technical – Resource Center

3 Advantages of Outsourcing Your Technical Interviews

admin — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 10:00:22 +0000

First, yes, you can do this. Some companies aren’t aware that you can outsource technical interviews. But, with companies worldwide struggling to quickly identify and hire quality IT talent, more and more are turning to outsourcing technical interviews to ensure that candidates have the necessary skills to succeed at a given job. After all, most technical recruiters are non-technical professionals, and do not have the qualifications to ascertain technical experience accurately.

Outsourcing Technical Interviews Advantages

Here are three, plus, the bonus, advantages you get from outsourcing your technical interviews instead of performing them internally.

1. Improve Quality of Hiring

The two primary internal approaches have shortcomings that negatively impact the quality of technical interviews, and as a result, quality of hire. Outsourced technical interviews don’t have these shortcomings.

Let’s take a look at the quality issues with the two primary internal approaches.

Pre-Submittal Tech Interviews by Third Party Staffing Suppliers

The typical approach for staffing companies is the use of an internal IT consultant or employee as a technical interviewer. The consultant is paid for a short amount of time—perhaps an hour or 30 minutes of their time. In some cases, a nominal gift card is shared instead of full compensation for the tech person’s expertise. While many firms have formalized this tech interview functionally, generally this is a “do me a favor, check out this candidate” type of situation. While the consultant generally has sufficient IT knowledge, interviewers may not be a role/stack match to the job and/or technologies required, there’s no guarantee that the interview process is legally compliant, and there’s no common scoring or reporting system.

Post-Submittal Tech Interviews by Hiring Companies

The approach most often used by direct-hire companies like financial institutions is to establish a technical interview panel for each new open IT position. Most panels are composed of three technical team members who likely will work with the person once hired. While committees usually do prep, ask questions together, and vote together, the members often aren’t trained in doing technical interviews. Even if they are, there’s another major flaw: they’re making a decision about whom they want to work with. That creates bias, as people tend to want to work with people like themselves, which isn’t conducive for increasing diversity.

When you outsource technical interviews, they are performed by an external IT professional with the technical skill set required in the role, paired with an intimate understanding of how their actions impact candidate experience and interview compliance. Meanwhile, the external IT pro is only concerned with who can best do the job, instead of who might be fun to work with. The result: a proper, extensive interview is conducted, and bias is minimized.

2. Decrease Time for All Stakeholders

It’s important to get technical interviews for candidates—especially top candidates—scheduled quickly. The best technical interview solution providers, often within 24 hours, can schedule a technical interview, conduct it and provide results in the form of a detailed candidate report.

Our research shows that it often takes a week or more for recruiters to schedule interviews with internal IT consultants, which delays getting feedback on the candidate. Combine candidate expectations for hiring decisions as if it were a buying experience not a hiring process with LinkedIn’s findings of time to hire in the IT sector at 44 days and your best candidates could very well accept another offer before you have the facts needed to make a next round decision based. Especially considering that IT professionals in high demand are more apt to receive multiple job offers simultaneously, according to Paul McDonald, Senior Executive Director at Robert Half.

In short, outsourcing technical interviews helps you minimize time to fill and time to hire while ensuring new hires have technical fit—a recipe for building and maintaining a top-caliber IT department.

3. Reduce Costs Substantially

Whether you’re looking to improve client retention by delivering high-quality candidates to the hiring manager on a consistent basis or you’re fed up with recruiting metrics outside of the norm, leveraging outsourced technical interviews makes financial sense.

Internal costs for technical interviews can add up surprisingly quickly. Assuming you have a team of three IT pros interviewing three candidates at a minimal cost of $50 per hour, you’ll absorb a minimum soft-cost of $900 Here’s how the math works:

Two hours of prep time for three IT pros, to agree on questions and format: $300
Three one-hour technical interviews with three IT pros: $450
One hour of deliberation with three IT pros: $150

The more growth or turnover in your department the more interviews and the costs can quickly escalate. A technical interview partner, meanwhile, conducts interviews at around one-third of the cost while reducing your company’s exposure for mistakes made by untrained interviewers.

