If a technical recruiter got a dollar every time someone said, “technical talent hiring is so easy” they would be giving world billionaires a run for their money. That’s right, the life of a tech recruiter is far from predictable and nothing like any 9-5 job. Almost every day, many job openings for tech roles appear and the recruiters’ quest to hunt down the best candidates continue. Work-from-home in the post-pandemic era has widened the scope of recruitment and the pool of talent alike, creating intense competition like never before. Crafting a strategic technical recruitment process attracts the best talents and bends the odds in your favor.
The tech talent gap is one of the main reasons that prevent tech recruiters from fulfilling the demand of these job roles. In 2020, a ManpowerGroup survey reported a 63% tech talent shortage in Indian companies, which was at 54% in 2018. One of the direct causes of this gap is the quality of education in the country. The lack of practical training required to develop the skills needed for tech roles strengthens the gap further. Finding the right candidates is no easy feat. Hence, Technical recruiters need to develop the right process to ensure recruiting for technical talent takes place seamlessly.
Pre-requisites of any Technical Recruitment Process
Identifying the hiring needs
Tech recruiters have to be proactive and identify the purpose of the vacant job role. For example, knowing that there is a need for a UX designer is not enough. They also need to know why is there a need for a UX designer and a roadmap for this role in the next 2-3 years. The best way to find that out is to communicate regularly with the Hiring Manager about specific hiring needs for their team. They can clarify how new tech talents will help the existing workforce and meet the team and organizational goals.
Creating an irresistible employer brand
A major roadblock for candidates during their job hunt is not knowing the company and what it is like to work for them. A favorable employer brand strategy attracts twice as many applicants as one which is reliable and/or trustworthy. According to a LinkedIn report, 75% of candidates check the employer’s brand before even applying for the job role. And, 52% of the candidates first visit the brand website and then their social media platforms to learn about the company and its culture. A wholesome candidate experience during the technical recruitment process becomes the first impression of a prospective candidate & employee. It raises the company’s competitive advantage and eases the recruiters’ job to pitch the USP of the company.
Irrespective of the size and budget of the company, employer branding works like a charm. One of the critical points of employer branding is to not focus too much on compensation. Talents are always on the lookout for prospects that offers them more than just monetary compensation. Propositions such as career development, job security, medical insurance, vacation time, work-life balance, employee recognition and more are a part of the narrative that recruiters have to pitch to give them an edge over others. That is why identifying and creating an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is the pathway to making your organization irresistible to top talents.
Writing a compelling job description
The job description underlines more than just the availability of the job. It highlights the duties and responsibilities the candidates would perform, the company’s cultural fit, and the possible remuneration they could expect. There are millions of jobs listed on various job boards and a compelling job description could be the difference between you and the rest. Especially, for technical talent hiring, this can be a critical step to stand out of the clutter already.
Indeed states that a practical job specification is concise and strikes a balance between the details of the job profile and the company. Their reports also show that brief job descriptions of 700-2000 characters receive 30% more responses from aspiring candidates. Keeping a check of all the details and not sounding mechanical can sometimes be a challenge. This Indeed guidelines on how to write a job description will help your hiring team stand out in the herd of job listings and attract the right applicants.
Designing a Technical Recruitment Process
Now that you know why you need to hire, and what are the requirements of the job you can move on to designing your technical recruitment process. Given the demand for tech talents, you must design a recruitment process that helps the hiring team gain enough details to make an informed decision and not lose a candidate to a long and tedious process. Top candidates are not on the market for long, which is why designing a minimalistic yet effective tech hiring process is essential.
A practical and streamlined technical recruitment process should include the following steps
Resume Parsing
Recruiters compare the applicants’ qualities against the job description and analyze their eligibility. It is a crucial step in filtering out unwanted candidates and narrowing them down to relevant applicants.
Consider asking yourself the following questions to pick the right candidates:
Do they meet the required qualifications, experience and skills criteria?
Where are they located?
Have they provided any references?
Is their work experience well explained and matches the job description?
Have they applied for any job roles in this organization earlier? Why were they not selected?
Although it is a crucial step of the hiring process, it is safe to say that this is also the step that gives technical recruiters nightmares. The Big Tech companies like Facebook META, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google receive over 2000 applications every day. Companies also have a database of resumes from previous tech recruitment campaigns. Manually going through each of them, filtering, extracting, and formatting data from various resume templates is tedious and time-consuming, to say the least. Here is how Applicant Tracking Systems like Webbtree Recroot can help recruiters filter top candidates through thousands of resumes and create an effective hiring process accordingly.
