Tech recruitment by non-tech recruiters might sound intimidating to you, but it’s certainly not impossible. With the skills gap in tech and IT hitting new peaks, organizations are under even more pressure to optimize their technical recruitment funnels. This burden rests on the shoulders of recruiters and hiring managers, who are tasked with finding the best tech talent.
If you are a non-tech recruiter without much technical knowledge, it can be difficult for you to differentiate between candidates with strong technical skills and ones that lack those. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. We’ve put this guide together to help recruiters that aren’t particularly tech-savvy find the best tech talent.
Who is a tech recruiter?
A tech recruiter is the one who is responsible for end-to-end recruiting of tech talent in a company like a developer, programmer, tech architect, or analyst. A technical recruiter is responsible for sourcing, screening, filtering, extending offers, and facilitating interviews among the candidates and the hiring managers for tech roles.
In recent times when demand for technical talent is constantly increasing, a technical recruiter is invaluable. A technical recruiter is in the driving seat of the talent acquisition process. Roughly defined, he identifies, vets, and ensures that the hiring manager interviews only the ideal candidates.
A technical recruiter is also required to keep up with the changing technology trends, skill requirements, and spending time in developer communities.
Also Read: How to Become a Technical Recruiter: A Complete Guide
Is tech recruiting easy?
While it’s well known that all great recruiters don’t have to be great developers, it certainly gets challenging when you don’t know what questions to ask and how to assess technical competency. For this, smart recruiters use a recruiting tool that can customize technical questions as per your needs.
Do you need technical knowledge to be good at Tech-recruitment?
The short answer is – yes. Whether you have an IT background or not, having some basic technical knowledge is necessary to acquire the best tech talent.
However, while some basic understanding of tech is important, you don’t have to be a tech expert to hire well. Tech recruiters should arm themselves with enough tech knowledge to customize job descriptions and attract quality talent. Beyond this, there are talent evaluation methods available that do not require recruiters to be particularly tech-savvy.
For example, familiarity with technical jargon helps identify skills to look for in a recruit. While an employer does not need to know software development to hire a developer, understanding the different levels of software development helps identify whether your organization needs a junior, mid-level, or senior developer.
You can then design the recruiting funnel components to maximize the chances of finding the right candidate for the job. Thus, as a tech talent acquisition manager, your tech knowledge positively influences the tech hiring process.
How to effectively build your tech recruitment funnel
The tech recruitment funnel comprises all the elements of the tech recruitment process – everything from putting up a job description to hiring the candidates. It’s referred to as a ‘funnel’ because the goal is to streamline the talent acquisition process.
Suggested reading: What is a Recruitment Funnel?
Here’s how you can build a tech recruitment funnel and improve the recruiting metrics without being a tech expert.
1. Start by identifying your target audience
Identifying the right target audience is a key part of the recruitment process and dramatically influences the remainder of the funnel. Posting multiple ads on different channels isn’t a reliable way to attract the best tech talent – your advertisement may attract unfit candidates instead.
Figuring out your target audience helps tailor job marketing efforts to channels that offer the most value. For example, when hiring a junior-level software developer, fresh graduates from software engineering may qualify as a target audience. Thus, you can add different university job fairs to your list of talent acquisition pools.
Similarly, recruiters can quickly identify their target audience and find them through services like Google analytics and platforms like Github or Linkedin’s Recruiter app.
2. Design an evaluation and screening process
Before green-lighting the recruitment drive, it’s crucial to have a clear idea of how candidates will be evaluated. Experienced recruiters plan their evaluation strategy before they advertise the job vacancy, to prevent any delays following candidate applications.
For recruiters without much technical knowledge, evaluating candidates for their tech skills can be difficult. Even if you can come up with some relevant questions, you might not be in a strong position to judge the candidates’ responses adequately. This is where tech skill assessment platforms, like WeCP (We Create Problems), can help recruiters out.
Tools like WeCP help tech recruiters design custom assessment tests, and the platform automatically scores candidates and evaluates them across various performance metrics. Recruiters can conduct assessments based on categories such as skill, area of work, job type, and more.
3. Craft a job description to attract the best tech talent
A good job description significantly cuts down your recruitment efforts.
A vague job description may attract many applicants, but few of them will be the qualified talent you’re looking to hire. By crafting a job description using relevant terminology, recruiters can attract the best tech talent and discourage ill-suited candidates from applying. This improves the overall quality of your pool of applicants.