4. Boost Revenue per Employee (BONUS Benefit)

While technological advancements continue to grow in leaps and bounds, unfortunately, IT hiring processes have not experienced optimal modernization to keep pace with hiring demands.

The result? Declining productivity due to disruptions in project timelines related to 1) reviewing embellished resumes from talent acquisition and/or staffing partners, 2) pre-screening tech skills of unvetted potential hires by phone and/or video, and 3) running technical interview panels ranging from 2 to 7 key tech pros already feeling the heat of being understaffed.

IT teams have begun to put this necessary activity into the bucket of technical debt. This kind of debt refers to sacrificing revenue facing responsibilities, employee morale, and/or quality of hire to fill an empty seat. By outsourcing the technical interview you are saving employees at your company valuable time—no more scheduling ping pong for unqualified candidates, technical panelists stay focused on critical revenue-producing projects outside of interviewing the top 3 candidates, and open IT roles close faster. Hear our executive team speak with Future of Work Influencer, Paul Estes, on his Work on Demand podcast.

Find out how much your company invests in technical interviewing.

Amanda Cole, Vice President at eTeki

Amanda Cole has more than 15 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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5 Reasons the Human Factor Is Essential for Effective Candidate Screening

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 11:31:59 +0000

If you’re an IT manager, when it comes time to make new hires, you likely want more than anything else: a clone.

After all, while hiring, you still have to meet work and project deadlines and manage your teams—and perform all of the other tasks that more than fill up your workday. It sure would be nice to have another you to handle the extra workload hiring takes (often 30%), so you wouldn’t have more stress and less time to spend with family and friends.

The last thing you want, meanwhile, is to waste your time interviewing unsuitable candidates. That means you need recruiters to consistently deliver quality candidates, which in turn means they need to use an effective candidate screening process. As we will see, the human factor—live technical interviews with qualified technical interviewers with relevant experience—is a must for effective candidate screening.

The Screening Automation Trend
The importance of the human factor seemingly flies in the face of one of the biggest trends in recruiting’s digital transformation – automation of candidate screening. Bullhorn’s Top Staffing and Recruiting Trends for 2020 report found “a major variance in the interest level (26%) in digital transformation depending on company size and role.”

See how eTeki had a pulse on the business drivers and satisfaction factors associated with decoupling the expensive, yet essential, the human-centric step of the hiring process. Their solution provided elastic interview capacity that’s transformed how India and the rest of the world hire IT, teams.

It’s easy to see the motivation for automation: speed. As the LinkedIn report makes clear, recruiters are under pressure to deliver more candidates in the same or less time. And with today’s computerized screening tools (such as personality and skills assessments) being smarter and more effective than ever at filtering out weak candidates, we agree that it makes complete sense to use them.

The problem is, these tools can’t—and likely never will be able to—filter candidates at the level IT hiring managers demand. To achieve that level of candidate screening, prior to delivery to hiring managers, candidates who’ve advanced through automated screening must go through live, rigorous technical interviews with trained technical interviewers who have relevant technical experience. In fact, these technical interviewers, in a way, act as the clones that IT hiring managers are seeking, asking tough, probing questions and evaluating answers as the hiring managers would.

5 Reasons Live Technical Interviews Are Essential
Live, rigorous technical interviews provide five benefits that make them essential for quality candidate screening.

You learn whether candidates have the relevant experience to succeed at a given job. Computer-based tests can evaluate candidates’ high-level competency. Screening challenges, such as coding exercises, meanwhile, can show whether candidates can do the work. But only live technical interviews reveal details about candidates’ true levels of experience with key tasks, challenges, tools, etc.—giving a far more complete picture of how successful they are likely to be at given roles. The reason: interviewers understand the job requirements and how the skill or tool is used to fulfill a specific responsibility. This gives them a keen ability to probe candidates about their key job-relevant experience in ways that computerized tools simply can’t (such as through follow-up and clarification questions based on candidates’ answers to initial questions).