On-Call Candidate Screening
This screening process is often conducted by the HR department or the technical recruiters themselves. The purpose of this screening is to assess the potential candidate’s soft skills, gauge their interest, and check their availability for the job. This is also an opportunity for the recruiter to explain the company details and the on-the-job expectations of the candidate. The tech recruiter can put forth the employer value proposition here to make a compelling offer to the candidate.
These questions will help you assess the candidate’s interest
Did they have sufficient technical experience?
How many programming languages/technical tools have they used?
What were their responsibilities in the latest technical project?
Why did they leave/are leaving their previous company?
What are their expectations from the next job they take up?
Can they answer basic technical questions related to the job?
During the interview, tech recruiters must make sure they allow the candidates to clarify their doubts. The duration of the interview too must not go over 45 minutes or the decided time limit.
Hiring Manager Assessment
This step is either a voice/video interview process conducted by the hiring manager to explain the nitty-gritty of the job and gauge the technical talent of the candidate. Being a part of the on-field duties, the hiring manager is the best person to brief them about the day-to-day job requirement and familiarize them with the challenges and responsibilities of the job & can also serve as a screening process wrt to the technical skills of the candidate.
The hiring manager is also expected to describe the ongoing projects and how their skills would fit in with the existing team. This works as a motivator for the potential candidate to take up the offer because they can envision their contribution to the workforce.
Here are a few questions that will help the technical recruiter & the hiring manager evaluate the candidate:
Do they have the relevant experience & skills for the job?
How did they respond to the technical challenges of the job?
Were they willing to understand the nature of the job?
Were they excited about their job responsibilities & career path?
Did they ask relevant questions about the job?
The hiring manager ideally can make notes during the overall interview process and share the final feedback with the recruiters suggesting why or why not should the candidate be considered for the next round of assessments. Oftentimes, this step creates a roadblock for recruiters to receive a timely evaluation of the candidate. Webbtree Recroot’s easy feedback submission simplifies the process for the hiring manager to register their feedback within minutes.
Most candidates who make it to this round of assessment are rarely rejected unless they prove to be a misfit for the technicalities of the job roles. The assessment designed for this step should replicate the job roles the recruiting for technical positions candidates will be filling in the future, although the scope of the assessment would be much smaller than the on-the-job tasks.
Technical Recruiters must coordinate with the hiring managers to develop a holistic yet realistic base project for evaluation. For instance, in a coding test for website development, the candidate would get 45-60 mins for a 30 minutes task with a much narrow scope. Recruiters can also use technical skill screening software such as Codility/Code Signal/Qualified.io to set up base projects. These platforms are user-friendly with relevant coding tests and programming interviews to assess the candidates’ technical expertise. This hands-on experience gives both the hiring manager and the recruiter a fair understanding of whether they are ideal for the job.
Here’s a checklist of questions that will help us assess the performance beyond the scope of the technical assessment:
Did they understand the technical aspects of the test?
Did they ask relevant questions?
How innovative were their answers?
How long did it take to complete the test?
Do you see them fitting in the technical aspects of job requirements with this performance?
These questions will give the technical recruiter a better understanding of not only how they performed on tests & skills assessments. The candidates who make it through to this assessment are called in for a final interview at the workplace.
On-site Formal Interview
The purpose of this interview is to see if the candidate fits into the organizational culture. It helps avoid future surprises and familiarize the candidates with the team members. The candidates are also introduced to the senior management and the team leaders at this stage since it is the last opportunity for the employer to make its case as a hospitable and professional organization to work with.
Before you go ahead and hire, ask yourself the following questions:
Had they read up about the company?
Were they well-spoken with the team and senior management?
Were they genuine in their interest in the work?
Did they show ambition for growth and development?
Do they fit into your organization’s culture?
If you have satisfactory answers to these questions, congratulations, you have found your perfect candidate! This interview is often the last step of the tech recruiting process for most organizations.
The Big Tech companies follow up the formal interview for the selected candidate with the senior management for review and the compensation committee before making the final offer to the candidates. For others, the technical recruiters themselves reach out to the selected candidate with an offer letter for the job offer and finalize the joining date & onboarding process details for the candidate.
