What You Need To Know About A Technical Recruiter

But, many of these recruiters face unnecessary roadblocks, which can sometimes be due to misalignment of business goals, miscommunication, or a lack of transparency.

In this article, we’ll dive into the life of a technical recruiter.

What Is A Technical Recruiter?

A technical recruiter handles sourcing, screening, scheduling interviews, and extending offers to candidates suited for tech roles. These include software engineering, data analysis, technical writers, etc.

Technical recruiters can also dabble in onboarding, employee communication, remuneration, business development, and other human resources responsibilities, including the following aspects:

• The size of an organization
• The specialization of the open roles
• The resources available for managing the process
• Technically assessing the candidate

Technical Recruiter Skills

Here are the most common skills exceptional technical recruiters and technology recruiters have:

• Strong interpersonal skills, networking skills, and verbal communication skills
• Negotiation skills and organizational skills
• Project management skills and technical skills
• Proven experience with technical recruiting and applicant tracking tools
• Technical knowledge of assessment techniques
• Critical thinking and flexibility
• Proven work experience with the tools and technologies that will be assessed
• Stakeholder management, business development, recruiter coaching, and interview development
• Ability to stay up to date on the latest tech industry standards
• Understanding of relevant labor laws and HR best practices
• Ability to maintain a database and pipeline of qualified candidates

There are also some stages that a technical recruiter must go through to improve the hiring and interview process. There are common daily duties and challenges for each of them:

1. Technical recruiting: Reach out to qualified applicants and encourage them to apply for a relevant role
2. Assessment: Invite the suitable candidate to a live technical assessment
3. Recommendation: You will reject or accept the candidate
4. On-site: Coordinate the final interview
5. The decision: Confirm the decision from the hiring manager and product manager
6. The offer: Make an offer to the candidate or provide feedback.

The Hiring Process

Technical Recruiting

Technical recruiters and technology recruiters embark on talent acquisition by reaching out to applicants based on the resources they have as well as the size the company is that they are recruiting for.

If a company is smaller, they spend countless hours internally going through the hiring process. But if they work with a recruiter, they will cut this time in half as they have referrals and social media contacts on hand that they can utilize to find a shortlist of suitable candidates.

Assessment

Once a candidate has been located, they then need to complete an assessment. However, some of them may choose to walk away from the recruitment process because:

• The technical assessment is too long
• The technical assessment can only be done during business hours
• The technical assessment is a code test that may feel impersonal or at risk of producing an inaccurate assessment of their skills

Technical recruiters can speed up the process, keep more exceptional candidates in the hiring funnel, and level the playing field by:

• Limiting the duration of the technical assessment to around 60 minutes (this gives each person enough time to go over the test, rework their answers, and ask any questions about the assessment)
• Providing a live technical assessment with a person who is an experienced interviewer
• Offering live technical assessments 24/7.

Once the assessment has been completed, the technical recruiter will let the hiring company know what the outcome was, as well as what their recommendation is.

Recommendation:

Most often, a company's decision about a candidate’s assessment will be a simple ‘pass’ or ‘fail’. But, this can make a technical recruiter’s job title more difficult when:

• The technical assessment is aligned to the wrong role or the wrong skill level
• The technical assessment is inconsistent and open to bias
• The technical assessment did not allow the candidate to receive guidance.

To combat these issues, technical recruiters should consider these approaches:

• Use a structured interview template to identify the relevant competencies linked to the role, and what success looks like in the technical assessment
• Select interviewers who want to conduct live technical assessments and develop a training process to establish interviewing best practices
• Use various categories of recommendations driven by the scoring template. This will show where exceptional candidates are close to meeting your hiring standards.

Another useful tip is recording the technical assessment so you can make more educated decisions about a candidate, as the entire hiring team can review the interview and assessment.

On-site

The technical hiring team and the people team will commence advanced interviews, like behavioral interviews, to ensure a candidate is the right fit for the company based on their abilities and attitude. But, as life goes, things don’t always go according to plan. Things like:

• Interviewers aren’t interested in interviewing candidates
• Interviewers aren’t sure what their role in the process is
• Interviewers aren’t equipped with relevant interview questions or the tools to conduct the interview.

A tech recruiter can address these challenges in three ways:

• Identifying candidates who are interested in interviewing in advance
• Clarifying everyone’s role in the process and which competencies they are looking for
• Building behavioral and technical interview questions in advance

The Decision

Recruiters may be leading the candidate through the process, but ultimately the technical hiring decision falls with the hiring team and the people team. These teams may work on the same task, but they may not understand how the final decision will be made.