You learn about how much supervision candidates would likely need. Learning about candidates’ job-relevant experience is an important indicator of how much managerial supervision they are likely to require. For example, if screening shows that one candidate is technically competent but has minimal experience, that candidate can probably handle the task but would likely require close supervision and additional training. Meanwhile, if a second competent candidate has lots of experience, that person would only require light supervision. Clearly, it would be easiest on a hiring manager to hire the second candidate. Knowing the amount of supervision likely to be needed could even impact whether to deliver one or both candidates.

You learn about candidates’ suitability for virtual teams. More and more teams today are virtual—89% of respondents to a 2018 survey reported being members of virtual teams. Virtual teams create leadership, communication, cultural and skills challenges, and it’s important that members be able to do their work with a minimal amount of handholding. As a result, it’s important that recruiters deliver candidates with the necessary experience, which is best revealed by live technical interviews.

You learn about candidates’ relevant problem-solving experience and capabilities. While tests can evaluate problem-solving ability, learning how candidates solved real-life challenges is far more valuable for evaluating how they are likely to deal with future challenges. In technical interviews, interviewers can probe candidates about instances where best-laid plans went awry, to learn how candidates solved specific types of problems. This will reveal whether candidates merely have knowledge about relevant challenges, of if they have experience actually solving them.

You learn a variety of other candidate information that could impact whether candidates should be delivered. Live video interviews are revealing in other, miscellaneous ways that computer-based tests simply aren’t, and the insights gleaned can be valuable for candidate delivery decisions. Truthfulness, or lack thereof, is one example. Sometimes candidates use odd body language and provide other non-verbal cues—such as not giving eye contact—that are signs of embellishment or lying. Some candidates even use proxies for screening tests, challenges and technical interviews. With the latter, candidates often get caught because of situational factors, such as audio feedback caused by multiple audio inputs in the room.

Keep IT Hiring Managers Happy
For recruiters, it’s critical to keep IT hiring managers happy—which is why combining quick and quality candidate delivery is important. Today’s automated candidate screening tools are terrific, but using technical interviews at the end of the screening process is essential for delivering the quality that hiring managers demand. Fortunately, technical interviews using on-demand freelance interviewers can be conducted in 24 hours or less, meaning there’s no need to sacrifice speed.

In other words, the end result of using technical interviews properly is exactly what recruiters want: happier IT hiring managers. Not only are the hiring managers able to spend less time interviewing unsuitable candidates, and more time managing their teams, working on critical projects, and with their families and friends, but they also are more likely to make better hires.

And if in doing so stronger recruiter-hiring manager relationships are built, it can make a profound difference in talent acquisition (TA) results. According to Bersin by Deloitte, “Our research found the most influential predictor of TA performance outcomes is a strong relationship between the recruiter and the hiring manager; in fact, this relationship is four times more influential than other TA performance drivers.”

photo credit: johnnytangphoto Odysseus’ Rock via photopin (license)

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The Future of Technical Screening Could Look Much Different

admin — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 18:12:34 +0000

As HR and business experts are pointing out, new technologies are changing work as we know it.

Take Forbes contributor Sylvia Vorhhauser-Smith, who says that in the future “employers may not have employees as we know them today,” but instead have “virtual talent warehouses” with some permanent talent, but much of it task or project-based. Some of this talent, she says, may not even be human.

Also notable is how these new technologies (artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.) and the resulting changes in the nature of work also promise to cause major changes to technical job screening. While it’s impossible to predict exactly what technical screening will be like even 10 years from now, with the help of technical recruiting experts, we’ve come up with the following four predictions.

Artificial Intelligence, Bots, and Screening Technologies Will Take Over Much of Technical Screening

One of the biggest complaints IT hiring managers have about technical recruiters is that many lack sufficient relevant technical knowledge. As technologies continue to advance, especially those in the emerging third and fourth platforms such as AI, shortcomings of relevant technical knowledge among recruiters will only become more acute. The result: recruiters will struggle to differentiate between strong and poor candidates for tech roles associated with those technologies.

