Research by Deloitte found that 68% of respondents reported that bias had a negative effect on their productivity, and 70% reported that experiencing bias negatively impacted their work engagement, while 84% said that bias affected their happiness, confidence and well-being. 

To reduce bias in recruitment, companies have turned to objective skills-based assessments to ensure a fair chance for all candidates. Even when companies use coding tests, however, technical recruiting is susceptible to bias and unfair practices that can hinder inclusive hiring.  

Here are some of the most common unconscious biases and how they can impact hiring at your company. 

What are Unconscious Biases? 

Unconscious or implicit biases are social and cultural beliefs about certain groups or individuals that exist outside of your conscious awareness. These biases are formed through an interaction of environment, media, life experiences and social relationships. They influence your attitude towards others and can cause you to form harmful assumptions about them. 

Since these biases are implicit, you have to actively look out for and address them. Some of the most common unconscious biases impacting hiring include: 

Gender and Race Bias – Unconscious racial or gender bias leads to unfair treatment of women and individuals from minority groups. 

Appearance and Age Bias – Hiring teams often characterize candidates based on their appearance, i.e., how they dress and age. For example, young professionals are considered to be lacking experience, while older professionals are considered outdated. 

Affinity Bias – A tendency to gravitate towards people like ‘us’ based on appearance, experiences, or beliefs. In hiring, affinity bias affects organizations trying to hire someone exactly like them. It is essential to recognize the importance of ‘culture add’ vs ‘culture fit’ here. Look for professionals who add value to your organization rather than those who simply ‘fit.’ 

Education Bias – Recruiters often prefer individuals from certain elite educational institutions. 

How Biases Impact Your Organization and Recruiting 

Due to specific skills requirements and fewer tech professionals, tech recruiters are limited to smaller candidate pools. Add to this the undue emphasis placed on formal educational qualifications, such as a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and you narrow the funnel even further.  

But formal education and work experiences are often available to a limited number of people and can cause recruiters to reject non-traditional applicants. Implicit biases also impact how you attract and review applicants from historically underrepresented groups.

For instance, research reveals that white people have higher top-of-the-funnel pass-through rates, while Black and Hispanic/Latinx talent have better pass-through rates during other stages. The finding indicates that top-of-the-funnel hiring practices like resume review are greatly impacted by unconscious biases. 

Unconscious gender and racial biases keep women and individuals that belong to minorities from receiving job offers, equitable pay and work satisfaction. As of 2021, the gender pay gap research finds that women earn only 82 cents per every dollar a man earns. 

So, how can you use objective coding assessments to overcome bias? 

How To Use Coding Tests to Eliminate Bias  

• Assessing Job-Relevant Skills

Assessing a candidate’s skills using validated coding assessments shows you how they will perform on the job. “Job relevant” means that the evaluation is associated with their prospective job role and responsibilities. Validated hiring assessments use different tasks to evaluate a candidate’s skills realistically. 

Relevant assessments also ensure that you are evaluating your candidates fairly and not based on arbitrary standards of what they ‘should’ know.  

For example, while hiring a mobile developer, you may want to give them a task to develop a mobile app. With a job-relevant task, the candidate also becomes acquainted with duties they will encounter during their work. 

• Recognize that Your Solution is Vulnerable to Bias 

When companies adopt coding assessments or other automated solutions, they may assume that their recruitment process is now free from bias. They often fail to validate their assessments or conduct adverse impact analyses to ensure fair practices. Many commonly-used coding tests can include discriminatory language that provides an unfair disadvantage to certain groups. 

But you must remember that just as humans are susceptible to biases, your technology solutions are prone to bias, too. Recognizing potential pitfalls of your hiring processes is essential to designing a fair hiring practice. 

Conclusion 

Bias in recruiting, especially in the tech industry, has caused businesses to reevaluate and improve their hiring practices. With the popularity of skill-based hiring, organizations have turned to objective coding assessments to overcome hiring bias. While coding assessments are great at widening the talent pool at the top of the funnel, assessments must be validated and analyzed for adverse impact to avoid introducing bias.

The post Can Coding Tests Help You Overcome Bias in Recruiting? appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

According to Jobvite’s survey, improving Quality of Hire over the next 12 months is the top priority of recruiters surveyed. 

In this article, we explore this crucial hiring metric, how it impacts your business, and what to do to improve it. 

What is Quality of Hire? 

Quality of Hire (QoH) is an important metric that indicates the value an employee adds to your organization. It also helps you examine the efficacy of your hiring process in finding, onboarding and retaining top talent. 

Companies typically measure a new hire’s performance during the first year to assess QoH. Measuring your new hire’s performance during the first year (or even earlier) provides insight into their contribution to your organization’s success.

Low QoH rates indicate low-quality hires with the potential to cost your organization a significant amount of money in the long run. On the other hand, a higher QoH leads to better performance, increased revenue and higher retention rates over time. 

Since various factors impact employee performance, companies use a combination of pre-hire and post-hire data and metrics like performance indicators, employee engagement and turnover to assess QoH.

Analyzing employee performance and engagement can help predict turnover, so you can proactively develop retention tactics for employees at the risk of quitting. You can also identify employees with higher engagement levels and productivity who are more likely to stay on. 

But measuring the quality of hire has its own set of complexities. 

Challenges in Measuring the Quality of Hire 

While measuring QoH is becoming popular, it is a complex metric to track. Metrics like employee engagement and cultural fit, crucial to QoH, may be subjective, difficult to quantify and differ across organizations. 

Without a universal formula or approach to measuring QoH, talent acquisition leaders struggle with optimizing talent. 

So, how can you measure the quality of hire? 

How To Calculate Quality of Hire 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to measuring the quality of hire. Quality and value are unique to all organizations, and they use a combination of different variables to determine value. The most common metrics organizations use include:

Pre-hire metrics include scores on skill assessments, time to hire, cost of hire and hiring budget and determine the candidate’s probability of being a quality hire. Tracking pre-hire metrics strengthens the hiring process to predict hiring quality precisely before onboarding a candidate. 

Performance Metrics – One of the most popular ways to measure QoH is via employee performance reviews, the success rate in achieving set goals or targets and assessing productivity and job fit. 

Employee Engagement and Satisfaction  – Employees who are satisfied and engaged with their work consistently perform better, resulting in improved business outcomes.  

Retention & Turnover –  Early turnover amongst new hires indicates that there are issues with your hiring process and organizational structure, leading to high turnover. Consequently, better QoH improves employee retention and vice versa – employees who stay long-term bring more value to the organization. 

A tried-and-tested formula is to quantify the variables and average them to get an average quality score for new hires. 

How to Improve Quality of Hire

Perfect Your Job Descriptions and Ads

A job ad is the candidate’s first interaction with your brand, and it is essential to get it right if you want to attract and retain talented candidates. Creating job ads with accurate and detailed job descriptions written by subject matter experts will provide a compelling overview of the job and increase your chances of reaching the right candidates. 

Unclear and vague job descriptions will confuse candidates, while on the other hand, job descriptions with unrealistic requirements may deter qualified candidates from applying.

Hiring managers will struggle to identify the candidates who fit the role, while candidates will fall short of your expectations without proper job role information. If you end up hiring an unsuitable candidate, it is an additional cost to your organization. 

Focus on listing specific objectives, tasks, duties and deliverables rather than simply stating required skills and qualifications. Providing candidates with a realistic picture of what the job will look like helps candidates feel prepared and motivated to pursue the role. 

