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How is technical recruiting and recruiting coordination in tech different from other recruiting specialties? Hiring for these highly technical roles requires a unique array of skills and competencies that may not have been originally built into a traditional recruiting team.
At some startups or rapidly growing companies, there isn’t an immediate indication that a technical recruiter will need to be part of the team. Perhaps the Product and Engineering teams relied on recruiting from employee talent networks and grew organically to a certain point, or hiring for technical roles was outsourced to agencies.
In these situations there’s usually a point, generally coinciding with rapid growth, where recruiting teams take stock of how many technical roles they’ll have to fill. And it’s at that point they’ll wish they had an in-house technical recruiter.
Why do you need a technical recruiter?
Technical recruiters are held to a high standard. The candidates they bring to the hiring process must bring expertise, agility, and growth potential to the organization. At the core of the success of most engineering teams in tech, there is a culture built to support growth and innovation. Without strong high-caliber talent at the frontline of engineering and product innovation will suffer.
Ideally, even if the skills for technical recruiting don’t yet exist on your team, you have a plan to develop them and bring them in-house. The time to do this is prior to that big hiring push that will leave you (and your hiring managers!) tearing your hair out. Building a technical recruiting team or group within recruiting will ensure the right kind of qualified talent keeps moving through the hiring funnel.
An in-house technical recruiter will work to source candidates for open positions. Their deep tech knowledge of the processes and day-to-day responsibilities within those positions will help them to better understand which candidates will be the right fit for each specific technical role.
In some human resources departments, these same recruiters will help coordinate the actual interview process as well, while other organizations choose to divide these responsibilities. Regardless of whether the candidate being sourced is scheduled by the same recruiting professional, whoever is scheduling those interviews must also possess a deep understanding of technical roles, responsibilities, and skillsets to properly schedule the candidate through the interview process.
E-book: The ultimate guide to recruiting coordination
In lieu of having a technical recruiter on staff, some organizations resort to other options:
Outsourced technical recruiting agencies
There are some incredible options available when it comes to outsourcing. And for some organizations that have a low volume of technical roles that don’t need to be filled with absolute urgency outsourcing can be a good fit. Similarly, if you suddenly need to scale or support your team and don’t have the headcount or training to do so, outsourcing may be a good option.
For long-term scaling though, and sustainable growth in organizations that foresee high-volume technical hiring on a continuous basis, an in-house recruitment process is the way to go. Understanding workplace culture and infusing it into the candidate experience will ultimately lead to happier, more engaged hires.
No one technical team is built the same and ultimately you can’t expect to deliver a candidate experience as unique as your team and organization when you’re counting on outside professionals to do the job.
AI recruiting tools
Some AI tools that strive to bridge the gap between “recruiter” and “technical recruiter” by assisting with sourcing or narrowing the funnel. Our issue with them is well-outlined in this HBR article detailing how hiring algorithms can introduce bias: “These systems, which promise employers more efficient use of recruitment budgets, are often making highly superficial predictions: they predict not who will be successful in the role, but who is most likely to click on that job ad.”
Whether AI is assisting with sourcing or recruiting, AI predictive algorithms can reinforce gender or racial stereotypes without the hiring organization intending to promote them. When sourcing, they do this by predicting not who will be most successful in the promoted technical role, but instead predicting who is most likely to click on which job postings.
Later in the funnel, these tools may use algorithms to mimic “knockout questions” (to establish if candidates are minimally qualified), or provide predictions as to who will be successful in a particular role. The algorithms used to provide these services, however, are usually modeled to mimic past hiring decisions, and therefore create the same biased hiring patterns employers are often trying to get away from.
Enlisting other internal resources
Companies without devoted technical recruiters often start off hiring technical talent by leaning on existing teams to source and move candidates through the funnel. While your highly skilled talent may be well-suited to evaluate potential candidates, it’s a misuse of their time to involve them in the entire process.
Existing tech talent should be enlisted to help in two ways:
1. Spreading the word about new roles to their professional networks to enhance visibility to the roles. Hiring teams should also make sure to look within existing departments for key talent before looking for outward candidates. Internal recruiting can increase employee engagement and loyalty, not to mention save money and resources you’d otherwise use sourcing.
2. Interviewing candidates. Ensure that your existing talent is not overburdened by this task by making sure interviews are evenly distributed throughout your team and continuously training new interviewers to keep up with demand. In technical interviews in particular, where specific skillsets may require a highly specialized interviewer, it's essential to make sure you aren’t always asking the same set of employees to conduct interviews.