We expect, however, technology solutions to arise that will help recruiters with their pre-screening efforts. In other words, much of recruiters’ work in sourcing and initial screening will be shifted to technology tools. Some examples:

We expect that recruiters will rely on prescreening bots for specific areas of expertise to give them a baseline understanding of candidates’ competency.
Bots could do the first level of screening by chatting with candidates.
Bots could help identify fraudulent candidates.

IT hiring managers also could see their roles in candidate screening and resume review decrease. In part, this is because tech hiring is snowballing that many hiring managers won’t have the time to serve those roles. Instead, skill and screening assessments—made more powerful by new technologies—will help fill the need.

However, there are limits to the impact of automation in screening. Human review and monitoring of data from automation will be important. And, as noted in the next prediction, an automated screening will still need to be weighted with live, person-to-person technical interviews.

The Human Factor Will Still Play a Role, Particularly in Technical Interviewing

Most of the experts we consulted with believe, as we do, that—at least for the short- and medium-term future—technical interviews conducted by hiring managers or other IT professionals will remain an important part of the screening process. After technology-driven prescreening for evaluating required competencies, technical interviews with human experts are needed to evaluate candidates’ relevant experience. The human factor is important at this stage because only qualified people are able to probe candidates’ responses, understand their nuances, and ask appropriate follow-up questions.

As one technical recruiting expert noted, bots could assist human interviewers in providing better technical interviews. For example, by identifying appropriate questions to ask based on the job role and candidates’ experience.

Perhaps in 20 years AI and bots will have developed the ability to effectively evaluate the experience. In the next five to 10 years, however, we believe it’s doubtful that technologies will be able to replicate the experience that human technical interviewers can offer.

New Types of Assessments

We expect new types of assessments to arise to meet the screening needs of employers using contract- and task-based workers.

One example: As recruiting expert Steve Levy suggested to us, we could see assessments that deliver skill and team compatibility scores. These scores would help determine if candidates’ skills match the needs of a project or team. The company would use the scores of other team members to ensure that the gig worker would bring the needed skills.

Another example from Levy: an “adaptability to new technology” assessment. As new technologies come to the forefront, employers need to know how well job seekers are able to adapt.

Plus, with much of gig tech work likely done remotely, we may also see assessments that gauge a person’s ability to work remotely, without supervision. After all, if a person is a remote gig contributor, the employer is going to want to ensure the person will be able to work well in that environment.

More Robust Professional Profiles

Many tech professionals might not even wait for employers to give them assessments. Instead, since they will be serving as entrepreneurs selling their own services to a variety of employers, they could have skill and experience assessments done on themselves to be able to showcase their skills and experience on their professional profiles.

We envision the development of skill certification programs, in which peers formally vet workers’ skills, allowing job seekers to show the certification in these skills on their professional profiles. Job seekers with tech skill certification would likely find themselves at an advantage in landing gig work associated with those skills.

One technical recruiting expert told us that while nice to have now, having profiles in the development platform GitHub, the programming online community Stack Overflow, and on LinkedIn will soon become musts for tech talent. Although with Google announcing in May a push into the job search market, Google for Jobs, it will be interesting to see how that impacts LinkedIn, other job search companies, and technical screening.

Some good news: applying for jobs could become much less time-consuming for candidates, which is good news for both them and employers. When candidates apply for positions, career history and online profiles could eventually be automatically submitted to recruiters without any effort from candidates. In addition to saving time for candidates, employers will benefit from eliminating candidate abandonment during the application process.

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The Top 35 Conferences in 2021 for Technical Recruiters Targeting Financial Services, Banking & Fintech

Raj — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 11:04:30 +0000

Demand for high-quality technical talent in financial services, banking, and fintech is exploding. It’s increasingly difficult for technical recruiters targeting these industries to deliver talent in sufficient quantities, especially with stiff competition for tech talent from the tech industry and others.