This is especially true when hiring for technical positions where roles are distinctly defined. 

Validated Technical Screening and Assessments 

Skills-based assessments are fundamental to tech hiring as they offer insight into a candidate’s technical, programming and problem-solving skills. Technical screening and coding assessments have replaced traditional resume screenings, opening the recruitment funnel to diverse candidates and promoting skill-based hiring.

Assessing candidates for skill shifts the focus from pedigree to competency. With validated and research-backed screening tools, you can streamline the process, automate scoring and evaluation and ensure consistently higher performance from new employees.

These factors, including culture fit, personality and proficiency, impact the QoH of your candidates. 

Make Recruitment a Team Effort

Often recruiters have little information about the role they are hiring for. When hiring for technical positions, designing a specific job description and ads is crucial. Work with hiring managers, subject matter experts and Industrial-Organizational Psychologists trained in job analysis to define the job role and essential skills to look for. Then, craft a compelling job description to attract candidates. 

By collaborating with all stakeholders, you ensure that everyone understands the role and its demands. It also helps you define ‘quality’ and ‘value add’ for your candidates. Post-hire measuring performance and employee value will become easier with everyone on the same page about the hire. 

Assess Your Current QoH

Lastly, begin by first evaluating your current quality of hire. Use your organization recruiting data and employee performance to ascertain your current QoH. It will help you define important metrics for your organization and improve the process to ensure hiring quality.  

Conclusion 

Quality of Hire is an important and popular metric this year for organizations to assess the effectiveness of their new hires. But, it is a complex metric to track due to the subjective nature of the variables involved.

High QoH influences employee performance, retention and business revenue. You can improve your quality of hire by optimizing your job descriptions, using validated screening and assessments and collaborating with experts to understand hiring needs.

The post Understanding the Quality of Hire Metric in Tech, and 4 Ways of Improving It appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Owing to longer recruitment cycles, engineers often spend up to 40 hours per hire on recruitment activities. With one of the slowest hiring times, tech hiring teams work to optimize the workflow and boost productivity. Enter technical skills assessments: your answer to faster hiring and improved productivity. 

How to Optimize Workforce Productivity with Technical Skills Assessments 

Technical skills assessments help you not only hire faster, but also significantly improve your chances of diversifying your candidate pool and create a more inclusive workplace. Adopting a data-driven approach improves effectiveness and recruiting efficiency by identifying hiring bottlenecks and systematically refining your recruitment funnel. 

Here are a few ways you can optimize your team’s productivity with skills-based assessments:

• Improve Workflows with Better Task Delegation 

Between their core coding responsibilities, recruiter communication and additional hiring tasks, engineers get only 10 hours of ‘deep work.’  

Technical skills assessment tools integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to support dynamic candidate communication, scheduling and interviewing. These integrations help recruiting teams automate administrative tasks, saving valuable time for your team. 

Skills assessments also allow you to determine each candidate’s proficiency. When candidates are pre-screened with a skills assessment early in the recruiting process, engineers can save hundreds of hours they otherwise would have lost interviewing unqualified candidates. 

• Automate Interview Scheduling 

Recruiting teams spend a significant amount of time assessing and interviewing technical candidates. It requires recruiters to navigate through calendars of various candidates and interviewers and to facilitate a smooth experience for both parties. With remote hiring and hybrid work structures, setting up interviews is even more challenging. 

With automated interview scheduling, candidates can access their technical skills assessments and schedule interviews on the platform based on their availability. This saves the back and forth between the candidate and the interviewer or recruiter, speeding up the hiring process. Seamless integration with an ATS and scheduling platforms makes scheduling more accessible, even with panel interviews. When conducting multiple interviews with different panels, automated scheduling creates unique interview links and shares the correct link every time. 

• Improved Communication and Collaboration 

Organizations can maintain productivity when teams work collaboratively and communicate effectively. Ideally, technical assessment tools should promote communication within and between teams. For instance, your tool should allow admins to control sharing of assessments and results with specific people, so that those who shouldn’t see results will not be permitted to access them. With controlled access and permissions, you can also define roles for your team members. This helps you stay organized while maintaining a workflow best suited to your organizational context. 

The recruiting tools you use should also make it easier to communicate and collaborate with candidates. While hiring technical candidates, coding assessments are essential to understanding candidates’ abilities. With technical skills assessment platforms, sharing assessments with your candidates happens with the click of a button. Candidates can complete these assessments in their own time. Asynchronous assessments allow both candidates and recruiters to exercise better control of their time. 

During the advanced or the final hiring stages, technical assessment tools should support collaborative coding sessions within an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This helps you understand how candidates write, run and debug code in a realistic coding environment. 

• Tracking Your Metrics

It is difficult to assess efficacy without data, and you won’t know if your efforts are yielding intended results unless you track key metrics. Identifying key performance indicators (KPI) for your business helps you define your goals and observe change over time. 

Technical assessment tools often feature dashboards and data visualization capabilities that highlight key recruiting metrics. These help you track your progress in real time and reduce hiring time and cost. 

Learn More

A continuing engineering shortage and inability to meet recruiting demands require companies to optimize their  workforce to meet their business goals. Technical skills assessment tools help evaluate a candidate’s technical skills, automate administrative tasks, encourage collaborative workflows and allow for data-driven analysis of the recruiting funnel to enhance workforce productivity. 

The post Optimizing Workforce Productivity with Technical Skills Assessments: A How-To Guide appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

In this article, we dive into the challenges recruiters face with technical assessments and how they can leverage these solutions optimally to achieve better outcomes. 

What is a Technical Assessment?

Technical assessments help organizations measure candidates’ coding, collaboration and problem-solving skills. Recruiters use coding or technical assessments to understand a candidate’s job-relevant skills, allowing them to make data-driven and unbiased hiring decisions. With technical assessments, you can assess for the following types of skills: 

Core programming language skills such as code-writing skills, code quality and speed

General software development skills such as working with testing frameworks and version control 

Skills specific to the role such as mobile app development

Problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate on a team

You can create a more objective and fair hiring process with technical assessments, leveling the playing field for all candidates. Skills-based assessments ensure that your hiring process is compliant with the legal and regulatory guidelines. It also reduces your risk of using unintentionally discriminatory hiring practices.  

Although technical assessments are effective tools for hiring software engineers and developers, they are not without challenges for recruiters. 

Challenges in Creating Technical Assessments 

Designing the Perfect Assessment

A good technical assessment helps you accurately assess a candidate’s coding skills based on experience and knowledge. But a poorly constructed assessment will cause unqualified candidates to move to the next stage in the funnel or rule out talented candidates right at the beginning. Moreover, poorly-designed assessments can be riddled with bias and irrelevant questions, hampering your hiring decisions and ruining the candidate experience.  

Your company’s engineers are generally not trained to construct complex coding questions, and using publicly available coding assessments comes with another set of problems. 

Leaked Coding Questions and Plagiarism 

You might have faced this situation before when candidates submit a plagiarized solution. With the increasing use of coding assessments, instances of cheating and code plagiarism are also rising. 

When companies rely on their in-house engineers to create and maintain coding questions, those engineers quickly become burdened with managing leaked questions and rewriting assessments. 

Time-Consuming for Engineers

Managing a process prone to cheating, bias, and other inefficiencies is stressful and time-consuming for recruiters and engineers. Apart from the time it takes to hire and onboard a candidate, engineers may  spend hundreds of hours designing and redesigning candidate assessments. 

