The top three metrics tech recruiters use to measure success in their roles, according to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2017 report, are:

1. The length of time new hires stay at the company
2. Time to hire: the time it takes to fill a job requisition
3. Hiring manager satisfaction

But with many studies finding that around 50% of new hires prove to be duds within the first 18 months, these metrics can look mediocre or even quite bad. For tech recruiters, a great way to simultaneously bolster all of these metrics is to focus on giving IT hiring managers an outstanding return on interview.

Return on interview—A hiring performance measure that evaluates the effectiveness of an interview and the efficiency of the interviewing process for the candidate, tech recruiters, hiring manager and hiring company.

Giving IT hiring managers an outstanding return on interview means:

• The hiring process runs efficiently (short time to hire)
• Only technically qualified candidates make it to the final interview stage (successful hires, satisfied hiring managers).

Here are seven steps that will help you accomplish this key recruiting goal.

1. Ensure that the hiring manager provides a complete job description. Start with the basics. A quality job description is the foundation for finding a high-quality hire. To properly evaluate and filter candidates, you must know the skills, competencies and experience that are necessary to perform the job effectively.

2. Have a detailed intake session with the hiring manager. You and the hiring manager need not only to be on the same page about the job description, but also about the process, timeline, and each other’s roles and responsibilities. Recruiting expert Tiffany Kuehl has said, “The initial conversation you have with your hiring manager is the most critical step in the recruitment process. In my experience, anytime there has been an issue with a search, it could be traced back to the strategy session. The success, or failure, of your search depends on how it begins.”

For some best practices, check out Kuehl’s intake checklist of what tech recruiters should do before, during and after an intake session with a hiring manager.

3. Filter resumes to align with job requirements emphasized by hiring manager. In most cases, filtering resumes mean setting up auto-filtering in an applicant tracking system to screen out candidates who don’t meet the job requirements. But if you’re hiring for a smaller company, such as a startup, this may mean going through resumes one-by-one to weed out unqualified candidates.

4. Perform other pre-screening activities. Take the time to further filter your candidate pool. It will save you time in the next step (fewer candidates to meet with), and will ultimately help you deliver better candidates. A few possible pre-screening activities include:

• Validate candidates’ identity and experience via social media. This includes LinkedIn, but when hiring for IT roles, also examine candidates’ contributions on sites such as Stack Overflow and GitHub.
• Have candidates undergo personality/work style assessments.
• Use automated reference checking. (We recommend this as a pre-screen rather than later in the process. Why spend time talking to candidates who will later be filtered out due to lackluster references?)
• Validate candidates’ IT certifications. Examples of certifications to check include Microsoft, Cisco, AXELOS, Red Hat, CompTIA, PMI and ZMware.

5. During initial conversations with candidates, evaluate for technical fit.

Even if you don’t have the necessary IT background to fully evaluate candidates’ technical skills, you can still help filter candidates during your initial conversations with them. Two ways to do this are:

• Ask relevant technical concept questions that have right/wrong answers. You don’t have to come up with the questions yourself; get the IT department or the hiring manager to provide them. That the questions have right/wrong answers is critical—you can evaluate candidates’ answers even if you don’t have knowledge of the concepts. (Note: you could do this as a pre-screening step by incorporating them into a computer-based technical assessment.)
• Have candidates discuss their older project experience. This helps uncover resume lies. Most candidates—including most fraudulent candidates—are prepared to discuss recent projects, but aren’t usually prepared to answer questions about projects from several years ago. Asking questions about older project experience helps reveal whether candidates are all they claim to be.

6. Have candidates undergo rigorous technical interviews.

Technical interviews are a critical step in the tech hiring process and have been shown to be as much as 5.5 times as predictive of future job performance as traditional interviews. Our post “9 Keys for Highly Effective Technical Interviews” lays out many technical interview practices, including:

• Interviewers need relevant technical experience and should have technical interviewing experience.
• Questions need to be challenging and behavioral-based (as opposed to theoretical questions) so that candidates’ experience can be evaluated.
• Interviews should be standardized so candidates are evaluated on the same basis.

To provide an outstanding return on interview for hiring managers, it’s important to point out two other technical interviewing best practices: (1) technical interviews should be recorded on video, and (2) candidates should be scored on a common rating scale based on the job requirements and preferences from the job description. Both the videos and reports are important for the final step: candidate delivery.

7. Deliver your candidate shortlist, along with technical interview videos and reports.

Once you’ve reviewed the candidates and confirmed that all meet the job requirements, it’s time to deliver your candidate shortlist to the hiring manager. As a result of the candidate filtering in this process, you might find that the shortlist is smaller and more refined. Instead of delivering a top 10 or 15, for example, you might deliver a top five or even a top three, and with more confidence in your recommendations.

When you deliver the shortlist to the hiring manager, also deliver the videos and reports from the technical interviews. They are excellent resources for the hiring manager to use when making the ultimate hiring decision, and also give the hiring manager confidence that you’ve delivered candidates who have the necessary technical skills and experience.