This raises a question: How can you, as a technical recruiter serving these industries, get better results for clients, and grow your career?
One great way is by participating in the right conferences. Our hand-picked list of the top 35 conferences for technical recruiters targeting financial services, banking, and fintech—presented at the bottom of this post—is a useful resource for finding great events around the globe.

How can participating in conferences help you? The benefits include:

Increase your credibility and build your personal brand (through presenting)
Meet valuable connections and find new clients (through networking)
Find potential talent (through networking)
Learn strategies that will help you recruit better and meet clients’ needs (through attending sessions)
Discover new technologies that will save you time and help you get better results (through attending trade shows)

How do you select the right events? Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to just pick at random from our list of 35 conferences. Selecting the right events does take a bit of research. In our opinion, it’s particularly important to consider:

Who will be there: If people and companies you’d like to meet or know will be at an event, the networking alone can have great value. Look at conferences’ audience demographics and exhibitor lists for insights.
What’s being talked about: This may be even more important than who will be there, because participating in conferences with the right topics can help you serve your clients. For example, if your clients are concerned with diversity and inclusion, the candidate experience, or quality hiring, learning the latest research, knowledge, and strategies can go a long way. Learn about key topics being covered by examining conference programs.

You may be thinking, “Who has the time to participate in a bunch of conferences?” Well, not many people. But the good news is you DON’T have to be present at an event to take part. You can also participate remotely by using events’ Twitter hashtags before, during, and after the events. For some good suggestions, see Hubgets blog post, “Participating Remotely in Conferences: 3 Things to Know.”

One final note: If you’re interested in presenting (many conferences are interested in getting insights from recruiters), you typically need to apply for speaking slots at least six months, and as much as a year or more, prior to a conference. That means you’ll probably need to wait until the 2022 conference to apply to speak at many of these events. Also, if you’re new to speaking, you may need to get some experience at smaller recruiting events to earn opportunities to speak at events like those below.

The Top 35 Conferences in 2021 for technical recruiters targeting financial services, banking, and fintech
Jan. 15 ICSTEM 2021, Melbourne, Australia.
Jan. 19 TAtec Leadership Summit on AI & Machine Learning, Virtual.
Jan. 25-29 Talent Acquisition Week, Virtual.
Jan. 25-29 Social Recruiting Strategies Conference, Virtual.
Jan. 28 FinTech Asia 2021, Bangkok, Thailand.
Feb. 3-4 Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services 2021, Virtual.
Feb. 16 HR Tech Conference & Awards, Taj Lands End, Mumbai.
Feb. 17-18 Latam Mobile Summit, Virtual.
Feb. 17-19 Developer Week, Virtual.
Mar. 3-5 HRcoreLAB summit, Virtual.
Mar. 8-11 SIA Executive Forum, Virtual.
Mar. 9-11 SourceCon, Virtual.
Mar. 16-17 MarTech West, Virtual.
Mar. 16-19 HR Tech 2021, Virtual.
Mar. 17-18 HR West, Virtual.
Mar. 24-26 FinTech India and Blockchain Summit, New Delhi, India.
Apr. 8-9 Technology, Knowledge & Society, University of Melbourne.
Apr. 11-14 HR Virginia 2021, Virtual.
Apr. 14 Empire Startups Fintech Conference, New York, USA.
Apr. 19-21 SHRM Talent Management Conference, Virtual or Las Vegas, USA.
Apr. 19-22 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, Virtual.
Apr. 28-30 Direct Employers Annual Meeting & Conference, Indianapolis, IN.
May. 11-13 Virtual Employee Engagement Summit, Virtual.
May. 18-19 UNLEASH America 2021, Las Vegas, USA.
May. 27 recruitDC, Falls Church, VA, USA.
May. 28-29 HR Summit 2021, Mumbai, India.
Jun. 8-9 d&i Leaders Global Forum 2021, London, UK.
Jun. 20-23 SHRM Annual Conference, Chicago.
Aug. 17-20 International Design Engineering & Technical Conferences and Computers & Information in Engineering Conference, Virtual.
Aug. 29 – Sep. 1 ATD21, Virtual.
Sep. 28 – Oct. 1 HRTech World, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas.
Oct. 5-7 TechRecruit Conference 2021, Virtual.
Oct. 10-13 The HR Southwest Conference, Dallas, TX, USA.
Nov. 2-4 The i4cp 2021 Conference, Virtual.
Nov. 8-10 Gartner ReimagineHR Conference 2021, San Diego, CA.