So, how can you conduct technical assessments the right way? 

Conducting Effective Technical Assessments

Tailor Your Process To the Role

You will be hiring for various roles and must adapt the process to meet your hiring needs. Here’s how you can design your technical assessments to evaluate different kinds of candidates. 

Start with the job description: This helps you narrow down the skill set based on role responsibilities and should be grounded in job analysis conducted by experts, such as IO Psychologists. Sharing the job description with your candidates will set the right expectations, making the process transparent. The job description should list essential or “must-have” skills. Be careful when listing additional “nice-to-have” skills, as these could discourage qualified candidates from applying. Once you have your list, you know which skills to assess and which coding assessments to use for every candidate. 

Design relevant assignments: Senior and junior candidates will need different assessments based on their experience and the role. Tasks that are too easy, irrelevant to the job role or unnecessarily long during the initial stages may cause qualified candidates to drop out of your hiring process. 

Assess Real-World Skills: When assessing candidates, focus on real-world skills, i.e., the ones they will use in their everyday work. Remember to keep validating and improving your hiring assessments. Work with your hiring manager and recruitment team to understand the specific skills to assess. 

Brush Up Your Techspeak

As a recruiter, you don’t need a computer science degree to hire engineers and developers. But if you want to hire the best ones, you need to know the fundamentals of the role you are hiring for. 

To create an accurate job description, you will need to understand the basic terminology surrounding daily tasks and responsibilities. For instance, if you don’t know the difference between a frontend and a backend developer, you will struggle to connect with the candidate. While interacting with candidates, basic technical fluency will enable you to understand their skills, ask the right questions to assess job fit and help decide the correct assessment to use.  

Invest in the Right Solution 

Manually building technical assessments is time-consuming and affects your productivity and workflow. On the other hand, pre-built technical screening tools streamline top-of-funnel candidate screening processes by directly evaluating candidates’ coding skills through a validated and predictive assessment tool. 

Technical assessment tools support data-driven decision making with the following benefits:

• • Streamline technical assessment and interviews
  • Save engineering time with a validated, leak-proof question library
  • Open candidate pool to more diverse candidates 
  • Reduce bias and increase diversity in hiring 
  • Spend time on qualified candidates only
  • Ensure excellent candidate experience 
  • Improve the quality of hire

How to choose the right technical assessment platform

A technical assessment tool will optimize candidate evaluation, saving your recruiting team time and resources. With online technical assessments, your hiring will move much faster as you eliminate manual work. 

There are many tech assessment solutions in the market, but choosing a solution depends on your hiring needs and goals. The solution should also be easy to implement and integrate with your existing tech stack. It should also have a comprehensive library of framework-based assessments and research-backed strategies for detecting and eliminating plagiarism.

The right solution will empower you to make better hiring decisions with reliable and structured technical assessments. 

Ready to Use Technical Assessments?

Assessments enable you to assess a candidate’s coding and problem-solving skills. For recruiters, conducting technical assessments can be a time-consuming process. With tech assessment and interviewing platforms, you can optimize this process.

The post The Recruiter’s Guide to Technical Assessments appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

For companies struggling to hire new talent (and especially technical talent), campus recruitment is a great place to start. Here’s how you can revamp your campus recruiting strategy for 2022. 

Succeeding with Campus Recruiting in 2022

Campus recruiting involves sourcing, assessing and hiring young talent for internships or entry-level positions. Companies should collaborate with universities to organize job fairs and meetings to connect with college students and recent graduates. 

Implement A Mobile-First Strategy

In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices generated 54.4 percent of global web traffic. With increasing mobile users, especially among younger generations, using a mobile-first strategy is a  promising way to reach candidates.

Candidates often feel frustrated due to a lack of communication during the hiring process. Waiting weeks or even months to hear back after an application is submitted is a common experience for candidates. The mobile-first approach allows you to stay connected to students and candidates alike and share: 

• • Application updates
  • Schedule interviews
  • New opportunities for graduates
  • Event alerts and invites

Transparency leads to better communication and coordination between recruiters and candidates. It also portrays a good company image, encouraging talented candidates to apply and accept the offer. Apart from communication, you can update your website to be mobile-friendly and develop dedicated landing pages to display opportunities for students and recent graduates. 

Develop Your Student Network  

Building a strong student network is essential for campus recruitment. A student network provides you visibility, and offering unique engagement opportunities throughout the academic year will help you attract new candidates.

Internships: Internships are great opportunities to get an idea about potential candidates’ working styles and abilities. During internships, you can assess the candidate-role fit by closely working with the student. It can function as a trial run to help you identify your next hire. 

Campus Ambassadors: Campus ambassadors represent your organization on the campus, acting as a point of contact between recruiters and students. They promote your employer brand and help get the word out about available career opportunities—on social media, for example. 

Workshops: New grads can struggle with demonstrating employable skills upon entering the job market. More practical software engineering skills, such as using a version control system, are sometimes overlooked in traditional educational settings. You can organize skill-development workshops for final-year students. 

Virtual/Hybrid Events: Companies organize job fairs, informal meeting sessions, career days and other events to reach more students. Traditionally these events were exclusively offline. Since the pandemic, hybrid events have become more popular. Virtual events are an opportunity to connect with prospective candidates regardless of geography. 

Leverage Social Media 

Social media can be highly effective in reaching the current tech-savvy and mobile-first generation. You can boost your employer brand using social media to showcase your company culture, share employee stories and highlight opportunities for college students and recent graduates. Using social media also naturally fits into a mobile-first strategy. 

New grads today are concerned about a company’s diversity, inclusion and mental health policies. Although you can have this information on your website, social media lends a more authentic voice to your brand. Using employee stories and testimonials, you can present real-life experiences.

You can also use social media to provide a glimpse into life at your organization. Sharing behind-the-scenes, everyday office photos and virtual office tours can help you curate your employer brand. 

Focus on Data and Insights

Recruitment strategies are becoming increasingly data-driven. Insights from different metrics enable you to determine your solution’s efficacy, troubleshoot problems and understand your return on investment. Similarly, campus recruiting will benefit from a data-driven approach. If you aren’t sure which metric to track, start with these: 

• • The total number of hires that came from each campus
  • The interview to offer ratio, i.e., how many candidates who were interviewed received an offer 
  • The offer acceptance rate
  • The retention rates of new hires

With these metrics, you will understand students’ interest in your company, what is (and is not) working, and how to change it. 

Optimize Your Application Process

Lengthy applications are time-consuming and lead to higher candidate dropouts from the hiring funnel. An application time of five minutes or less is ideal for campus recruiting and will encourage more applicants. On the other hand, screening and assessing hundreds of candidates is challenging. With hundreds of applications coming in, your team will burn out by the time you reach hiring decisions.

Campus recruitment is a large-scale event, and might feel chaotic at times. But fair assessments, including tech skill assessments, consistently show accurate results during recruitment. With the right tools, you can streamline the process and avoid confusion or bias.

Using an assessment or campus recruitment tool can help you optimize your hiring plan. CodeSignal’s University Recruiting solutions empower recruiters to streamline evaluations and identify the top 2–3% of software engineering talent with less time and resources.

Pre-Screen, a technical skills evaluation solution, is perfect for fast-paced, high-volume hiring like campus recruitment. To assess candidates, Pre-Screen utilizes over half a decade of machine learning to power skills evaluation frameworks aligned to key roles, such as early career talent.

