| If you don't know the difference between C# and VB.NET, how can you recruit new staff for your company's burgeoning .NET initiatives? And even if you discover the answer, can you distinguish between candidates who really have the expertise you need and those who are simply good at slinging technical jargon?
HR professionals charged with recruiting technical staff face a host of challenges. They must find candidates, wade through detailed, acronym-laden resumes to extract meaningful information, and during interviews, decipher what may sound like a foreign language. What's a recruiter to do?
In a nutshell, technical recruiting demands the participation of both HR professionals and hiring managers/technology experts. Beginning with job requirements and continuing through the selection process, combining HR and hiring-manager expertise will yield the best results. Follow these tips to collaborate effectively and ultimately, choose the right candidate.
Define the Job Requirements
First, do your homework. The key to technical recruiting is understanding exactly how important the technical aspects are, what they need, what they can do without, and what they can train on. Establish the requirements of key stakeholders and manager before recruiting.
Screen for Technology Skills
Once job requirements are agreed on, you can perform initial resume reviews and candidate screens for the defined skill set. Use a checklist to verify skills and ask candidates to self-evaluate on their level of expertise and length of experience with each competency. Better still is to use a technology test to evaluate fundamental skills.
Interview for Performance and Cultural Fit
Here's where the recruiter's expertise really adds value to the process. Every job is about so much more than technical skills and knowledge, so use the interview process to evaluate past performance and fit with the department's environment, work pace and company culture.
Behavior-based interviewing is an excellent tool for eliciting performance stories. When you ask candidates, "Tell me about a time when" or "Give me a specific example of" and encourage them to describe the complete Situation-Action-Result (SAR), you gain insights into core competencies, performance track records and areas of weakness as well as strength.
Delve beneath the technical activities to determine actual accomplishments, using pointed questions such as, "How many times have you been on a project where you actually released software?"
You are looking for "character, culture and chemistry." Partner with a technical recruiter to further evaluate candidates on technical and performance skills that characterize a quality hire.
Get Creative in Sourcing Candidates
Your online application system, resume-tracking software and job listings probably yield a good number of qualified candidates. But with growing demand for technology talent, these sources may not be enough.
A great recruiter will be able to profile and target passive candidates from a variety of resources:
- Specialized Web sites, including Monster, DICE, and non-meantream sites for hard-to-find talent.
- Professional associations.
- LinkedIN
- Their professional network.
- Nontraditional advertising sources
|