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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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4 Technical Recruiter Resources for Great Candidate Knockout Questions

admin — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 13:53:46 +0000

Many IT hiring managers, as we’ve detailed, complain about technical recruiters’ lack of technical knowledge. One reason for this complaint: in many cases, too many clearly unqualified candidates advance to the technical interviewing stage, which can result in:

Wasted time for technical interviewers
Longer time to hire
Lower quality of hire

As a technical recruiter, you can improve your reputation and relationships with hiring managers by consistently screening out clearly unqualified candidates during pre-screening. One method is asking effective candidate knockout questions. This is possible even without strong technical knowledge. You just need to ensure:

The questions cover skills that are highly relevant and meaningful to the job.
You have the ability to evaluate candidates’ responses (as a result, questions with right or wrong answers are ideal, while questions requiring candidates to write code are ill advised if you lack coding skills)

In this post, we offer four recruiter resources that should help you with this effort.

Hiring Managers

In a perfect world, hiring managers will provide you with the knockout questions and answers for particular positions during effective intake sessions. Encourage them to do so. Since they are the ideal people to create questions that weed out weak candidates before the technical interviewing stage.
Unfortunately, you’re not always dealing with a perfect world, and hiring managers may be unwilling or unable to provide you with knockout questions (for example, they might not have the time). In this situation, you’ll need to identify questions yourself. However, it’s important to provide your questions to hiring managers to ensure that they approve them. If they don’t, it might prompt them to identify questions they believe are better—which is, of course, ideal, and also educational for you.

CareerCup and 3. the balance

Be realistic about your ability—or lack thereof—to have complex technical discussions and evaluate candidates based on them. If you aren’t a former tech professional, chances are this is outside your skill set. As a result, if you find yourself needing to identify questions, we don’t recommend trying to come up with questions in your head. Instead, take advantage of outside resources. Tech professionals often discuss technical interviewing questions online, and you can beg, borrow, steal, or modify those that are appropriate (i.e., whose answers you could evaluate) to use as knock out questions.
Two great places to find great technical interview questions that you can use are CareerCup and the balance.

CareerCup, founded by leading technical interviewing expert Gayle Laakman McDowell, helps IT workers prepare for technical interviews. It includes questions sorted by company, technical topic and job title. Examples of questions we found include:
For a Quality Assurance Engineer:

A bug was found in production, but not in QA. What are two possible reasons it wasn’t caught in QA?

For an Android Engineer:

Tell me about one Android API that you had difficulty using in a project. How did you resolve that issue?

For a System Administrator:

What is firmware? What is a device driver? How are they related and how are they different?

The balance, meanwhile, is a financial advice site but has run several articles on technical interviewing questions. Examples of questions we found there include:

Define authentication and authorization and the tools that are used to support them in enterprise deployments.
What is ETL, and when should it be used?
Describe the advantages and disadvantages of dynamic memory allocation vs. static memory allocation.
What is a VLAN?

Google

Google can be your ally in finding questions that are relevant and meaningful, because targeted searches enable you to find questions that are appropriate for particular roles. For example, what if you were trying to find a security analyst? When we Googled “technical interview questions for security analysts,” we found an InfoSec Institute piece by Kurt Ellzey titled “Top 50 Information Security Interview Questions [Updated for 2017].” Many of the questions have right or wrong answers, which is awesome. And we know they’re relevant to security analysts. Awesome again!

Of course, be smart with Google. Vet the reputability and quality of the source. And, of course, run any questions by the hiring manager to ensure that they are appropriate.