Ready to Put Your Campus Recruiting Strategy in Motion?

Organizations frequently use campus recruiting to hire students and recent graduates into entry-level roles. To succeed with the current generation, you need unique strategies to attract, engage and retain college students. By adopting a mobile-first approach, organizing virtual/hybrid events and leveraging social media, you can attract new talent.

Lastly, improving the hiring process to optimize screening and assessments is essential in ensuring a smooth candidate experience. Learn more about how CodeSignal can help you level up your campus recruiting here.

The post How to Succeed with Campus Recruiting in 2022: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

In a recent survey, 75% of candidates said that positive candidate experience was a determining factor in their decision to accept the job. Although technical screenings lead to better hiring decisions, lengthy assessments can create a poor candidate experience. Adopting a candidate-driven approach for technical assessments enables you to focus on candidate experience during hiring.  

Why Are Technical Screening and Candidate Experience Inseparable? 

Candidate experience has evolved as a central part of technical screening and significantly affects your business. A positive candidate experience: 

Impacts Employer Brand

A negative candidate experience during the recruitment process directly influences your reputation as an employer. You not only lose your top talent, but candidates also become wary of referring others in their professional network to your business. Similarly, bad reviews of your hiring experience online (for example, on Glassdoor) will discourage candidates from applying for jobs at your organization. 

Consequently, following a positive recruiting experience, candidates are more likely to accept the job offer and give referrals to their network. 

Drives Return on Investment (ROI) 

A complex hiring process results in higher attrition rates, with candidates dropping out due to poor candidate experience. 

On the other hand, a positive candidate experience improves your conversion rates, quality of hire and employee engagement. By tracking your candidate experience metrics you can identify and address the problems in the process and curate a better experience. 

Encourages unsuccessful candidates to re-apply

Naturally, you will not hire the majority of the candidates that you interview. But, it’s important to ensure that each candidate has the same positive recruitment experience. How non-hires perceive your recruiting process will impact your employer brand. 

A positive candidate experience encourages unsuccessful candidates to re-apply when positions become available. So, regardless of the hiring decision, you build a robust talent pipeline which is helpful for future hiring. 

How Technical Screening Tools Can Support Candidate Experience

Streamlined and Efficient Assessment

Here’s the thing: developers have a lot of options and very little time. Top candidates are often inundated with offers and assessments from various interested companies. According to Greenhouse’s survey, 60% of job seekers are unimpressed by time-consuming hiring experiences and want more modern recruitment processes. 

Many tech candidates are often already employed. It’s unrealistic to expect them to complete “take-home” projects, especially at the beginning of the interview process. Complicated assignments requiring substantial time and commitment during the screening stages will drive your candidates away.  

A technical assessment solution optimizes your screening and testing by developing short and relevant assessments to share with your talent pipeline. Candidates can complete these assessments on their own time after receiving an invite. Once candidates have progressed through this stage of the recruiting funnel, you can start to request subsequent interviews, showing that you respect their time.

Effective Communication at Every Stage

Effective communication is the key to a great candidate experience. Sharing regular updates, changes in the process, and delays will help you avoid confusion and significantly improve the candidate experience. Explain your hiring process: tell your candidates what to expect and how they can prepare for it. When candidates have the correct information, they are comfortable and will perform better. 

However, with an influx of applications, it becomes nearly impossible to keep up with all candidates and send regular updates. More than 75% of candidates have been “ghosted” after an interview. Waiting for updates is frustrating, and without any feedback, candidates will move on to other opportunities. 

Technical screening solutions allow for automatic updates, helping candidates navigate the application process. Candidates also receive support and feedback to prepare for their assessments and interviews.  

Unbiased and Transparent Application Process

Companies’ commitments to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) remain important factors for applicants. A majority of 86% of candidates reported considering a company’s investment in DE&I when deciding to apply. 

Technical screening solutions reduce bias through the use of skills-based assessments. For example, CodeSignal Pre-Screen allows you to look beyond resumes and assess candidates based on their objective, job-relevant skills. By eliminating resumes from the process, you invite more diverse candidates. Additionally, checking coding tasks for discriminatory language  and clearly defined evaluation metrics makes the process more inclusive. 

Accounting for Recruiter Experience 

Developing an excellent candidate experience strategy requires considerable investment from recruiters, especially for technical roles. Manually scanning resumes, designing and assessing coding assignments and scheduling and conducting interviews is grueling for recruiting teams. When swamped with time-consuming administrative tasks, recruiters have little time for what truly matters in candidate experience: the personal relationship. 

Technical screening and assessment tools are beneficial for recruiters here. These free up recruiting teams to pursue essential projects, such as diversity initiatives. It also enables them to interact with candidates, spend time assessing culture fit and working style and enhance the overall candidate experience. 

Conclusion 

Candidates equate their candidate experience during the recruitment stage with the experience they can expect to have as an employee. A company that invests in the interview process and treats candidates well fares better than a company that is unresponsive or disorganized during the hiring process. So, good candidate experience is essential for any business. Positive candidate experience helps attract, engage, and retain new talent while boosting your employer brand.  

The post Technical Screening and the Candidate Experience: Why the Two Are Inseparable in 2022 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Finding qualified talent is hard enough, but given the current labor market dynamics, it is more challenging than ever before to fill technical roles. In an effort to broaden their talent pool, organizations are now looking at candidates from non-traditional backgrounds—candidates who may not have a four-year college degree in computer science.

The State of Software Engineers Report 2022 found that while 46% of software engineers have a computer science degree, 24% are self-taught, and 11% learned how to code through a bootcamp program. 

Hiring candidates from a diverse educational background means assessing for skills rather than pedigree or academic credentials. While this structural reset in the hiring approach had already begun to happen before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated it.

With a shortage in talent due to employees leaving their jobs to relocate, retire or care for sick relatives, more employers began to forgo degree requirements. The rise of skills assessment platforms has also made it easier for engineering organizations  to remove traditional barriers to entry in the field. 

While skills-based hiring strategies may differ from organization to organization, interview assessment fundamentals and best practices remain the same. 

Five Best Practices for Interviewing Software Engineers 

The fundamentals of interviewing are similar for tech and non-tech roles; however, when taking a skills-based approach, organizations can move beyond the resume and address larger business challenges like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), cost per hire and more. Here’s how you can make the most of your interview strategy for software engineers:

Ensure Everyone Gets a Fair and Inclusive Interview

With an increasing number of candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, ensuring an inclusive interview experience is key. You can achieve this by:

• • Offering skill-based screening – At the top of the hiring funnel, measure applicants’ skills directly—rather than relying on resumes—to decide which candidates should move forward. For developer roles, coding tests are used to screen candidates. 
  • Structuring your processes – Treat all candidates equally by asking them similar questions and using the same structured framework for each interview to ensure that questions are presented in the same order and format. 
  • Creating a diverse interview panel – A homogenous panel will add to the candidate’s discomfort and make your interview prone to bias. 

Technical interview and assessment platforms offer screening, testing and interviewing services that are skills-based and designed to reduce bias in the interview process. 

Assess Soft-Skills Too

Technical interview questions should always be relevant to the skills that the candidate will need to perform the job requirements. Avoid brain teasers and puzzles, and have the candidate write real code (rather than pseudocode) wherever possible.

