As your organization grows, optimizing your recruitment funnel becomes increasingly vital. For enterprises, a suboptimal recruitment pipeline translates to longer hiring times, higher costs, and the risk of bad hires. Thus, following a relevant guide for technical recruitment is crucial to acquire the best tech talent.
Filling tech roles is becoming more difficult , as these positions are highly skill-based, and the tech sector is suffering from an alarming skills gap.
Fortunately, enterprises can optimize their technical recruitment process and acquire quality talent. Optimizing your funnel involves strategic decision-making and access to the best tools, which are the key points that we’re about to discuss.
What is technical recruitment?
Technical recruitment involves sourcing, screening, and assessing tech candidates to find the best fit for a role. While some enterprises rely on external teams for hiring, a strategically designed recruitment strategy helps optimize hiring efforts with your in-house team.
Why should enterprises optimize their technical recruitment process?
Firstly, an optimal tech recruitment process minimizes the talent gap in a technical enterprise. Finding the best fit for a role translates into reduced losses, better teamwork, and more innovation opportunities for your enterprise.
Additionally, a solid recruitment pipeline saves company resources, by reducing the cost and time to hire. Organizations can then better allocate these resources to other departments in need. Plus, faster hiring times mean successful candidates can start working sooner.
A good hire saves enterprises from employee turnover losses. According to a resource, these losses are especially pronounced in the tech industry and can range up to 400% of the employee’s annual salary. So, it’s vital to have the right tech recruitment strategy from the get-go.
How should enterprises conduct technical recruitment?
Recruitment is a challenge in any field, but it’s especially pronounced in the tech industry. Optimizing your recruitment funnel takes time and strategic thinking, but it’s quite possible. Here are some guidelines to help you out.
Promote your company image
To attract the best talent, tech enterprises should project a work environment that candidates aspire to work in. This requires your company to be transparent. Research revealed that job seekers want organizations to be transparent about details on compensation packages and benefits.
Additionally, applicants want to know about a company’s mission, vision, values, and any basic information. Candidates are evaluating your enterprise as much as you’re evaluating them. They are looking trying to understand your company’s working environment to determine their fit. So, clearly projecting your organization’s image and work environment helps save your time and theirs.
Formulate a strategy
Understanding the position you’re filling, and its skill requirements is key to formulating an effective hiring strategy. To find the best candidates, you need to know what the role demands. For example, a software developer must have solid programming skills, and data analysts must be well-versed in data science.
After determining what to look for, the right recruitment tools can help evaluate your pool of applicants. Other points to consider for talent evaluation include the testing strategy, location, and scoring methods.
The next important step is talent sourcing. Employers must have an idea of where to look to make a suitable talent pool. Having an online presence and a social media recruitment strategy is often helpful for talent sourcing.
So, if there is a need, companies need to focus on this too. While strategizing, it’s vital to go with pre-planned budget allocation for recruitment. It saves companies from financial complications during recruitment.
Talent gaps are real, and tech employers should not limit themselves to short-term solutions. To make the right hiring decision, it’s vital to think long-term. For example, you might need a software developer to lead a team in the future. So, it’s better to have a candidate with some leadership and management qualities that can develop over time.
Determine recruitment needs
Before you start the search for candidates, first determine the job position’s recruitment needs. These may include details about the position, the candidate’s technical skill requirements, the specialization level, etc. Fully understanding your organization’s recruitment needs helps organize your recruitment calendar and related hiring strategies.
Analyzing recruitment needs also helps employers decide whether to train their existing employee pool or look for new recruits. For example, it might be beneficial on occasion to train and promote a mid-level software developer to lead your software development team. In other situations, however, hiring junior devs is more economical, such as for basic projects.
Define the package you’re offering
When it comes to ironing out the job details, it’s essential to be on the same page as the candidate. For example, if you’re hiring a candidate from a different location, discuss the working conditions, such as hybrid or remote options. More workers now feel that remote working improves their productivity, according to a source.
