Hiring the Best Tech Talent: 5 Helpful Tips

Solid candidates continue to have multiple options, making hiring harder and more expensive for organizations. You can use this challenge to your advantage.

With a resource shortage, many businesses do not have the skill or capacity to hire well. The following 5 tips will help you evaluate your current recruiting process and look at how you can provide an exceptional experience that will win your candidates over- and set you apart from your competition.

1. Be organized.

It may sound obvious, but taking the time to organize your team and the hiring process is important. It will reduce confusion, save time, and keep your candidates and staff from getting frustrated.

The first step to organizing your hiring is to keep a current list of your open positions and know the details. Each open position should have a relevant and focused job description, available internally and for candidates to review. A good job description will contain why the job is important, unique or different.

Once the open positions are available and maintained in a central repository, the next step is defining and documenting your hiring process. What is the journey of a candidate from start to finish? Who from your organization will participate, what is their role, and what is communicated to the candidate at each step?

2. Be prepared.

To truly be prepared for an interview, you need to spend the time to do your homework prior to the interview. The first step is to read the resume from the bottom up so you can understand the story of this person’s career.

Then, you should look at the candidate’s LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles to see what you can learn about them. If you have a shared LinkedIn connection, reach out to learn more about the experiences others have had with your candidate.

Once the interview is over, commit to providing immediate feedback. You can do this by scheduling an internal debrief that day to gather input from the team. Based on the consensus, contact the candidate by phone or email to keep them informed.

Do everything you can to avoid leaving the candidate hanging. Even when a decision has not been made, or the answer is no, you have an opportunity to provide a positive experience by keeping the candidate well informed. Remember, candidates can both hurt and help your reputation.

3. Change your attitude.

When you first talk to a candidate, find ways to be welcoming; introduce yourself, give them an overview of your process, and let them know what they can expect. Too many times interviews start by grilling the candidate, or immediately throwing a test at them.

What does this communicate about your company and the type of environment the candidate can expect going forward? The candidate is not your adversary. They are not an inconvenience or undeserving of your time. They are your future.

Creating an exceptional experience for your candidates is good business sense. If a candidate is defensive or nervous, you will not be able to clearly evaluate their attitude, aptitude, professionalism, and experience.

By creating a warm and welcoming environment, and allowing a candidate to relax, you will gain a better understanding of who they are and what they have to offer. Beyond evaluating the candidate, you want to take the opportunity to showcase your company in the best light. Even if this individual is not the right fit for you, they may know someone who is. The better the experience they had with you, the more likely they will pass on a good word.

4. Screen in, don’t screen out.

Whether you know it or not, based on your attitude, you are either screening in or screening out candidates. Screening out means conducting the interview in a way that seeks to find reasons that you should not hire the candidate.

When you have this mindset, you may ask questions too quickly dismiss the candidate and not take the time to get to know the individual and explore their positive traits and skills.

The opposite approach is screening in, where you remain open to the possibility that the candidate is a good fit, and ask exploratory questions with the aim of discovering the candidate’s unique and valuable capabilities.

5. Hire a professional.

Outside recruiting agencies should continually maintain healthy pipelines of candidates and have established and professional screening processes, which can help improve the speed and quality of your search.

By looking at the strengths of your internal recruiting team, you can evaluate where they are best focused, and where you can use outside help. An outside recruiting agency can also help protect your reputation by taking the time to provide a better screening experience and by searching for candidates in places you can’t, or shouldn’t.

Hiring the Best Tech Talent

Offering a top-notch hiring experience is not overly complicated, but it does take focused action and an honest look at the approach and those conducting your interviewing process.

By taking the time to organize your hiring process, prepare for your interview, augment your team with professional help, and create an exceptional experience for your candidates, you will set yourself apart and have the edge in hiring the talent that your business needs.

If you’re looking for a recruiting team that won’t just hand you a stack of resumes, reach out to us! At SOLTECH, we know good tech talent, we know what it takes to build a successful development team, and we’d like to help you.