Our favorite solution for hiring top technical talent is building and maintaining your own rockstar technical recruiting team. There will always be incredibly talented technical recruiting pros you’d be lucky to add to your team. But many recruiters who already have a strong foundation in recruiting have the potential to become very successful in a more technical role as well.
Building a technical recruiting team
Starting from the ground up and building technical recruiting competencies is not an impossible task. The most successful recruiters we see thrive are those that balance deep analytical and interpersonal skills with superb time management and unbiased diverse hiring techniques.
Technical recruiters need to add onto that a deep knowledge of the entire tech industry landscape. They need to have a particular focus and knowledge around their own organizations’ unique technical space. What problems are the company and its technology solving? For whom?
If recruiting teams can find the time to immerse bright and engaged team members deep within the technical or product departments of the organization to lean in and learn the answers to these questions, a brilliant technical recruiter may emerge. On top of being steeped in the knowledge and technical terms needed to clearly define open roles, they’ll gain relationships with existing talent that will improve communication and provide real insight as to why the roles are open in the first place.
Deep dives into current events, competitors, and a capacity and willingness to be always on the pulse of news in the specific industry will go a long way towards informing understanding of the company’s unique niche.
With training, knowledge, and resources available, newly minted technical recruiters will be able to help your team prevent bad hires and promote only the best technical candidates to the organization for interviews.
Resources for technical recruiters
On top of training and research, there are resources that technical recruiters should keep in their back pocket as they start any new hiring push.
Job boards
In addition to leveraging your team’s networks, the following job boards cater specifically to hiring tech talent and will get your job descriptions exposure to the right candidates. Our favorites are below. Our friends from Recruiting Daily also wrote about where to find tech talent tools.
73+ million software developers are on this network used for recruiting and sourcing technical talent
Specifically created for startups to post jobs and source candidates for free
Provides funding for promising startups. Those chosen have access to post jobs on a curated list appealing to top talent
Required reading
Tech recruiting stories and resources from over 10k technologists
A massive collection of articles with best practices and tips you can filter by topic
Has a host of resources to stay abreast of what's happening in tech and resources available to streamline technical hiring
Technical assessment tools
Making sure a candidate can succeed at a technical assessment is a necessity. Filtering out candidates whose skills may not be a fit for the role or match their resume descriptions ensures only the best candidates are selected.
Technical assessments allow you to test candidates with coding exercises that are consistent with your team’s real workflow to test behavioral and technical skills. They provide customization and should integrate with your ATS so candidate information is reflected for your recruiting team.
Depending on the size of your company and the amount and variety of roles you’re hiring for the following solutions are our favorite options (and integration partners)!
CodeSignal has a hyper-realistic development environment and enterprise-level features available in solutions for both hyper-growth teams and university recruiting teams.
HackerRank has a variety of different plans and contains over 170 million data points on technical skill assessments, as well as 18 million developers in their community.
CoderPad allows for technical assessments in the candidate’s language of choice and has hosted more than 3 million technical interviews in 30+ languages
Long term hiring success
High turnover in technology and software engineering roles in particular demands innovative approaches to hiring to ensure not only a great candidate experience but also employee experience.
Once you’ve started managing tech recruiting at volume, be sure to keep track of your metrics. You’ll want to track time to hire, time to fill, and applicant drop-off rate. Sources for that data can largely be tracked within your own department and ATS.
In addition, take the time while setting up the foundation of your technical recruiting program to enable your team to report on the quality of hire during the new hire’s first years. This lets your team go beyond tracking just the first-year turnover rate. Understanding the context of why a candidate does or does not work out can help pinpoint areas for improvement in your hiring process.
Within your company’s technical departments, there is almost certainly a process in place for measuring productivity and employee performance. Set expectations that you’d like access to this data to track your technical hiring success.
Your talent development and employee engagement counterparts will be measuring productivity and employee contributions as well. A holistic view and understanding of the talent acquisition and development process will improve your hiring outcomes.
Lastly, always make sure to give your candidates an opportunity to provide feedback, and pay attention to it. Poor candidate experience spreads fast, particularly in tech, and can impede your ability to attract the right talent.
Behind every great technical department, there are great technical recruiters who coordinate and guide candidates through the hiring process.
Recruiting Week 2023: A virtual series for talent acquisition professionals
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