Ask about programming skills, experience and problem-solving rather than credentials. Solutions like CodeSignal help you evaluate candidates’ technical or hard skills before committing to a hire. However, measuring a candidate’s soft skills is equally important. 

Soft-skills like communication, creativity, ability to work well with others and more are crucial to understanding if a candidate is a good fit for your organization or culture. The bottom line is, that hard skills cn be measured and certified, however, measuring soft-skills is a little more challenging. 

Here’s how you can frame a few questions to gauge your candidates’ soft-skills:

• • Communication: Assess candidates’ non-verbal behavior during the interview – a good question to ask engineers is how they respond to situational questions. Like, how did they improve a faulty/inefficient process in their team. Notice how they explain the situation, describe a model of behavior and ultimately outline an effective solution. 
  • Interpersonal skills: Ask projective questions – questions that prompt candidates to assess other people’s skills, capabilities, and approaches to problem-solving. This will help you understand if a candidate is able to think of their peers as a resource for achieving their own goals or source of knowledge and information. 
  • Learning abilities: High-performance teams all have one thing in common – the mindset and ability to constantly learn, unlearn and relearn. To assess a candidate for their learning abilities, previous work experience is a good place to start. Ask them to describe issues or challenges that they faced in their previous roles. Notice how they articulate episodes of where they had to comprehend new information – could be learning new skills or moving into a new project. 
  • Team play: This makes it into our list of highly-sought after soft-skills because collaboration is now the cornerstone for remote and hybrid teams. Ability to play well with others is often a defining trait for successful software teams. Ask how the candidate would address a team mate if  they couldn’t fulfill their duties in a timely and efficient manner. A response to this question will help you understand how they deal with people’s challenges and how empathetic they are.
  • Innovation and creative thinking:  Use a brainstorming approach to a real-life problem, give them a paper and a pen. Now, evaluate if a candidate can:
    • Propose new solutions as sit in the question?
    • Are the solutions applicable to real-world problems?
    • An ideal candidate will not only describe their ideas but also propose a way to realize them

Help Your Candidates Feel Comfortable

Interviews can be nerve-racking for candidates. To set a friendly tone for the conversation, you can begin by introducing the company, yourself and the role before asking them to speak. 

Remember, candidates have all had different life experiences and will have different communication styles. While interviewing them, ask them specific questions – some instead of asking them, “tell me something about yourself that’s not on the CV,” ask – “Tell me about a time when you…”

It’s natural for candidates to feel stressed or intimidated during interviews and anxiety might prevent them from giving thoughtful and informative responses. 

Focus on Fundamentals, Not Programming Language Specifics

In general, it’s a good idea to hire engineers for overall programming ability rather than language- or framework-specific knowledge. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, like if you want to hire a senior data architect who has worked on a system like yours in the past. However, especially for more junior-level roles, the details of specific technologies can be learned on the job. 

What’s harder to teach are the fundamentals that make someone a capable engineer, such as problem-solving skills, logical thinking and curiosity. Languages and technologies change over time (you don’t see too many COBOL engineers these days). But with a solid foundation, an engineer can keep growing and learning new skills over a long career in your organization. 

For these reasons, it’s best to avoid asking coding questions and challenges that are entirely specific to a certain language or technology. In many cases, it’s a good idea to ask candidates to use the language of their choice when writing, running and troubleshooting coding questions. This flexibility will make them feel more confident and increase their chances of performing at their best.   

Prioritize Candidate Experience 

Candidate experience is an important determinant of employment decisions. Job-seekers are likely to refuse job offers after a poor interview experience. A bad interview and hiring process also reflects poorly on your employer brand. Here are some ways to enhance your organization’s candidate experience:

• • Effective communication – Candidates hate being kept in the dark about the hiring process. A good candidate experience offers support throughout the entire process.
  • Asking for feedback (and implementing it) – Ask the candidates for input regarding their hiring experience and suggestions for improvement. 
  • Technology – Coding interviews require appropriate tools to code, compile and debug. Poor technology affects candidate performance and may even cause them to drop out. 

Prioritizing candidate experience, especially for hard-to-fill software engineer roles, is crucial to hiring talented candidates. 

Conclusion 

Interviews are the engine that drives hiring: they allow employers and candidates to meet and assess each other and lead to either positive or negative outcomes. The interview experience for technical roles in software engineering will determine the candidate’s employment decision.

Adopting interview best practices during technical screens and coding interviews enables you to onboard new talent. Creating an inclusive interview space with skills-based assessment, asking open-ended questions and prioritizing the candidate’s experience are vital best practices for interviewing software engineers. 

The post Five Best Practices for Interviewing Software Engineers appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Technical interview and assessment platforms assist in efficiently conducting pre-employment screenings for technical roles at scale.

Most technical assessment tools include screening tests, technical assessments or live interviews. Based on your company’s hiring needs, you can choose the suitable option: 

Pre-screens – these technical skills assessments are used instead of resumes to shortlist appropriate candidates and move them through the recruiting funnel. These are great for high-volume hiring, allowing recruiting teams to evaluate many candidates quickly and objectively. The tool automatically grades the coding assignments, providing a fair assessment and saving engineering time traditionally spent scrutinizing resumes. 

Technical Phone Screens are technical interviews to assess a candidate’s core competencies after entering the recruiting funnel. Company or vendor interviewers conduct these technical screenings, which are often time-consuming. 

Take-home Assignments – typically used during the later stages of the hiring process, candidates complete these coding projects on their own time and submit them for review. 

Live Interview and Coding Platforms –With an integrated development environment (IDE), you can determine how candidates write and run code, debug mistakes and understand their communication and problem-solving skills. Platforms for live coding interviews range from simple code editors to full-powered IDEs that simulate a local coding environment. These assessments are used during the technical or remote onsite interview stage once the candidate has completed the technical screening.  

How Technical Assessments Tools Optimize Your Hiring 

Coding assessment and interview tools are data-driven, objective and scalable, helping recruiters find the best developers and software engineers. Technical assessments can: 

Save Your Engineers’ Time 

Technical assessment vendors develop, validate and maintain the screening assessments, saving engineers from spending valuable time interviewing candidates and reviewing candidate solutions.    

Limit Hiring Bias

By adopting technical skills-based assessments, you open the hiring funnel to diverse and non-traditional candidates. 

Improve Quality of Hire 

Technical assessment tools improve hiring quality by enabling recruiters to find talented candidates during the initial stages. Tools like Pre-Screen assess candidates based on their skills rather than their resumes. 

Choosing a Technical Assessment Vendor

Technical assessment solutions are popular tools for all recruiting teams today. But with so many options in the market, how do you decide which one is the best for you? 

Determine Your Hiring Needs

The success of any solution depends on its ability to meet your requirements. Determining hiring needs will allow you to better assess potential vendors based on your specific requirements. Here are some questions to reflect upon during this process: 

• • What is the current size of your engineering team? How much are you expecting it to scale in the next 12 months?
  • What types of technical roles is your company hiring for? Which are the most challenging to recruit for?
  • What is the average time to fill your technical roles? Would your team benefit from reducing time-to-fill?
  • How much time does your engineering team spend preparing for, conducting and de-briefing technical phone screens? How much time do they spend doing the same for onsite interviews?
  • How much time does a recruiter typically spend screening candidates in your current process?