When these components are missing:

• Technical recruiters are unable to identify the ‘right’ candidates early on
• Technology and technical talent acquisition leaders are unable to monitor hiring process performance (and see if underrepresented candidates are slipping through the cracks)
• Hiring teams disagree and are unable to come to a clear hiring decision

Consider the following three tools and approaches to align these teams and hire the right candidates more quickly:

• Create KPIs in line with the candidate assessment
• Clarify roles and responsibilities in the hiring team. A strong technical recruiter will ensure all team members know what they are looking for in the candidate and come to the final decision quicker.

It’s at this point where a recruiter will typically check the candidate’s references, work history, and past achievements. A background check may also be conducted, depending on the nature of the role.

The Offer

A technical recruiter will then share the final decision with the candidate. But, even at this stage, a candidate may not accept the role if they feel their expectations haven't been met. This can be avoided when you use a technical recruiter as a middleman or mediator.

In cases where the candidate has not been hired, the technical recruiter should provide constructive feedback to them. This is just so that the person on the other end knows what not to do in their future interviews. Plus, you never want to burn any bridge with a candidate, as a company may want to approach them again in the future.

This informative video breaks down some of the key steps you can expect to encounter during your recruitment process.

Choosing The Right Technical Recruiter

Most companies agree that a strong employee is worth at least three times their total compensation, making bad hires a costly mistake. This mistake can, however, be avoided if some work has gone into what a company is looking for in terms of its perfect technical recruiter.

Here’s a checklist to help you choose the right tech recruiter and set them up for success:

• Ask yourself what your ideal recruiter looks like. What experience do you want them to have? Should they be good with people? Should they be task driven? Or a mixture of both?
• Ask them about their knowledge base. Are there tools or best practices they use to determine what makes a good hire?
• Make sure you give the onboarding period enough time, as this can influence the impact your recruiter is going to have on your company’s success and culture.

The Benefits Of Working With A Technical Recruiter

When it comes to creating job boards and a job description for different opportunities, there’s no doubt that finding the right candidate can be hard work. And if you’ve been looking for the right person for a while with no luck, you may have considered working with a recruiter – which can make the process easier and faster. Here’s why.

More Talent

Often, employers don’t advertise their available job positions and partner directly with recruiters to find candidates. If you decide to work with a technical recruiter for your candidate search, you will have access to more talent due to the established pool of candidates the technical recruiter will have on call.

Increased Visibility

If you seek out talent on your own, your posting joins the line of potentially dozens (or even hundreds) of other listings. This, unfortunately, increases the risk of being filtered out or going unnoticed. A technical recruiter helps increase your visibility to candidates since they have a direct line of communication and will personally contact potential new hires via their email addresses.

Expert Advice

When you use a recruiter, you take advantage of their expertise regarding your values, criteria, package on offer, and interview questions.

Saves Time

Finding candidates to pursue can be a long and tedious process. Once you’ve established a working relationship with a technical recruiter, it will save you significant time for your search since they will contact you with candidates that align with your job requirements and technical requirements. You no longer have to filter through countless applications.

A Shared Interest In Your Success

If you work with a technical recruiter, you can rest assured they have your best interest in mind because you both have the same goal: to place the perfect person in the role. They are just as invested in your success as you are, so they will not waste your time and are indeed a partner in your search.

Wrap Up

One of the most challenging things for any organization is staffing and maintaining a strong workforce. Recruitment is key to your company’s success, no matter what field you work in.

Work with a recruiter you trust to understand your needs and have your best interests in mind. Recruiting experts are dedicated to working closely with candidates to learn about their qualifications, hard skills (technical skills) and soft skills, and goals to match them with the optimal opportunities.

The tech industry, in particular, has unique challenges, with highly specialized jobs, technical roles and technical positions, and industry-specific jargon. Given these obstacles, many tech companies employ a technical recruiter’s services to help with hiring operations and onboarding top talent. Technical recruiters are specialists with unique skill set that makes the process more efficient, streamlined, and productive.

If you aspire to draw the best professionals out there, first, you have to look for them in the right places. Secondly, technical recruitment requires a captivating approach and presenting candidates with an accurate portrayal of your company culture.

So, make sure you are partnering with the right technical recruiter and a top-tier HR tool like flair’s to ensure you hire the best person for your company and have the right software to help you retain them in the long run.

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