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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.

The post 3 Advantages of Outsourcing Your Technical Interviews appeared first on Resource Center.

Examining 6 Recruiting Metrics, and the Key for Improving Them

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 10:12:46 +0000

How should recruiters and employers measure the recruiting process?

It’s a question without a consensus answer. There is no recruiting metrics gold standard because too many factors impact recruiting priorities and results—company size, industry, and job type to name a few. Yet to make intelligent adjustments to your recruiting process, and to evaluate the results of those adjustments, you need to measure something. But you also can’t measure everything, or you won’t get much actual recruiting done.

With that in mind, we’ve selected six metrics that you should consider evaluating in your recruiting process. After we go over them, we’ll discuss the key factor for improving whichever metrics you use.

Time new hires stay at a company

What it is: Number of years that new hires remain with your organization.

Average value: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.2 years in January 2016 (the most recent time for which data is available), down from 4.6 years in January 2014.

Be aware: A number of factors can affect the median tenure of workers, including age, industry and occupation. For example, wage and salary workers in the public sector had more than double the median tenure of private-sector employees, 7.7 years compared to 3.7 years. Also, as LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2017 survey shows, this metric is valued most by smaller organizations—those with 200 employees or fewer.

Use: For evaluating the quality of hire. A shortcoming here is significant time lag; if you make a positive change in your recruiting practices today that impacts the quality of hire, it could take years before there’s a significant corresponding positive change in this metric.

Time to fill

What it is: Amount of time, typically measured in days, between when a job is opened and an offer is accepted.

Average value:

As per our recent hiring metrics research, the average time to hire and fill all IT Development/Engineering roles globally, it takes 33 and 68 days. However, this number can vary greatly depending on where you are located. The U.S and Canada take 56 days to fill and 33 days to hire while Asia takes 92 days to fill and 36 days to hire.

As of December 2016, U.S. jobs take 27.2 working days to fill, according to DHI Hiring Indicators. That’s slightly below the all-time high of 29 days hit in 2015, but significantly higher than 2009 levels (just over 15 working days).

Be aware: As recruiting software provider Workable notes, time to fill can vary greatly by industry and job type: “While the industry average time-to-fill for engineering in the US was 58 days, some roles had much lower numbers, like data scientist with 28 days. Meanwhile, hiring a senior QA engineer was taking 121 days on average.”

Use: For evaluating your sourcing and hiring processes.

Time to hire

What it is: The number of days between a successful candidate’s first contact (e.g. they apply for the job) and their hire date.

Average value: eTeki research found that the data shows that interviews per hire for all engineering roles across the globe are 12. In America and Canada it’s 13 but in Asia 11 in 2022

A Glassdoor survey found that the process of getting hired in the U.S. took 22.9 days in 2014, up from 12.6 days in 2010.

Be aware: As with many recruiting metrics, the time to hire can vary greatly based on job type and other factors. “High-skilled jobs that require judgment, creativity, and technical skills generally require longer, more intense job-screening processes,” Glassdoor chief economist Andrew Chamberlain told SHRM.

Use: For evaluating the speed and quality of your screening and interviewing process.

Hiring manager satisfaction

What it is: The level of satisfaction of hiring managers with your hiring process.

Average value: Not available due to different ways of calculating. A 2014 ERE study found that hiring managers tend to give recruiters a C-plus grade.

Be aware: An October 2016 study by workforce intelligence provider Visier found that 71% of hiring managers said that to increase the quality of people they hire, HR needs to improve its recruiting process.

Use: For evaluating the quality of hire.

Submit-to-interview ratio (aka present-to-interview ratio)

What it is: The ratio of candidates submitted/presented to hiring managers to the number of given interviews.

Average value: A good submit-to-interview ratio in staffing is 3:1 or better, but in some industries can see as high as 6:1 or 8:1.

Be aware: If the ratio is high, possible causes could be poor screening, the recruiter not understanding the type of candidates the hiring manager is looking for, or the hiring manager being too picky.

Use: For evaluating the quality of screening and recruiter effectiveness. If your time to fill is high, a poor submit-to-interview ratio indicates lackluster screening may be to blame.

Interview-to-offer ratio

What it is: The number of candidates on average a hiring manager needs to interview in order to make an offer.

Average value: We’ve been told an average interview-to-offer ratio is about 4.8:1. A good ratio is 3:1 or better.

Be aware: As Amy Caswell notes in a Recruiter.com article, a “high interview-to-offer ratio is a cause for concern because of the waste it creates — not just in the recruitment department, but also the wasted time the hiring manager invests in performing too many interviews.”

Use: For evaluating the quality of candidates submitted.

It’s All About Screening
No matter which metrics you use to evaluate your hiring process (the period beginning after candidates are sourced through the interview), the solution for optimizing them is the same. Great candidate screening.

If you consistently deliver or submit quality candidates in an efficient time frame to hiring managers—what we call delivering a high return on the interview—your metrics will look great. In fact, we’ve seen a company get its submit-to-interview and interview-to-offer ratios close to 1:1 through great screening practices.