Identify Hiring Metric to Optimize

Optimizing the right metrics will allow you to measure the solution’s impact and calculate the return on investment. Some hiring metrics to consider while looking for vendors:

• • Time to fill – total time taken to hire a candidate
  • Onsite to offer – the percentage of onsite interviews leading to offers
  • Candidate volume – total number of candidates applying for the role
  • Quality of hire – candidate’s performance during the first year in the role
  • Candidate drop off – candidates voluntarily leave the recruitment process
  • Engineering time spent – number of hours engineers spend on recruiting work (resume screening, technical screenings, interviews)

What to Look for in a Technical Assessment Solution 

Once needs and technical metrics are defined, keeping a list of essential questions helps evaluate vendors. Here are the essential features to look for and questions to ask potential vendors: 

Languages and Framework Support

A tool must cover a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks to test for all coding roles like web developer, iOS or Android developer, data scientist, front-end or back-end and others. 

Certain roles require you to assess specific skills. For instance, for the role of an iOS developer, you need to check their experience with Swift. However, providing options to your candidates is helpful when evaluating general technical skills. You can determine candidate skills best in the language of their choice.  

Having a platform that supports more programming languages is crucial here. Consider asking your vendor:

• • What languages and framework does the tool support?
  • What kind of roles can you test for with this tool? 

Scoring and Reporting 

Establishing definite evaluation parameters and metrics ensures objectivity, significantly reducing bias in the hiring process. 

Coding assessment platforms should support auto-generated scores and reports with an in-depth analysis of the candidate’s code-writing and critical thinking skills. The coding score offers insight into the candidate’s proficiency and is predictive of the candidate’s performance in later rounds. 

Developer assessment tools should also offer a live interviewing tool to interact and code with candidates collaboratively. 

To identify the tool’s assessment and interview capabilities, here are a few questions to ask a vendor:

• • Are the assessments developed using skills evaluation frameworks? 
  • What are the evaluation metrics, and how are they determined?
  • How is the score determined?
  • Does the tool support live coding and interviewing?
  • Is it possible to conduct assessments at scale?

Integrations With Existing Systems and Ease of Implementation 

The best tools support applicant tracking system (ATS) integration to simplify your recruitment workflow. With this, recruiters can stay on the top of the applicant pipeline, send assessments, conduct interviews and view and share reports all within their ATS. 

Here are some questions to ask prospective vendors:

• • Does the tool integrate with your choice of ATS?
  • Does the tool allow you to invite applicants and receive results directly within the ATS?
  • How long does the integration take? 
  • Does the platform provide custom API access?
  • Is it possible to customize features and interact with candidates?
  • What do your customers have to say about the implementation?
  • What kind of support do you offer? 

Diversity and Inclusion 

Developing an inclusive culture is possible through technical skill assessments. While selecting an assessment tool, consider the following questions: 

• • How do you ensure your coding questions are unbiased? 
  • How do you ensure compliance with employment laws?
  • Do your assessments follow best practices from IO Psychology to validate assessments?
  • Do you routinely conduct adverse impact analyses? 

Are You Ready to Invest in a Technical Assessment Tool?

When you are ready to invest and have a list of vendors, a request for proposals (RFP) is effective to evaluate them according to your criteria objectively. Create a list of must-have and nice-to-have features based on your needs and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for an RFP. 

For example, if your company needs to rapidly scale your engineering team while minimizing engineering time spent on unqualified candidates; you might list the following requirements on your RFP:

• • Asynchronous technical assessments powered by validated skills evaluation frameworks
  • Demonstrated assessment reliability, fairness, and validity in line with applicable laws governing federal employment
  • Question library and assessments created using research-based best practices
  • Ongoing vendor support for new task creation and assessment maintenance
  • Specialized assessments for hiring front-end, back-end, full-stack, data and machine learning engineers (nice to have)

Download your customizable RFP template for selecting a technical assessment vendor as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet here, or Word document here. This RFP template includes:

• • 5 sections essential to any RFP for purchasing software
  • Recommended requirements for tech interview and assessment vendors
  • Customizable boilerplate language for each section

CodeSignal helps you hire the best technical talent by accurately measuring developer skills with their research-backed skills evaluation frameworks. To learn more, sign up for a free demo today. 

The post How to Choose a Technical Assessment & Interview Tool in 2022: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Deloitte’s survey highlights the major causes of employee burnout, including lack of support or recognition from leadership (31%), unrealistic deadlines or results expectations (30%) and consistently working long hours or on weekends (29%)

The risk of employee burnout is especially high at companies that have had to slow down or freeze their hiring— and, in some cases, lay off workers. During a hiring slowdown, employees may experience pressure to build products and deliver services at the same pace as before, but with a leaner team and tighter budget. Together, these factors can easily lead to burnout.

Staying the Course through Economic Downturns 

Rising inflation and subsequent higher interest rates in the first half of 2022 have led to what some journalists are calling “the great tech hiring slowdown.” Tech titans like Meta and DoorDash have slowed their headcount growth, and others (Cameo, Robinhood) have announced large-scale layoffs. While the unemployment rate for tech workers remains low, economic downturns can cause stress and panic among employees; these, in turn, can lead to overwork and burnout.

Your company’s ability to weather economic downturns depends on your employees’ ability to rise to the challenge— without burning out. So how can you manage this turbulent time while maintaining employee wellbeing and motivation? Let’s discuss strategies to prevent your engineering teams from burning out during an economic downturn. 

Preventing Burnout on Resource-Constrained Teams 

Empowering Your Employees with the Right Tech

Using the right technology is one of the best ways to combat stress resulting from repetitive manual tasks. Imagine being a recruiter and having to go through hundreds of applications to find a developer. It doesn’t make sense, especially when tools are available to make these tasks easier. Any administrative task that is repetitive and cumbersome can now be automated with the right set of tools. 

For instance, while hiring at scale for software engineering roles, a comprehensive technical interview and assessment platform like CodeSignal allows you to evaluate a high volume of candidates at the top of the funnel while reducing engineering hours spent conducting interviews—crucial for engineering teams who are under pressure to do more with less. 

Talent acquisition professionals and technical recruiters spend weeks sourcing, screening and assessing candidates. With a platform like CodeSignal, you can optimize the process by using pre-screen assessments and live technical interview solutions that use research-backed coding questions. This way, you only move forward the best candidates for later-stage interviews. 

Pre-Screen is a technical skills evaluation tool that helps you perform the top-of-the-funnel screening. It automatically evaluates the candidate’s submission and assigns them a Coding Score, a metric that allows you to understand the candidate’s level of skill objectively.  Codesignal Pre-Screen also records each session, allowing for easy sharing with the recruiting team.

Since the Coding Score is calculated using CodeSignal’s machine learning algorithm, you don’t need your engineers to score the assessment results manually. This also means the Coding Score is free from human bias, helping you avoid interviewer biases that often affect traditional hiring processes. This helps you achieve your team’s goals around diversity and inclusion. 

For hiring more experienced software engineers, CodeSignal also offers Tech Screen–-a technical phone screen replacement that gives time back to engineers while providing a white-glove candidate experience. And for virtual on-site interviews with your engineering teams, Interview is a powerful, all-in-one interviewing tool that includes an integrated, collaborative coding environment, HD audio, video calling, extensive language support and more.

A comprehensive tool like CodeSignal goes a long way toward optimizing your hiring process and setting up hiring teams to be successful after weathering a hiring slowdown. It takes over the administrative tasks, streamlines hiring processes and allows for more objective and data-driven decision-making.

