality talent comes on board quickly, so that productivity is maximized.

Yet among banks and other financial institutions—which are now tech companies’ biggest competitors for tech talent—technical interviews are still often conducted inconsistently, slowly or not at all (one freelance IT interviewer told us that technical interviews were “optional” at one of the nation’s largest banks).

This is a major problem with major consequences. Below are three of the consequences for banks and financial institutions that fail to conduct quality technical interviews.

1.Customers’ expectations aren’t met
Customers increasingly expect two things from their online and mobile interactions with their banking and financial institutions:

For the interactions to be as instantaneous as Facebook. This is true from everything from ordinary banking activities to checking on investments or trading stocks. People don’t want to wait, and banks with strong technical departments are taking advantage. Some banks are even allowing customers to do a mortgage application on an app.
For the interactions to be as secure as Fort Knox. This goes well beyond cameras and phone security; increasingly the concern is cybersecurity—protection from hackers. In fact, according to the Federal Reserve’s “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2016” report, 42% of people with a mobile home think people’s personal information is “very unsafe” or “somewhat unsafe” when they use mobile banking, and another 15% “don’t know” how safe mobile banking is.

For banks and financial institutions, your technical staff is responsible for creating and sustaining tools and systems that provide the services and security that your customers expect. This means that investing in your own tech talent, which includes taking the steps to make quality tech hires—i.e. quality technical interviews—is essential.

Otherwise, due to the delays in conducting technical screens, you can expect mediocre or poor tech hiring quality, which will cause performance problems and delays in key projects. Similarly, your company likely will struggle to evaluate and implement the technical banking solutions offered by more and more competitors. The combined effect is you could lag behind competitors in releasing key products and services, such as a mobile app. Or worse, it could cause your security to be weak, potentially leading to a damaging and embarrassing breach. Any of these problems would cause customers’ expectations not to be met, and possibly prompt them to move their business to your competitors.

2.Candidates’ expectations aren’t met
A slow, substandard technical interviewing experience can cause candidates to be frustrated and to wonder what else about your company is substandard—and even impact their decision on whether to work for you.

One of the biggest causes of an overall substandard technical interviewing experience is a poor code review experience. A code review experience can go wrong in several ways, but the most common is a communication disaster created by not having the right tools for the job. For example, it’s common for some companies to use Skype video, with the interviewer using a whiteboard in an office. This forces the candidate to try to communicate their code to the interviewer to write on the whiteboard, slowing and frustrating the process and making it difficult for the candidate to focus on the technical challenge.

If the same candidate, meanwhile, has had seamless code review experiences with other employers—such as through a virtual whiteboard that all involved can write on or a collaborative code editor—your company will appear technologically inept in comparison, and as a less attractive option.

Meanwhile, it’s also important to note that a slow technical interviewing process can also frustrate candidates, leading to abandonment for other opportunities. IT professionals in high demand receive four to six job offers per week, according to Robert Half.

3.Your expectations aren’t met
Customers aren’t happy and you aren’t able to hire the talent you need. That’s a recipe for not meeting your own expectations—whether it’s revenue, increasing customer satisfaction ratings or improving your company reputation.

It’s clear: If your company is a banking and financial institution, not having a rapid, quality technical interviewing process is a major mistake. It will contribute to you failing to meet customers’ expectations, candidates’ expectations and your own expectations.

The post 3 Critical Reasons Why Banks Need to Conduct Quality Technical Interviews Rapidly appeared first on Resource Center.

How Technical Interviewing Shortcuts Derail Your Tech Hiring

admin — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 18:07:05 +0000

Note: This is the final post in a four-post series on the biggest technical interviewing mistakes commonly made by employers.
Read the intro post to the series here.
Read about Mistake No. 1 here.
Read about Mistake No. 2 here.

Shortcuts rarely work. They’re sure a terrible idea with technical interviews. In fact, short-cutting the process is one of the three biggest common technical interviewing mistakes.

The reason short-cutting the technical interview process is such a big mistake is it spoils the results, vastly increasing the chances that you hire the wrong people. The whole goal of technical interviews, of course, is to hire the right people, those who have the necessary skills and experience to perform well at given jobs. And they are highly effective when done right—research by the University of Notre Dame found technical interviews to be more than five times more predictive of future job behavior than traditional interviews.

Shortcuts—such as not having standards for your technical interviews (e.g., not having common questions, not having common rating scale) or not using experienced technical interviewers—make your interviews far less insightful, especially for comparing candidates. So you’ll be more likely to hire the wrong candidates, a mistake that comes with tremendous costs.

SHRM has estimated that the cost of a bad hire could be as high as five times the amount of the bad hire’s salary. Assuming an average IT salary of $100,000, in IT, the cost could be $500,000 per bad hire. Bad tech hires lead to frustrated co-workers, frustrated customers, key projects not getting completed, etc.

Which companies tend to make the mistake of short-cutting the technical interview process?
Not leading technical companies like Google. They prioritize technical interviews because they know the reward is better talent.

The companies we see making this mistake often are those whose primary focus isn’t tech. Even in the banking and finance industry—the tech industry’s biggest talent competitor—companies put themselves at risk of bad hires due to flawed technical interviewing shortcuts.

The following are three of the main problems we see companies in the banking and finance industry having with technical interviews:

• Interviews have no standards. Not having common questions, common rating scale, etc., makes it difficult to identify the candidates with the best skills and experience
• Too slow moving. Delays hamper the technical interviewing process. Not only does time to fill increase, but also top candidates choose other opportunities.
• No technical interviews at all. Leave hiring decision up to hiring manager without any predictive insights from technical interviews, vastly increasing the risk of bad hires.

So don’t just perform technical interviews. Make sure you have a technical interviewing process that works, that doesn’t take shortcuts. It will make the difference between having the right tech talent, and the wrong tech talent.

The post How Technical Interviewing Shortcuts Derail Your Tech Hiring appeared first on Resource Center.

Stop Losing Candidates Because Your Technical Interviewing Takes Too Long

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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