Setting Expectations with Candidates
While the primary purpose of this post is to offer resources for knock out questions, we’d be remiss if we wrapped up this post without mentioning the importance of setting expectations with candidates when you ask them your knock out questions.

The reason you need to set expectations is because top candidates enjoy demonstrating their skills and experience, and want to be asked challenging questions. Giving them a quality candidate experience is one reason we recommend technical interviewers ask tough questions.
So:

Acknowledge that you’re not a technical expert
Let candidates know that they might find your questions simplistic or rudimentary.
Explain that this is not a technical interview, but rather a preliminary round the hiring manager has asked you to conduct to help ensure only qualified candidates receive technical interviews.

By pairing effective knockout questions with this communication, you’ll be able to weed out weak candidates while keeping stronger candidates interested in the job.
photo credit: Club Paf Paf Boxing Gala 10.9.2016 via photopin (license)

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The Candidate’s Checklist for Succeeding at Live Video Interviews

admin — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 11:41:03 +0000

It’s easy to feel uncertain about job interviews and technical screens as a candidate. Modern technical interviews bring these conversations to a comfortable setting (usually at home), rather than in the employer’s office. While convenient, it’s easy to let your guard down. Use this Candidate’s Checklist for Successful Live Video Interviews to ensure that you’re presenting yourself as a capable professional.

Before the Interview
Be prepared. For live technical interviews that mean going beyond just being prepared to discuss the job opportunity, all past projects and jobs on your resume, researching the employer, and making some notes about what you want to talk about .

I’ve dressed professionally. It’s frankly quite stunning how many candidates dress inappropriately for video interviews. Just because an interview isn’t at an employer’s worksite doesn’t mean that it’s OK to wear a T-shirt or a cap.
I’ve performed a complete tech check

- - I’m able to access the video interviewing system/my webcam is working properly.

- - My microphone is working properly.

- - If I’m using my computer’s built-in audio, I have a headset available in case the interviewer has difficulty hearing me.

I’ve performed a complete environment check

- - My camera is positioned correctly. Your camera is facing you straight-on and shows your shoulders and up. Also, pay attention to the background. Remove anything the interviewer might find distracting or inappropriate.
  - The lighting is adequate. The interviewer needs to be able to see your face. A common cause of poor lighting is sitting in front of a window. For best results, turn on all lights in the room and lower blinds/shut curtains.
  - I’ve done what I can to minimize background noise. Do the interview in a spot where any background noise would be unlikely or minimized. Let family members/roommates know that you need a quiet environment and can’t be interrupted. Ask them not to flush nearby toilets (we’ve heard this happen more than once). Mute any devices that might cause distracting noises.
  - I’ve identified potential causes of interruption. Be aware of situations that could momentarily interrupt the video interviews (e.g. a package delivery), and at the start of the interview inform the interviewer of the potential distraction.

During the Interview

I’ve connected with the interviewer. It’s important to develop some rapport with the interviewer. There’s no need to be detailed, but be personable and pleasant during introductions.
I’ve given eye contact without staring. Providing a good amount of eye contact helps make you appear confident and professional.
I’ve avoided fidgeting. Nervous habits such as tapping on your computer or desk, stretching and yawning frequently can give an interviewer a bad impression of your personality and professionalism.
I’ve maintained confidence. You don’t want the interviewer (or hiring manager, who will probably watch the recording of the interview) to think you’re uncomfortable or struggling. If you need more time to think about an answer to a question, restate the question, which will give you a few more seconds to process.
I’ve used examples from my past experience. Telling an interviewer how you’ve done something in the past gives him or her much more confidence in your qualifications than merely explaining how you might do it. This is especially important for technical interviews, during which good interviewers are seeking behavioral examples.
I’ve created maximum impact by talking about outcomes of my work and accomplishments. This is related to the past examples item above but is important enough to deserve its own item. To get interviewers and hiring managers to take notice, show how your work has benefited your employers.

The post The Candidate’s Checklist for Succeeding at Live Video Interviews appeared first on Resource Center.