Most importantly, it leaves time for the hiring managers and talent acquisition leaders to build relationships with candidates. Regardless of tech advancements in hiring, candidate interactions are crucial to securing a “yes” from top candidates These interactions help create rapport and understand the cultural fit of your candidates. 

Encourage Flexibility and Taking Breaks 

High-stress work situations are common during periods of economic uncertainty and can disrupt employees’ work-life balance, making it hard for them to relax and rest. Introducing flexibility in your work culture can help combat this. Allowing your employees more control over their schedule and work decisions can be empowering, and may motivate them to put their best foot forward.

Flexibility also allows employees to take a step back when work gets too much. Workflow automation technologies allow employees to work remotely and collaborate across teams without compromising quality. 

Similarly, encouraging your teams to rest will positively affect their mental health. When work pressure increases, it is easy to feel that staying overtime by an hour or two will help achieve the goals. However, that is not always the case.

Productivity takes a hit when employees go beyond the 40-hour mark. In addition, there is no glory in overworking or the constant hustle without taking breaks. Breaks are essential to helping employees do their best work.

Design Policies to Support Mental Health

The mental health impact of COVID-19 continues to influence the work lives of professionals across industries. Workplaces have had to update their policies to support the mental health of their employees. Support can be tangible—like investing in better tools, mental health days, paid vacation, childcare or eldercare support.. 

Employee assistance programs (EAPs) are designed to help employees deal with stress in their personal and professional lives. You can proactively address and eventually avoid burnout with an EAP. These also show your employees that mental health is a priority for your company and that support is available when needed. 

Conclusion

Economic downturns can quickly become toxic for employee morale if not managed appropriately and can trigger burnout amongst your teams. However, it is possible to manage and reduce burnout with technology. A comprehensive technical assessment tool like CodeSignal can streamline and optimize the tech hiring process. This helps reduce the burden on hiring managers and engineers, empowering teams to do more with less.

The post How to Prevent Burnout on Resource-Constrained Teams appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

When it comes to career advancement, 32% of women and 38% of workers from underrepresented racial groups do not believe they have the same advancement opportunities as their colleagues. In addition, only 25% of workers reported their leadership teams to be “very diverse.” 

The 2020 protests for racial justice prompted organizations to take a closer look at their workforce composition. Despite the economic fallout from the pandemic, the number of DEI-related job postings grew by over 120% between May and September of 2020.

A survey within this time period revealed that 91% of IT leaders said that DEI will be a priority in 2021. But by June 2021, only 45% of tech workers reported an increased focus on diversity and inclusion efforts at their organization. Similar trends continue in 2022 with 73% of respondents saying there were no Black leaders on their teams. 

The data is disheartening, to say the least. Fortunately, DEI is increasingly becoming a priority for job seekers and, in a candidate-driven market, this means organizations now believe they must make serious progress in their DEI efforts to snag top talent. 

Why Do Engineering Teams Need Diversity?

The short answer is that diverse teams consistently perform better. A 2019 Gartner study found that diverse teams are 12% more productive than homogenous teams. People from different backgrounds—including age, gender, race, ethnicity and cultures—bring diverse ideas and perspectives. Diverse teams also reduce bias by often adopting a multi-view approach to problems.

They  are uniquely adept at problem-solving, resulting in better decision-making and profitability.  

A diverse team also promotes an inclusive work culture and environment. When people feel included, they are more engaged and perform better. Lastly, diverse engineering teams build products that consumers can relate to more easily as they see their identities and cultures reflected in their interactions with the brand. This, in turn, fosters a virtuous cycle – enabling tech companies to design solutions and products that are universally accessible. 

So how do you start building a diverse engineering team?

4 Steps to Building a Diverse Engineering Team

Rethink Hiring Practices

Evaluating your hiring practice is the first step to building an inclusive team. Traditional hiring processes are rife with practices that promote stereotyping and unconscious bias. Here are a few ways to make your hiring process inclusive: 

• Inclusive Language – Whether in  job descriptions or within the company, it is crucial to consciously choose inclusive language. Oftentimes, bias is seated within language, discouraging talented candidates from underrepresented groups from applying. Adopting inclusive language allows you to reach a wider talent pool and highlights your commitment to providing equal opportunities. By using inclusive, gender-neutral language for job postings, you not only prioritize minorities but also challenge biases that are embedded in your hiring process. 
• Consistent Processes –  A consistent process ensures that all candidates receive the same treatment during recruitment. This might look like providing objective assessments and interviews for all candidates. However, consistency doesn’t mean rigid – offering candidates reasonable accommodations will ensure that it is accessible to all, e.g., closed captioning for those hard of hearing. 
• Hire for Skill –  A degree-based hiring approach disproportionately eliminates 76% of Black candidates and 83% of Latinos. In contrast, a skills-based approach overlooks the economic backgrounds and is fair to all applicants. You also open up your pipeline to non-traditional candidates when you hire for skills. By providing them with real-world situations, you can condition your candidates to perform better at their jobs. Similarly, during the interview, focus on the engineer’s roles and responsibilities over credentials. 
• Choose a Diverse Interview Panel – Regardless of how unbiased your interview panel is, if it’s homogenous, you run the risk of alienating candidates from underrepresented communities. 

Look Beyond Referrals – Source and Network Proactively 

The number of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in tech and engineering is remarkably low. According to the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission Bureau, Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people account for just 16% of the tech worker population, Asian 14% and women 25%.  

Diversity sourcing requires a deliberate and proactive attitude.  You need to look beyond traditional job boards, referrals and other social media communities.

Creating tailored Boolean search strings to target organizations for Black and Latinx tech talent like ColorStack, Code2040 and National Society of Black Engineers, groups for women like Women Who Code, LGBTQ groups like oSTEM and veteran groups like Vets Who Code will help you narrow your search on specifically underrepresented groups. Networking with historically black colleges and student unions can help, too. 

Minimize Bias with Skills Assessments

Traditional coding assessments or take-home assignments require input from hiring teams and engineers. This can allow bias to creep in and negatively impact a talented candidate’s application. With objective skills screening, you can greatly limit personal or unconscious bias from seeping in. Because skill assessments allow candidates to show what they can do, hiring teams can make unbiased hiring decisions.  

Objective assessments frequently tap into artificial intelligence (AI) and are relatively insulated from human bias. This means you don’t need engineers to assess your candidates’ assessments manually. CodeSignal’s technical assessment platform is ideal for assessing programming skills for developers in a realistic development environment that simulates what candidates will do on the job. CodeSignal’s objective skill evaluations are also validated and subject to regular adverse impact analysis to ensure they provide an unbiased measure of candidates’ skills. 

Foster a Diversity Culture: Retain Diverse Talent

Retaining candidates is crucial to building diverse teams in the long run. Fostering a culture of diversity and encouraging inclusive practices is critical. By centering the experiences of underrepresented groups while developing policies, you can create a workplace culture that is welcoming to all.

Ask your teams for feedback and incorporate it. Employees from underrepresented groups often feel unheard and undervalued within organizations. If you want your teams to thrive, listen to them. Also, provide opportunities for growth primarily aimed at underrepresented groups. With the demand for accessible tech, a diverse engineering team will significantly impact your market performance. 

Conclusion

The tech industry still has work to do to embrace a culture of diversity and inclusion. However, there are some promising trends and insights. Hiring diverse candidates, especially for technical and engineering roles, can be challenging. Focusing on sourcing from diverse candidate pools, adopting objective skills assessments and fostering an inclusive work environment can help organizations build diverse engineering teams that will stay on. 