The Final Interview(s)
After you perform the seven steps above, the remainder of the hiring process is out of your hands. However, the work you’ve done to provide a high-quality shortlist will help make the final interview(s) more successful, leading to better hires. The benefits include:

1. Hiring manager can focus on non-technical areas during candidate interviews. Because the hiring manager knows that candidates have the required technical skills, he or she can look to gain insights about other job-relevant factors. How are the candidates’ communication skills? How do they present themselves? How would they fit within the culture of the team? These factors can impact how successful a new hire is and how long he or she stays with an organization.
2. Bad hires become less likely. Surveys show that hiring managers often decide whether they want to hire candidates with 10-15 minutes. This can lead to bad hires, as they often hire for likeability—not skill. But when all the candidates are technically qualified, these quick decisions, while not ideal, are less likely to result in bad hires.
3. Hiring manager can shorten interview process, or go more in depth. Because the hiring manager can view the technical interview videos, he or she may decide that just one interview, rather than multiple rounds of interviews, is enough to make a hiring decision. This can speed up time to hire—sometimes even by a week or more—and lessen the demands on the hiring manager’s time. Alternatively, the hiring manager can opt for more in-depth interviews. One possibility is performing technical case studies, in which candidates are given real work scenarios, and then asked about the actions they’d take and what they’d expect the results would be.

Tech recruiters benefit, too. Not only do your top three evaluation metrics improve, but you also achieve a strong working relationship with the hiring manager—a key for sustained recruiting success.   

The title of a recent New York Magazine article declared, “Job Interviews Are a Terrible Way to Find the Right Candidate.”

The article’s criticism of job interviews: “We see what we want to see. We’re great at quickly forming first impressions, but we’re pretty terrible at changing our minds when new information comes in after the fact.”

Research largely backs this criticism up. A 2014 CareerBuilder survey found that nearly half (49%) of employers know within the first five minutes of an interview whether a candidate is a good or bad fit for a given position, while 87% know within the first 15 minutes. A 2015 study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, meanwhile, found that 60% of interviewers made their hiring decision within the first 15 minutes, a somewhat lower but still significant portion.

The Twin Consequences of Relying on First Impressions in Hiring
There are twin consequences of relying on job interviews driven by first impressions.

1. Bad hires—personality, not job suitability, drives hiring decisions

As the New York Magazine article points out, interviewers are drawn to candidates whom they like—typically those with strong personal, aka “soft” skills. Soft skills have value in the workplace, but candidates must have aptitude in technical and other skills that are necessary to succeed at a given role, or they’ll end up as bad hires.

2. Less diverse candidates tend to be hired

In addition to bad hires, relying on job interviews leads to biased hiring. The reason: Interviewers are drawn to candidates who are like them. The same gender, the same ethnicity, the same sexuality, the same background, the same interests, etc. This leads to fewer opportunities for diverse candidates, but also contributes to lower performance and creativity and less innovation for employers, as there is less thought diversity.

How Can Employers Avoid These Consequences?
Employers can take a number of actions to mitigate these twin consequences, including:

• Educating hiring managers and other interviewers about interviewing biases.
• Instituting diversity and inclusion programs, and sticking to them.
• Using screening tools (reference checks, background checks, skills assessments, intelligence assessments, etc.) aggressively to filter out candidates who aren’t good fits—before the job interview stage.

The Extra Action for Tech and IT Hiring
Technical skills and experience are especially critical for new hires to succeed in tech and IT hires. While a sales person might succeed based on their interpersonal skills, having stellar soft skills isn’t enough in tech. You must have technical chops.

As a result, it’s critical that employers NOT rely on first impressions from traditional interviews for making tech and IT hiring decisions. Of course, tech and IT don’t have the best reputation for diversity, which is another reason not to rely primarily on traditional interviews.

Fortunately, in addition to the screening tools available for filtering out candidates for other positions, in your tech and IT hiring, you have another powerful tool: the technical interview. Technical interviews evaluate whether candidates have the necessary technical skills and experience to perform a given job. Best performed as the last step in the candidate screening process, before candidates are delivered to hiring managers, technical interviews weed out the technically unqualified. Three of the benefits of technical interviews are:

• Better return on interview for hiring managers—they don’t waste their time interviewing unqualified candidates.
• Better hiring quality—even if hiring managers’ final hiring decisions are guided by their first impressions, they’ll still be hiring qualified candidates.
• Improved hiring diversity—your gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. don’t matter in technical interviews, as they focus on skills and experience, not personality and cultural fit.

Just how big of a difference can technical interviews make? According to a landmark University of Notre Dame study, technical interviews are 5.5 times more predictive of future on-the-job behavior than traditional interviews.

Take a Multi-Faceted Approach
Ultimately, to get the best hiring results, you need to use the various tools at your disposal, and to take a considered, multi-faceted approach. There’s still a place for traditional interviews at the end of the process, but due to their limitations and shortcomings, it’s critical to take other actions that support hiring quality and diversity.

photo credit: aqua.mech Beautiful woman with grimace beacuse of bad smell. Isolated on white. via photopin (license)

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
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