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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Our 16 Favorite Behavioral Interview Questions for Technical Roles

admin — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 17:19:50 +0000

For great technical behavioral interview results, you need to ask the right questions. In this post, we provide 16 of our favorite behavioral interview questions for technical roles—with questions specifically for network engineers, business analysts, developers and database administrators. Behavioral interview questions help you distinguish the contenders for your jobs from the pretenders. Why do we like these questions?

They reveal candidates’ relevant technical skills and experience.
They provide candidates with a quality experience by focusing on their accomplishments.
Instead of being hypothetical—what candidates would or might do—these questions focus on specific actions—what candidates did, which is far more predictive of what they’re likely to do in the future.

It’s important to note that when you ask these questions, it’s vital to ensure they are fully answered so that you get complete behavioral examples. We recommend using the SCOPE Model. If a candidate doesn’t complete components of SCOPE for a given question, ask a follow-up question to get the information you need.

SCOPE Model:
S — Situation; describe a specific situation;
C — Challenges any problems or challenges faced;
O — Outcomes or specific results from the action(s);
P — Processes the candidate used to create and deliver the results
E — Evaluation; explain and evaluate what was learned from the experience

Questions for a Network Engineer Role

Your resume says that you worked with Wireshark. Describe the most challenging network issue you took the lead to solve, including what made it challenging, your initial plan of action, how you adapted that plan to improve the result, and the outcome of your effort. Please use the whiteboard to draw the network topology.

Tell me about your most valuable success with using remote monitoring software in one of your past projects. Which software were you using? Describe the most stubborn difficulties you faced and how you overcame them.

Please tell me what version of Hadoop you have used, which tools in the Hadoop stack were utilized, and the size of data from your largest implementation in terms of GB/TB/PB.

What is your “go to” IDE (integrated development environment) and why? Be sure to include at least two examples from past projects.

Questions for a Business Analyst Role

About how many times have you used LucidChart? What percent of the time do you use LucidChart vs. traditional Visio? Any other charting tool you rely on? Tell me about the most successful instance where you used LucidChart, Visio, or some other diagramming tool to clarify a complex set of entities and relationships.

Give me your best example of using Puppet, and describe any difficulties you faced. On reflection, what measures could you have taken to minimize the difficulties with this configuration management software? Tell me about the configuration assignment where you put what you learned to best use.

As you know, the job position requires the candidate with experience in MongoDB. Please describe two projects/assignments where you use of MongoDB was most helpful for achieving overall system objectives? Did anyone comment on your DB? Who? What did they say?

Questions for a Developer Role

Which three projects best demonstrate your skill level with Ruby on Rails development? Please demonstrate using the built-in code editor.

Explain how you made the best use of Mysql in the context of a project you received positive compliments.

Tell me about the most puzzling programming challenge you solved over the past year. How did you tackle it? How do you quantify the success achieved?

Describe the most critical advantages of Oracle Java over C++.

Tell me about the scripting language you learned that has been most useful for you. Please include how you decided to learn this language, the steps that went about learning the language (include timeframes), and describe your best application of that language to a project that delivered strong end-user value.

Questions for a Database Administrator Role

Tell me about the step by step details of project with company XYZ. (Pick a project that you found relevant from their resume or their response to a warm-up question.)

When have you worked with PowerBuilder? Describe what efficiencies it provides for database-driven business applications and elaborate on your most complex project leveraging PowerBuilder.

Describe a problem that you faced during go-live of an Inventory & Warehouse Management system. Please give me an example detailing how you managed changes or change requests to the system, as the ERP system administrator.

Your resume indicates you’re experienced with NetBackup. Share with me the latest version you’ve utilized and its main features, along with the operating systems and server platform types you were backing up.

Better Technical Hires Getting full answers to the technical behavior interview questions above—and others like them—can make a tremendous difference in your IT hiring results. A landmark University of Notre Dame study found that behavioral interview results are 55% predictive of future on-the-job behavior, compared to just 10% for traditional interviews.

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Amanda Cole

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

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