The post Building a Diverse Engineering Team in 2022: The Beginner’s Guide appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in computer and information technology occupations is projected to grow 13 percent from 2020 to 2030. These occupations will likely add about 667,600 new jobs, growing faster than the average for all occupations. Demand for these workers will stem from greater emphasis on cloud computing, the collection and storage of big data and information security.

The recovering U.S job market and COVID-19 vaccines led to a sharp increase in the demand for technical recruiters last spring and is only rising. This year, the demand for tech recruiters exceeded pre-pandemic levels, with more than 1,700 job openings for tech recruiters added in January 2022 alone. Emsi Burning Glass, collecting data from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, found a 200% increase in job postings compared to January 2021 and a 135% in postings since January 2020. 

If you plan to add a technical recruiter to your team, read on to find out what technical recruiters do and what essential skills to look for when hiring them.

Why Do You Need a Technical Recruiter?

Non-technical recruiters adopt a generalist approach and hire for various positions based on the company’s needs. In comparison, technical recruiters hire for specialized positions in tech like developers, engineers, data analysts and tech operations. They are in charge of sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring for these positions. 

Unlike generalist recruiters, tech recruiters possess deep knowledge about these fields. Since these posts require full-time, specialized and experienced candidates, tech recruiters need in-depth understanding to converse with, assess and screen potential candidates.

Tech recruiters also work closely with hiring managers to understand business needs, identify the necessary tech skills and source candidates accordingly. Apart from that, they are responsible for designing the recruitment plan, writing job descriptions, marketing and attracting candidates. 

Based on your urgency and volume to hire, you can either hire an in-house technical recruiter or outsource to external technical recruiters or recruiting firms.

In-House Technical Recruiter – Having an in-house expert is essential if you frequently hire for technical roles. They are full-time employees of your organization and perform recruitment activities only for your organization. 

External Technical Recruiters are usually independent consultants or associated with recruitment firms. You can hire them based on your needs. However, they are not exclusive employees of your organization. 

While looking for technical recruiters, consider the following essential and desired skills.

The ‘Must-Have’ Skills of Technical Recruiters

Data-Driven Mindset

Recruiting has become more data-driven than ever before. Recruiters rely on hiring metrics and key performance indicators to inform their recruitment decisions. 

Technical recruitment differs from other recruitment due to its specialized nature and limited talent pool. Hiring software engineers is often a lengthy process, and technical recruiters use data from the hiring process to determine inconsistencies and deliver a better candidate experience.

Moreover, tech recruiters often use specific assessment and screening tools with candidates. These tools are AI-powered and provide feedback to candidates on their performance. Recruiters can also use data from these tools to enhance their hiring strategy and achieve their goals. 

While hiring a tech recruiter, check for familiarity with data analysis. Since data analysis is now embedded in various hiring tech stacks, candidates must have experience working with data. The candidate need not be an expert or a data scientist. But, it is crucial they can understand statistical results and put them into action. 

Technical Aptitude & Proficiency with Tech Tools

While not themselves in a “technical” role, technical recruiters should have a basic understanding of the technology and the industry they are hiring for. Having foundational knowledge about the industry, like key terms engineers use,  will enable them to identify qualified candidates. 

What makes a successful technical recruiter? According to DK Burnaby, Senior Talent Acquisition Leader on the Amazon Alexa team and President of Seattle Talent Acquisition Collaborative, “..a curious technical recruiter will go beyond simply matching candidates to positions. They will investigate more about the skills they are recruiting for. This means that they will understand how the position fits into the product. All too often, candidates are put off by bad technical recruiters who treat them as one-size-fits-all.”

Here are the top technical skills to look for: 

Know Your Tech Stack

A tech stack, or the technological infrastructure, differs for every organization. Your tech recruiter should be aware of the frameworks, applications, front and back end tools and the programming languages your engineering and data teams use. 

Although they do not need formal training in these tech applications, they will need to learn about them. Since tech recruiters deal with highly technical information, their average salaries are also higher. No, they will not be writing code. But they will interact with the candidates about the job roles, responsibilities and qualifications.

So if your tech recruiter doesn’t know the difference between Python and JavaScript and what they are used for, they will struggle to connect with and determine the right candidate for your organization. 

Technical Writing 

Technical recruiters are also responsible for writing the job descriptions and job ad copy for various platforms. They will also communicate with different stakeholders, and may write press releases or web and marketing content. The ability to clearly and precisely communicate complex information is a must for technical recruiters. 

While hiring, you should assess your candidates’ writing and communication skills. 

ATS, CRM & Microsoft Office Proficiency

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) makes the recruiter’s work easier and more efficient by screening and shortlisting the best applicants. Although many ATS’s are available in the market, they all work similarly. More holistic recruitment solutions are also making a segway into the market with advancing technology. For technical recruiters, if they have previous experience with an ATS, they will quickly get the hang of the one you use. 

Similarly, proficiency with Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) systems is an  essential skill for recruiters.  

Candidate Sourcing with Boolean

Technical recruiters are under pressure to attract and hire candidates for hard-to-fill tech roles successfully. The candidate pool is comparatively smaller, with talented candidates already employed and not looking for a change. It is often a ‘needle-in-a-haystack’ situation for technical recruiters. In such cases, Boolean searches can be beneficial. 

Boolean search saves you valuable time and helps optimize your preferred search engines to perform technical sourcing resourcefully and efficiently. When you use Boolean search strings, each search you perform is customized to meet your prerequisites. Moreover, Boolean search is a fantastic tool for discovering passive candidates. You are likely to miss them with the traditional sourcing methods.

Lastly, the Boolean search will also enable you to overcome bias and fulfill your organization’s diversity initiatives. With targeted Boolean search strings, you can more easily reach candidates belonging to historically underrepresented groups. 

Marketing and Branding Skills

In a candidate-driven market, recruitment is all about selling the job and your company to the candidates. So, technical recruiters will also perform employer branding activities, including content creation, developing an employer value proposition and telling your organization’s story to potential candidates.

Analytics from the recruitment campaigns will help tech recruiters understand:

• • The best channels for tech roles
  • Optimizing social media to increase reach
  • What kind of content works in attracting candidates
  • Find passive candidates who regularly engage with your content

Look for candidates with experience developing the right social profile and branding for technical roles. Social media, marketing and branding are all crucial skills in candidate sourcing.  

Interpersonal and Soft Skills

An excellent technical recruiter will have more than just technical skills; interpersonal and other soft skills are equally important. 

Technical recruiters often partake in networking and relationship-building activities. While hiring for specific roles, these professional networks can be game-changers. Relationship management is also necessary as they often work with different teams like marketing and sales. Moreover, interpersonal skills help tech recruiters nurture candidate relationships that can convert a candidate into a hire. 

Lastly, recruiters must possess skills like curiosity and openness to learning. Technology is rapidly evolving, and an openness to learning can help tech recruiters stay at the top of their game. When you are hiring technical recruiters, remember to consider these essential interpersonal skills. 

Conclusion

Rising recruitment in technical areas has led to increased demand for technical recruiters. While hiring technical recruiters, look for technical aptitude, familiarity with data analysis, a willingness to learn and marketing experience. In addition, don’t overlook interpersonal skills like networking and relationship management. 

The post Five Skills to Look for When Hiring Technical Recruiters appeared first on RecruitingDaily.