Meanwhile, if you’re metrics need improvement, the solution is bound to be in improving your screening practices. Here’s a listing of quality candidate screening we recommend for tech roles (click the link for detailed descriptions of each step):

Ensure the hiring manager provides a complete job description.
Have a detailed intake session with the hiring manager.
Filter resumes aligning with job requirements emphasized by the hiring manager
Perform other prescreening activities (e.g. validating candidates’ identity and experience via social media, personality/work style assessments, automated reference checking, validating candidates’ IT certifications).
During the initial conversation with candidates, evaluate for technical fit.
Have candidates undergo rigorous technical interviews.
Deliver technical interview videos and reports along with candidate shortlist to the hiring manager.

A Useful Resource

If you need help with calculating recruiting metrics, Glen Cathey’s Boolean Blackbelt sourcing and recruiting blog has terrific sourcing and recruiting candidate funnel and output calculators (spreadsheets) that you can download for free.

The post Examining 6 Recruiting Metrics, and the Key for Improving Them appeared first on Resource Center.

9 Tips for Achieving Faster Time to Fill Without Sacrificing Quality

admin — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 13:18:32 +0000

Having a long time to fill open positions leaves managers frustrated, current teams working shorthanded, and everyone at risk of burning out.

Not good.

Slow hiring processes, meanwhile, make candidates more likely to choose opportunities from other employers, especially if they are strong candidates in high-demand jobs. (Such jobs include web designer and Java developer, both of which have an average time to hire more than 10 days less than average, which is 22.9 days, according to Glassdoor Economic Research.)

Also not good.

This raises a question: How can you shorten your hiring process to reduce time to fill without sacrificing candidate quality? Here are nine tips.

Put a quality job description together—quickly.

A poor job description can result in having poor-quality candidates or not having enough candidates—both negative outcomes. To get a quality job description together quickly, recruiters and hiring managers need to get on the same page so that the recruiters will submit candidates that meet hiring managers’ expectations. A quality applicant tracking system (ATS) can help by maintaining records of your job descriptions and requirements for a variety of roles.

Keep applications short and candidate-friendly.

Long application forms not only typically top the list of candidates’ complaints about the hiring process, but they are also the leading cause of candidate abandonment. Some suggestions here: use a shorter application form that only asks for information about the most essential requirements. Better yet, use an ATS that can scan and imports data from resume, LinkedIn profiles, job board sites, etc., so candidates only have to enter in a fraction of the data.

Use text messaging, not just email, to communicate with candidates.

It can be hard for passive candidates to answer emails while at work; it’s typically easier to send a quick text message reply. This is especially true for IT candidates. They know emails are monitored, and don’t want others at their current employer to know they are looking at other job opportunities.

Consider using automated reference checking instead of manual reference checks.

Automated reference checking is faster and more convenient than manual reference checks, as there are no wasted phone calls, no voicemail tag and no missed emails. When automated, reference feedback can be used as a screening tool to verify work history and past performance instead of a tedious task towards the end of the hiring process.

Don’t go overboard with your personality assessment.

According to Glassdoor, using a personality test typically adds about a day to the hiring process. That’s not a long time, considering the benefits, but if the personality assessment you require is too long or frustrating, it can result in significant abandonment rates. So while taking care to ensure that any test you use is statistically valid and well designed, it’s important to also consider the candidate experience.

Be efficient with background screening/drug testing.

More than half of employers say their biggest background screening challenge is the time it takes to complete a background check, according to a Sterling Talent Solutions survey. The average time added to the hiring process by a background check is 3.1-3.4 days, according to Glassdoor, but delays can make the time even longer. The most important suggestions here are to ensure that you’re using a quality provider that’s responsive to your needs, and to have efficient processes for ordering and evaluating background checks.

Schedule technical interviews quickly.

It can often take several days to more than a week to schedule technical interviews with internal technical interviewers. After all, if the interviewers are on the tech team, they may be overloaded with high-priority projects. But to reduce time to fill, it’s critical to make getting technical interviews scheduled quickly a priority internally, or to use freelance technical interviewers who can get candidates interviewed in less than one day.

Schedule traditional interviews quickly.

According to Glassdoor, phone interviews typically add 6.8 to 8.2 days to the hiring process, one-on-one interviews 4.1 to 5.3 days and group panel interviews 5.6 to 6.8 days. With technical interviews added on for tech roles, it’s easy to see why time to hire, while lower for some technical roles, is well above average for many other technical roles. The good news is prioritizing scheduling interviews more quickly can make a big difference in the length of your hiring process.

Make faster time to fill an organizational commitment.

Once you’ve set expectations for how long individual steps should take, the people responsible for the individual steps need to take responsibility for ensuring that the expectations are met far more often than not. Improving your time to hire requires organizational commitment, and that means that all team members involved need to be accountable for their timelines.

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