Stages of Tech Recruitment – Challenges & Best Practices

With evolving trends and the focus shifting on using technology to increase efficiency, tech recruiters are turning to job portals, tech forums, social media, building the company’s career page, hackathons, and passive candidate search through LinkedIn to source candidates.

Despite the availability of all these channels, more than 40% of companies face a challenge while sourcing quality tech candidates according to the Tech Hiring & Technology Adoption 2019 report.

Sourcing often requires tech recruiters to sell the brand name along with the position, benefits, and culture of the organization to the candidate. Here are some ways to help you source better:

• Start by creating a strong employer brand by leveraging digital media. Publicize work culture, quality of problems, learning opportunities, and engagement activities. Work in close collaboration with the marketing team. You can also create a tech blog for your company to engage the tech community.
• Tap into websites used primarily by the tech community like GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc., and use them as brand building channels.
• Explore innovative means of attracting and sourcing tech talent through conducting hackathons.
• Extend your search to potential passive candidates for a broader outreach.
• Launch a lucrative employee referral program to tap into the close-knit tech community and leverage it when the need arises. Referrals not only further retention but also encourage recommendation for the overall success of the tech hiring process.

Pre-screening entails shortlisting candidates from a pool of CVs, in accordance with the role at hand and the prerequisite competencies laid down by the organization.

Traditionally, pre-screening took up a lot of time, for recruiters had to sift through hundreds of CVs to shortlist candidates for the following stages. Not only was this exercise extremely time-intensive, but it also didn’t guarantee a thorough and scientific search.

• Sophisticated application tracking systems (ATS) have already made inroads into the hiring process, making the job of tech recruiters so much easier.
• The next step is to integrate your ATS with machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the process further. These technologies can be trained to screen resumes just like a human recruiter, based on a pool of data, with pre-decided consideration factors and other post-hire statistics.
• Tech recruiters should look for ATS that can be easily integrated, can serve as a one-stop-shop for all hiring needs including conducting assessments, interview scheduling, tracking applicants, all-in-one system, and can automate parts of the recruiting process that are time-consuming and repetitive.

82% of respondents don’t use any smart AI-based technologies to filter resumes and continue to rely on manual means for pre-screening the applications.

Investing in technology improves the quality of applicants and shortlisted candidates, optimizes the recruitment process for time and cost, and ensures a better experience for candidates. It also helps in combating unconscious bias and promotes inclusivity and diversity. It solves the time versus quality dilemma by sorting the good from the disqualified resumes in a fast and efficient manner, thereby significantly reducing the time spent by tech recruiters in going through every resume. AI helps recruiters analyze big data and put logical filters to target relevant candidates within a few clicks. Time-to-hire is a critical metric to measure the success of your recruitment, and the use of AI tools in the pre-screening process significantly expedites the shortlisting process and reduces the time-to-hire.

Trusted with the responsibility of organizational growth, the tech hiring process needs to leverage the best of technological tools that are easy to integrate and that tick all the boxes in the talent acquisition process.

No two companies have the same screening process, but it is primarily guided by the same principles of assessing a candidate on their fitment for the role as well as for the organization. For effective screening, it is important for businesses to have, first and foremost, a competency framework in place followed by a scientific method of screening using assessments and tools.

Competency Framework

Competency-based recruitment enables businesses to align their goals and visions at one place and create a culture of success. An outline of expectations regarding a candidate’s performance and behavior, competency frameworks make it easy to check boxes during the recruitment process, thereby maximizing the efficiency of each stage of recruitment.

88% of participating organizations implement competency frameworks for tech recruitment; the percentage goes up with organizational size – more than 90% of the larger organizations (with 500 employees or more) are successfully using a competency framework.

Adoption of competency frameworks impact the overall success rate of the recruitment process, as well as the key metrics that define it, namely time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, and rehiring rate.

Competency frameworks enable interviewers and assessors to carefully design questions and activities to assess a specific set of skills and traits. To make the screening process a success, it is important for all parties involved to lay out a well-defined competency framework based on which a transparent screening process should be executed. It is essential to know what competencies and skill sets are necessary for your business and then decide the right assessment for it.

Technical Assessments in Screening

Resumes can lie, interviews can be manipulated, but assessment tests provide evidence that the potential tech candidate can perform the job she/he is being hired for. It also gives candidates a closer look at the kind of work they will be doing daily. Screening assessments are also a great way to reduce human bias in the hiring process by basing the decision to hire solely on the candidate’s knowledge and skillset.

79% of organizations use technical assessments in one form or the other to screen tech candidates.

Behavioral Assessments in Screening

Behavioral or psychometric assessments help tech recruiters make successful hiring decisions through an objective overview of a candidate’s personality. Due to the volatile nature of work in this age of rapid digital transformation, psychometric assessments provide a safety valve for a candidate’s suitability.

Many organizations undermine the importance of behavioral fitment in a tech role. Digital transformation has made collaboration between teams extremely easy; no department works in silos in an organization in this day and age. While technical assessments ensure that you hire someone who can adequately perform the task at hand, finding the right fit for your company’s culture is the need of the digital world.

The last round before putting an offer on the table for the qualified tech candidate often involves one-on-one interaction with the candidate.

Interview Technology

While the concept of remote working is gaining acceptance, 58% of employers still prefer to hold in-person interviews.

However, high-tech companies are fast moving towards virtual video interviews, that contribute to 45% of overall interviews conducted, due to a widespread acceptance of the gig economy and steady globalization of teams. Virtual video interviews promote real-time collaboration for all parties involved and solve for time and location constraints, along with being cost-effective. Digital transformation requires organizations to scale up quickly, yet face-to-face interviews are not the most scalable model in this global world. Virtual video interviews allow organizations to hire the best of tech talent, sitting in any corner of the world, and leverage technology to achieve a global presence.

The entry of millennials and digital transformation are changing the landscape of tech recruitment. Video interview platforms with their stellar features are redefining the future of tech hiring.

• Video interviews could be one-way interviews, which are prerecorded to be sent to the employer, or two-way interviews, which are a live conversation between the candidate and employer through a webcam.
• Video interviews are location and time-agnostic (in case of one-way interviews), thus ensuring the convenience of the candidate as well as the recruiter.
• Video interviews with live code abilities and artificial intelligence to analyze facial expressions of candidates are the answer to long hiring processes. They remove geographical constraints and ensure you hire the best candidate suited to the position.

If you wish to know more about the current trends and challenges that plague the tech recruitment process today, download the Tech Hiring & Technology Adoption 2019 report and find out the best practices in technology adoption to overcome your challenges.