Passive Recruiting: How to Hire Tech candidates

Tech talent is notoriously hard to find and all the more hard to hire. The “best and the brightest” already have jobs, you should always strive to hire potential superstars; it's all in the chance that you give someone to prove themselves. Tech skills are in high demand and low supply; it is suspected that by 2020, there will be more than one million unfilled programming jobs. Along with shortage of talent, difficulty in accurately finding tech candidates is what's creating this gap.

Reducing the Overwhelming Gap

So to speak, there are lots of tech applicants who are unemployed, but they are all scattered across geography and ‘unavailable’ to you. Scarcity of the talent is only if you confine your search to one particular location. Going by traditional methods, you are probably looking at arranging referral drives, walk-ins or advertising on social networking sites and job boards. But these are not enough, and asking someone who stays 30 km away from your office premises to come in for preliminary round of interview is unfair. A better practice would be to inculcate digitized or virtual walk-ins wherein candidates are provided with a link where they can attend the interview anytime & anywhere before the link expires. Are you worried about fraudsters who look up answers over the internet? With fraud detection extinctions and video recording of the entire assessment, these assessments can be cheat-proof. That would mean three things for you:

1. More quality candidates to choose from

2. No headaches of assigning resources to handle the bulk candidates pooling into the office premises, and

3. You are now in the candidate's list of 'best employers' for the convenience you have provided

That covers major part of screening bulk candidates, it also means that you now have lot of 'superstars' that I mentioned earlier, selecting them is the task ahead of you. Subject matter experts in this domain can be consulted or you can prepare these questions in-house. Now, set up one of these online, recorded, cheat-proof, video assessments in the form of MCQs or code evaluation tests as per your need. Next, set up panelists to evaluate the answers and you are now a little short of finding superstars.

Now that the candidates are shortlisted, you need to find out if they are a good cultural fit in your company. Leverage one of the easy interviewing solutions out there. Introduce recorded behavioral skill tests, push for analytics to the interview process so that it computes all the traits and flag the good ones. et voilà! You now have your all star tech new hire ready for the on-boarding process.

I suddenly feel like the teacher we had in primary school who always asked, “what did we learn today?” After writing this article, I think, I’d say -

1. Implement online video interviews as it offers convenience to candidates and panelists and reduce passive recruiting.

2. Evaluating candidates is much easier for over this platform as tech hiring involves multiple evaluation.

3. Time taken to hire these candidates would cut back considerably due to reduction in rescheduling and travel.

You can also refer to our E-book on Solutions Guide for Tech Industries for a better perspective on the topic.