Conclusion
Recruiting for tech roles is no cakewalk, but building a straightforward & transparent technical recruitment process can help attract the top candidates you are looking for. Although every organization has a customized hiring process the ones that work the best often limit the procedure to 4-5 steps. Now you know which step will help you test the required skills you are seeking. So, go ahead- mix and match these steps and design a technical role recruiting process that works best for you. The rising demand, the tech talent gap, and relevant candidates with many offers reflect the need for tech recruiters to be one step ahead and proactively keep sourcing a pool of candidates for future vacant positions. But where can recruiters source these top tech talents? Good thing that we have covered this for you in our previous blog – 13 Sources That Can Make Talent Sourcing For Top Tech Roles A Cakewalk. There you go! You can now ace that technical recruitment campaign like a pro.
A 5-Step Foolproof Technical Recruitment Process to Hire the Perfect Tech Talent
If a technical recruiter got a dollar every time someone said, “technical talent hiring is so easy” they would be giving world billionaires a run for their money. That’s right, the life of a tech recruiter is far from predictable and nothing like any 9-5 job. Almost every day, many job openings for tech roles appear and the recruiters’ quest to hunt down the best candidates continue. Work-from-home in the post-pandemic era has widened the scope of recruitment and the pool of talent alike, creating intense competition like never before. Crafting a strategic technical recruitment process attracts the best talents and bends the odds in your favor.
The tech talent gap is one of the main reasons that prevent tech recruiters from fulfilling the demand of these job roles. In 2020, a ManpowerGroup survey reported a 63% tech talent shortage in Indian companies, which was at 54% in 2018. One of the direct causes of this gap is the quality of education in the country. The lack of practical training required to develop the skills needed for tech roles strengthens the gap further. Finding the right candidates is no easy feat. Hence, Technical recruiters need to develop the right process to ensure recruiting for technical talent takes place seamlessly.
Pre-requisites of any Technical Recruitment Process
Tech recruiters have to be proactive and identify the purpose of the vacant job role. For example, knowing that there is a need for a UX designer is not enough. They also need to know why is there a need for a UX designer and a roadmap for this role in the next 2-3 years. The best way to find that out is to communicate regularly with the Hiring Manager about specific hiring needs for their team. They can clarify how new tech talents will help the existing workforce and meet the team and organizational goals.
A major roadblock for candidates during their job hunt is not knowing the company and what it is like to work for them. A favorable employer brand strategy attracts twice as many applicants as one which is reliable and/or trustworthy. According to a LinkedIn report, 75% of candidates check the employer’s brand before even applying for the job role. And, 52% of the candidates first visit the brand website and then their social media platforms to learn about the company and its culture. A wholesome candidate experience during the technical recruitment process becomes the first impression of a prospective candidate & employee. It raises the company’s competitive advantage and eases the recruiters’ job to pitch the USP of the company.
Irrespective of the size and budget of the company, employer branding works like a charm. One of the critical points of employer branding is to not focus too much on compensation. Talents are always on the lookout for prospects that offers them more than just monetary compensation. Propositions such as career development, job security, medical insurance, vacation time, work-life balance, employee recognition and more are a part of the narrative that recruiters have to pitch to give them an edge over others. That is why identifying and creating an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is the pathway to making your organization irresistible to top talents.
The job description underlines more than just the availability of the job. It highlights the duties and responsibilities the candidates would perform, the company’s cultural fit, and the possible remuneration they could expect. There are millions of jobs listed on various job boards and a compelling job description could be the difference between you and the rest. Especially, for technical talent hiring, this can be a critical step to stand out of the clutter already.
Indeed states that a practical job specification is concise and strikes a balance between the details of the job profile and the company. Their reports also show that brief job descriptions of 700-2000 characters receive 30% more responses from aspiring candidates. Keeping a check of all the details and not sounding mechanical can sometimes be a challenge. This Indeed guidelines on how to write a job description will help your hiring team stand out in the herd of job listings and attract the right applicants.
Designing a Technical Recruitment Process
Now that you know why you need to hire, and what are the requirements of the job you can move on to designing your technical recruitment process. Given the demand for tech talents, you must design a recruitment process that helps the hiring team gain enough details to make an informed decision and not lose a candidate to a long and tedious process. Top candidates are not on the market for long, which is why designing a minimalistic yet effective tech hiring process is essential.
A practical and streamlined technical recruitment process should include the following steps
Recruiters compare the applicants’ qualities against the job description and analyze their eligibility. It is a crucial step in filtering out unwanted candidates and narrowing them down to relevant applicants.
