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TechHR

Great tools that will help you find the perfect tech candidate for your business 

By Gurvinder Singh, TechRank 

When you need to recruit a new technical person to the team, there are huge numbers of technical recruitment companies out there. All of them will promise to find you the perfect candidate for the position you are looking to fill. But can they really deliver? How do you choose between the candidates they offer you?

Having spent many years recruiting tech candidates, I’ve pulled together a series of tools that have helped recruit the right tech person for the right tech job. These tools will help you find your perfect candidate.

Writing the Perfect Job Description and Advert

Finding that perfect candidate starts with an accurate job description and a great advert. They are the first points of contact you have with any candidate and if you want to get the best people excited, you have to have a great job description and an enticing ad

  1. Hemingway App

Designed to help you write clear and concise content. It will help you cut out needless words and highlight overly complex sentences that can be shortened or simplified.

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

  1. Grammarly

When you need to spellcheck and to ensure your grammar is spot on, Grammarly will ensure your writing is up to standard.

https://www.grammarly.com/

  1. Visuwords

A thesaurus that automatically offers you alternatives and will keep you from using the same words repeatedly in sentences or paragraphs.

https://visuwords.com/

Using Job Aggregators

Job aggregation sites gather together jobs from across multiple job boards, careers sites and vacancies pages to provide candidates with a huge range of vacancies that they will find interesting and be suitable for. They are often described as “Google for jobs”.

Posting your vacancy onto a site, such as Indeed.co.uk will significantly improve your chances of your role being found by great candidates who are looking for their next challenge.

LinkedIn

The perfect candidate to fill your tech role may not be actively looking for a new role right now. With over 575 million profiles, LinkedIn offers you an almost infinite buffet of people to pick from. Of these profiles 260 million are active at least once a month and 40% of those use LinkedIn at least weekly.

Of course, LinkedIn was originally built for the recruitment industry. The idea was that the level of detail people put into their profiles, including job titles, experience and hobbies would allow recruitment firms to better select suitable candidates for roles they are filling. LinkedIn provides you with the opportunity both to advertise job vacancies and to proactively search for people with suitable skills and attributes.  The advertising function will put your advert in front of the people their algorithms identify as suitable, with increased frequency if they are deemed to be actively searching (i.e. they have clicked on job adverts recently).

The proactive search opportunity is going to be time-consuming for somebody within your team. Putting “tech” into the search bar and then filtering to the three tech-related industry sectors listed still lists over 1.99 million people who may be suitable. Luckily other filters, such as Country, Current Employer and by using Boolean search criteria, you can cut that number dramatically. If you pay for your membership, the number of search filters you have available to you increases to further reduce the list to manageable numbers.

“All” you need to do then is approach the candidates you would like to apply…

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

So, you have a list of candidates, how do you ensure you keep tabs on all the information you have about them, so you can make the right decision for your business?  This is where applicant tracking systems, such as Bullhorn, come to help you. https://www.bullhorn.com/products/applicant-tracking-system/

Think of applicant tracking systems as your recruitment CRM. Recruitment isn’t as simple as it may have been in the past. Legislation designed to protect both the candidates, and the company, has to be adhered to and you have to be able to justify decisions around this. Simple things like interview times and the notes from those conversations can all be recorded into an ATS. 

Applicant tracking systems will speed up the process and ensure you never miss a candidate or conversation with them. Some, including Bullhorn, integrate with LinkedIn to help with the activity we described above.

Video Interviewing Tools

Arranging face-to-face interviews with candidates isn’t always easy. Candidates are usually in another job, so it is difficult for them to come to you during working hours. With many jobs requiring multiple interviews for some people, arranging face time will elongate the process. When you’re looking to fill a role as soon as possible, delays are the last thing you want. If your business is one of the rapidly-growing number of remote only businesses, you may not even have an office for them to come to. And let’s face it, the coffee shop really doesn’t cut it!

Video interviewing tools mean you take away much of that delay.  Products such as VidCruiter, Breezy HR and Spark Hire allow you to book interview times, record the video (for playback later and to meet legislative demands) and even check references. All of which cuts costs, removes delays and makes everyone’s life just a little easier.

Imagine these as Skype with benefits.

https://vidcruiter.com/

https://breezy.hr/

https://www.sparkhire.com/

Recruitment Assessment Tools

When recruiting to fill a technical vacancy, it’s vital that the candidates have the core set of skills you are looking for. However, more and more organisations are looking at the “softer” skills and traits to help them choose the perfect person. Personality, judgement aptitude and cultural fit are all important. Just having the right technical skills does not guarantee they will be the right person for you. That’s where tools such as Saberr, Berke and Athena Assessment will help.

You may be better off finding someone who is the right fit and then training them to fill any gaps in their technical knowledge – as long as you know, in advance, where those technical gaps are. 

https://www.saberr.com/base

https://www.berkeassessment.com/features

http://www.athenaq.com/

Candidate Testing Tools

So, how do you assess their technical skills and identify any gaps? This is where candidate testing tools come in.  There are many variations available. Some are straightforward skills testers: do the candidates have the exact skills you need. Others take a slightly different approach, looking at the candidates’ abilities to think logically and laterally. Scenario testing, so to speak.

Having an accurate assessment of the skills your candidates really possess, as opposed to what they claim to be able to do, is key to making the right choice. Of course, there are also people who struggle to sell themselves (particularly tech staff) but have a really strong set of skills. Knowing this will stop them being disqualified from your application process. Check out tools like TechRank if you want to know what tech skills your candidate has – this will also help you see through a poor interview performance to the skill-set the candidate has. 

Gone are the days when you have to base a decision on a CV, an interview or two and the interviewer’s memory. Today there are plenty of tools available that will help ensure that you make the right decision for your business.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gurvinder Singh is the co-founder of TechRank. TechRank sources, expertly tests and objectively ranks tech talent helping companies hire the best, and most capable person for the job. By testing candidates for the level of skill the position requires, businesses can make an objective decision about the person they hire to fill a vacant tech role. 

Web:  www.techrank.io

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techrank/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techrank.io/   

Gurvinder’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurvinder-singh/