Thus, a relevant job description can go a long way to attract your organization’s ideal candidate. It’s also advised to keep the job description concise and to avoid the inclusion of any unnecessary information.
4. Screen your applicants and provide feedback
Technical skill assessment tests are a reliable way to evaluate candidates on their hard skills, and even their cultural fit to an extent. Since tech assessment tests are quantitative, candidates can be compared reliably on their scores and overall performance. For example, candidates with the highest cumulative scores should qualify for the next round of evaluation.
However, recruiters may need to evaluate candidates further to complete the screening process, such as for their soft skills or language proficiency. This is where interviewing proves helpful.
5. Invite successful candidates for an interview
After selecting candidates for the interview stage, the next step is to conduct the interview itself. While on-site interviews offer their own advantages, remote interviews facilitate more diversity in hiring and invite lower costs. With remote interviews, recruiters can conveniently assess candidates located far away.
A virtual interview also provides recruiters with the option to record the session, and evaluate candidates from a fresh perspective post-interview.
6. Make the offer
The final stage of the recruitment process is to hire the desired candidate. For that, you need to reach out to the candidate and make them an offer they can’t refuse.
A good offer should attract the candidate to join your team. A quality offer includes a fair financial package, a manageable workload, and clearly communicated expectations. The last point, especially, allows the candidate to thoroughly examine the offer and make an informed decision.
Streamline your tech hiring with the latest tech recruitment technology
Technical recruiting can be relatively more daunting than recruitment in other sectors. This is because tech has some of the most demanding skill requirements, and recruiters can’t risk hiring a candidate without the necessary skill set.
Employers can use recruitment technology to optimize tech hiring. These platforms help hiring managers streamline the recruitment process, through the use of skill assessment tests, data and analytics, and integrated remote interviewing functionalities.
Here are a few ways in which recruitment technology can optimize your recruitment funnel.
Generate custom tests in minutes
Leading tech recruitment solutions like WeCP (We Create Problems) help recruiters perfect the evaluation process with little effort. With WeCP, recruiters can create custom tech assessment tests in minutes to evaluate candidates for a variety of different roles. The platform boasts a repository of over 0.2million screening questions, and recruiters can customize tests with their own branding.
Skills like programming languages are a requirement for most tech-related jobs. However, programming language requirements for, say, a software developer and a software salesperson are pretty different. Intelligent tech recruitment platforms like WeCP understand this difference and cater to it. Recruiters can use recruitment platforms to generate skill-specific questions distribution for role-specific assessment tests.
Conduct hassle-free assessments at scale
Individually inviting candidates to take a test, and then having to conduct each test separately, is the perfect recipe for a nightmare. Thankfully, tech recruitment platforms are designed for scalability and allow recruiters to test and evaluate candidates in bulk. With WeCP, over one-hundred-thousand candidates can be evaluated simultaneously, with a guaranteed 100% uptime. WeCP scales seamlessly according to your hiring needs.
To conduct these tests at scale, upload your candidate list to invite applicants in for testing. WeCP allows you to control the test access and use developer-friendly IDE. With the tool’s AI video proctoring, question shuffle, and plagiarism test, you don’t need to worry about any cheating during the assessment tests.
Follow-up with remote interviews
Earlier, we discussed how interviews may be necessary to conduct a final evaluation of candidates. Platforms like WeCP include video interviewing technology and offer an integrated recruitment experience.
With WeCP, recruiters can avoid scheduling conflicts with automated interview scheduling features, and seamlessly conduct virtual interviews with the platform’s high-definition interview software. Video interviews help you assess candidates on their soft skills and make sure they’re a good cultural fit.
Utilize quality performance reports to evaluate candidates
Optimizing the recruitment funnel requires access to relevant data and analytics, empowering recruiters to make data-driven decisions. WeCP scores candidates based on their skill assessment test results using more than twelve performance metrics.
This includes the total time taken to complete the assessment, the individual times for different problems, the accuracy of the answers, and the chances of guesstimates. Furthermore, the platform quantifies a candidate’s focus during the test and their approach to different problems.
Conclusion
To become a great tech recruiter, you don’t need to have an abundance of tech knowledge. By following the guidelines we shared, and perhaps using a tech recruitment platform, streamlining your recruitment funnel is quite possible.
If you’re still a bit uncertain about tech recruitment, we’d be happy to help you out. You can schedule a demo with us to learn more about how WeCP (We Create Problems) fulfills all your recruitment needs.
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