Consider asking yourself the following questions to pick the right candidates:
Although it is a crucial step of the hiring process, it is safe to say that this is also the step that gives technical recruiters nightmares. The Big Tech companies like Facebook META, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google receive over 2000 applications every day. Companies also have a database of resumes from previous tech recruitment campaigns. Manually going through each of them, filtering, extracting, and formatting data from various resume templates is tedious and time-consuming, to say the least. Here is how Applicant Tracking Systems like Webbtree Recroot can help recruiters filter top candidates through thousands of resumes and create an effective hiring process accordingly.
This screening process is often conducted by the HR department or the technical recruiters themselves. The purpose of this screening is to assess the potential candidate’s soft skills, gauge their interest, and check their availability for the job. This is also an opportunity for the recruiter to explain the company details and the on-the-job expectations of the candidate. The tech recruiter can put forth the employer value proposition here to make a compelling offer to the candidate.
These questions will help you assess the candidate’s interest
During the interview, tech recruiters must make sure they allow the candidates to clarify their doubts. The duration of the interview too must not go over 45 minutes or the decided time limit.
This step is either a voice/video interview process conducted by the hiring manager to explain the nitty-gritty of the job and gauge the technical talent of the candidate. Being a part of the on-field duties, the hiring manager is the best person to brief them about the day-to-day job requirement and familiarize them with the challenges and responsibilities of the job & can also serve as a screening process wrt to the technical skills of the candidate.
The hiring manager is also expected to describe the ongoing projects and how their skills would fit in with the existing team. This works as a motivator for the potential candidate to take up the offer because they can envision their contribution to the workforce.
Here are a few questions that will help the technical recruiter & the hiring manager evaluate the candidate:
The hiring manager ideally can make notes during the overall interview process and share the final feedback with the recruiters suggesting why or why not should the candidate be considered for the next round of assessments. Oftentimes, this step creates a roadblock for recruiters to receive a timely evaluation of the candidate. Webbtree Recroot’s easy feedback submission simplifies the process for the hiring manager to register their feedback within minutes.
Most candidates who make it to this round of assessment are rarely rejected unless they prove to be a misfit for the technicalities of the job roles. The assessment designed for this step should replicate the job roles the recruiting for technical positions candidates will be filling in the future, although the scope of the assessment would be much smaller than the on-the-job tasks.
Technical Recruiters must coordinate with the hiring managers to develop a holistic yet realistic base project for evaluation. For instance, in a coding test for website development, the candidate would get 45-60 mins for a 30 minutes task with a much narrow scope. Recruiters can also use technical skill screening software such as Codility/Code Signal/Qualified.io to set up base projects. These platforms are user-friendly with relevant coding tests and programming interviews to assess the candidates’ technical expertise. This hands-on experience gives both the hiring manager and the recruiter a fair understanding of whether they are ideal for the job.
Here’s a checklist of questions that will help us assess the performance beyond the scope of the technical assessment:
These questions will give the technical recruiter a better understanding of not only how they performed on tests & skills assessments. The candidates who make it through to this assessment are called in for a final interview at the workplace.
The purpose of this interview is to see if the candidate fits into the organizational culture. It helps avoid future surprises and familiarize the candidates with the team members. The candidates are also introduced to the senior management and the team leaders at this stage since it is the last opportunity for the employer to make its case as a hospitable and professional organization to work with.
Before you go ahead and hire, ask yourself the following questions:
If you have satisfactory answers to these questions, congratulations, you have found your perfect candidate! This interview is often the last step of the tech recruiting process for most organizations.
The Big Tech companies follow up the formal interview for the selected candidate with the senior management for review and the compensation committee before making the final offer to the candidates. For others, the technical recruiters themselves reach out to the selected candidate with an offer letter for the job offer and finalize the joining date & onboarding process details for the candidate.
Conclusion
Recruiting for tech roles is no cakewalk, but building a straightforward & transparent technical recruitment process can help attract the top candidates you are looking for. Although every organization has a customized hiring process the ones that work the best often limit the procedure to 4-5 steps. Now you know which step will help you test the required skills you are seeking. So, go ahead- mix and match these steps and design a technical role recruiting process that works best for you.
The rising demand, the tech talent gap, and relevant candidates with many offers reflect the need for tech recruiters to be one step ahead and proactively keep sourcing a pool of candidates for future vacant positions. But where can recruiters source these top tech talents? Good thing that we have covered this for you in our previous blog – 13 Sources That Can Make Talent Sourcing For Top Tech Roles A Cakewalk. There you go! You can now ace that technical recruitment campaign like a pro.