However, if the role is suited to remote working solutions, the job offer should include relocation packages. If an employee needs to move locations, it’s best to make an offer that compensates for relocation efforts.
Regarding remuneration and perks, be prepared to offer generous packages if you’re looking to acquire top talent. Remember, applicants are evaluating your organization, too, so you need to keep them interested. Otherwise, you risk losing the best candidates to your competition.
Craft a relevant job description
Designing a relevant, specific job description helps employers attract the best talent. Therefore, the job description should be tailored to the tech position’s skill, knowledge, and experience requirements.
Additionally, employers should cover details like salary, benefits, team structure, remote working options, contact information, etc. You can also focus on what makes the position particularly attractive.
Use a technical recruitment platform
Candidates can apply to multiple vacancies to increase their acceptance chances when looking for a job. Thus, longer hiring processes increase the chances of losing top talent to your competition. So, companies need to source the best talent quickly.
Tech enterprises use tech recruitment solutions to optimize the hiring processes. They also help you stay within your recruitment budget by trimming down hiring costs.
An estimate suggests that tech vacancies receive an average of 22.57 applications as of April 2020. This means that there are many candidates to assess for a vacancy. Tech recruitment platforms like WeCP (We Create Problems) streamline the hiring process by facilitating bulk assessments and remote interviews.
Additionally, platforms like WeCP boast comprehensive question repositories that help you generate custom tests in minutes. Furthermore, automated scoring and analysis help employers make data-driven decisions and guarantee quality hires.
Leverage a multi-stage evaluation strategy
A survey by the US Department of Labor suggests that the average cost of a bad hire is up to 30% of the annual employee earnings in that position. Additionally, employee turnover costs can be as high as 400% of the annual salary.
These statistics highlight the importance of hiring right the first time, which a multi-stage evaluation process helps guarantee. Furthermore, a multi-stage process is significantly less costly and resource-exhaustive than starting the entire recruitment process again.
Examples of multi-stage processes include pair programming exercises after the initial skill test to determine the cultural fit. Alternatively, you can use more challenging assessment tests that focus on specific technical skills like data analysis and problem-solving. In addition, some platforms allow you to create and conduct customizable tests for a multi-stage evaluation.
Conduct thorough background checks
After selecting the successful candidates, employers should move on towards background and reference checks. This is an optional part, depending on your company’s policies. However, it’s best to decide early on whether you’ll be adding background checks to the recruitment process or not, to avoid possible delays during recruitment.
Reference and background checking can be quite challenging, especially during the initial stages of the recruitment process when the viable talent pool is larger. However, towards the end of the recruitment process, background checks become more manageable. You can reach out to references and confirm the qualifications of successful candidates.
Invite top performers for a final interview
The last step in the recruitment pipeline is to invite top performers for a final interview. This final assessment helps verify applicants’ cultural fit and soft skills. Employers can also implore upon the candidates’ technical skills with focused technical recruitment interview questions, if necessary.
With the ongoing COVID pandemic, the recruitment landscape has changed significantly. According to a source, 70% of the US employers used virtual technology and remote interviewing platforms for at least half of their recruitments during the pandemic. This reflects on how remote interviewing is becoming the new normal.
Hire better - and faster - with WeCP
WeCP (We Create Problems) is the technical recruitment platform of choice for many leading enterprises. Our leading recruitment solution has helped employers reduce their time to hire by up to 90%, and eliminates unconscious biases from the hiring process entirely.
WeCP is an all-in-one recruitment solution, with skill tests to vet candidates and remote interviewing features to conduct a final evaluation. Employers can use the platform to design custom tests in minutes, with the help of WeCP’s question bank with over a 0.2million skill-based questions.
The recruitment solution evaluates candidates on 12+ performance metrics, including the accuracy of answers, focus, prioritization, accuracy, and more.
Start hiring better with WeCP (We Create Problems). Schedule a demo with us today to start optimizing your recruitment funnel.