Attracting and retaining a talented employee is one of the challenges of any large company, regardless of its line of business. Finding and retaining good talent is a challenge. However, the IT sphere faces unique obstacles, mainly because of the crazy pace of its development.
Technical recruiters are hired to solve these problems. These specialists make hiring employees more efficient and simplify it, and save the company a lot of time. In this article we will discuss IT recruitment, and what a recruiter should know in order not to get an amateur.
The role of the IT recruiter
For specific technical positions, the recruiter does what is called technical or IT recruiting. It consists of searching, selecting, and evaluating candidates according to the requirements of the position.
Given the speed of IT development, the shortage of personnel grows exponentially every year. The world does not have time to train specialists in the required volume. This creates competition for specialists among companies, so the latter is struggling to attract a specialist, not vice versa. On this basis, the recruiter must interest the applicant, not the other way around. Recruiters, therefore, use every possible trick to find and retain talented employees.
A good recruiter doesn’t have to have a background in code, but it does require a great understanding of the IT field.
Peculiarities of the work of a recruiter in IT
The IT recruiter deals with the full cycle of recruiting candidates: he starts with the search and first contact (sourcing), then moves on to assessment (conducting one or more interviews), then forms a final offer (offer) together with the hiring team and presents it to the candidate. If necessary, conducts negotiations.
This is a very complex role. It’s about understanding the industry and business in general, about sales and presentation, about evaluation skills, and about the fact that everyone needs to “talk” – both the hiring managers and the candidate.
In fact, there are only two most important skills a technical recruiter should have: developing soft skills (just like any human resources professional) and being technically savvy. And technical knowledge does not necessarily imply specialized education, the recruiter can even be a humanitarian, just well-versed in the subject. And now a little more detail.
Soft skills
The ability to show the value of an offer. As mentioned above, it’s not the employee looking for the company, but the company looking for the employee. This requires well-developed communication skills and knowledge of psychology to find the right arguments.
Technical knowledge
An IT recruiter should have a broad knowledge of software development, a command of specialized vocabulary, and a general understanding of the field. Without this, the hiring manager simply can’t really assess a candidate’s competence, skills, and experience. A technical recruiter should be able to speak the same language as an IT professional. A recruiter who has a good understanding of IT is more likely to be able to gain a candidate’s trust and attract them.
What is important for recruitment in the IT field
- Marketing tools
- Automation
- Company value
- Not just a resume
- Good interviewing
You are probably very aware of how quickly the technology industry has grown. Finding, evaluating, and retaining the best tech talent is extremely difficult and expensive, but still possible. Let’s take a closer look at how IT staffing is selected.
Marketing tools
Today, recruitment is all about marketing. To find the best IT professionals, you have to look at the task from a marketing perspective:
- Where can you find a candidate?
- What is the candidate interested in?
- How do you make an offer valuable to him or her?
Recruiters who are experienced process the data, then look for answers to questions and combine and apply different marketing tactics to attract new talent.
Facebook Insights and Google Analytics are some of the technical tools for recruiters.
Google Analytics can be used to analyze metrics such as job seeker behavior on your site. How potential employees are searching for your company, determines the keywords of their queries. Add them to the job description and the offer.
Automate
If you don’t automate repetitive recruiting tasks, you’re wasting valuable time and resources. You can use technology to speed up recruitment by automating resume screening, candidate database searches, external database reviews, responses to standard candidate queries, technical assessment campaigns, social media interactions, etc. By automating some processes, time and energy are freed up for tasks that have a higher value to the company.
Company values
In fact, company values are important to developers. Technical candidates want to join companies with a soul. It’s no longer effective to post standard job offers without providing information about what it means to be part of a team at your company. Give candidates a real sense of your company’s culture. Help them visualize what working for you looks like. Company culture and values can be valuable tools for attracting candidates.
Not just resumes.
Technical recruiters are well aware of the fact that you can’t focus on one resume to evaluate and compare real technical skills when selecting a candidate. Technical recruiters turn to specialized online testing platforms (e.g., Codility) to evaluate candidates on specific IT skill sets and programming knowledge
For a successful selection process, make sure to test against the exact mix of knowledge and abilities needed for a particular position. This helps to objectively assess skills and reduce bias.
The importance of interviewing
Interviewing is an important part of the hiring process. You should make sure that the interview uses relevant questions and topics for discussion. Outdated interviews frustrate and irritate developers. To avoid irrelevant interviews and awkward questions, it’s worth considering including people in the same or related positions as the open position in the interview question creation process. Simply put, your company’s technical people.
Total
In conclusion, finding a worthy candidate for the position you want is not a simple and time-consuming process. It requires a lot of time and knowledge of other industries. Therefore, this work can be entrusted to an experienced recruiting agency. The Alcor team will help you save your time and energy on finding candidates worthy of your positions.
