IT Recruitment
IT recruiters are in high demand with increasing opportunities in the industry. Get a competitive edge with these five essential IT recruitment skills.
Recruitment refers to the process of identifying, attracting, interviewing, selecting, hiring and onboarding employees. In other words, it involves everything from the identification of a staffing need to filling it.
Depending on the size of an organization, recruitment is the responsibility of a range of workers. Larger organizations may have entire teams of recruiters, while others only a single recruiter. In small outfits, the hiring manager may be responsible for recruiting. In addition, many organizations outsource recruiting to outside firms. Companies almost always recruit candidates for new positions via advertisements, job boards, social media sites, and others. Many companies utilize recruiting software to more effectively and efficiently source top candidates. Regardless, recruitment typically works in conjunction with, or as a part of Human Resources.
What is recruiting in HRM?
Human Resource Management, otherwise known as HRM or HR for short, is the function of people management within an organization. HR is responsible for facilitating the overall goals of the organization through effective administration of human capital — focusing on employees as the company's most important asset.
Recruitment is the first step in building an organization's human capital. At a high level, the goals are to locate and hire the best candidates, on time, and on budget.
What does recruitment involve?
While the recruitment process is unique to each organization, there are 15 essential steps of the hiring process. We’ve listed them here, but for a detailed exploration of these steps, check out our page on Hiring Process Steps:
• Identify the hiring need
• Devise a recruitment plan
• Write a job description
• Advertise the position
• Recruit the position
• Review applications
• Phone Interview/Initial Screening
• Interviews
• Applicant Assessment
• Background Check
• Decision
• Reference Check
• Job offer
• Hiring
• Onboarding
Types of recruiting
There are several types of recruiting. Here’s an overview:
Internal Recruiting: internal recruiting involves filling vacancies with existing employees from within an organization.
Retained Recruiting: When organization hire a recruiting firm, there are several ways to do so; retained recruiting is a common one. When an organization retains a recruiting firm to fill a vacancy, they pay an upfront fee to fill the position. The firm is responsible for finding candidates until the position is filled. The organization also agrees to work exclusively with the firm. Companies cannot, in other words, hire multiple recruiting firms to fill the same position.
Contingency Recruiting: like retained recruiting, contingency recruiting requires an outside firm. Unlike retained recruiting, there is no upfront fee with contingency. Instead, the recruitment company receives payment only when the clients they represent are hired by an organization.
Staffing Recruiting: staffing recruiters work for staffing agencies. Staffing recruiting matches qualified applicants with qualified job openings. Moreover, staffing agencies typically focus on short-term or temporary employment positions.
Outplacement Recruiting: outplacement is typically an employer-sponsored benefit which helps former employees transition into new jobs. Outplacement recruiting is designed to provide displaced employees with the resources to find new positions or careers.
Reverse Recruiting: refers to the process whereby an employee is encouraged to seek employment with a different organization that offers a better fit for their skill set. We offer Reverse Recruiting Days to help workers with this process. At our Reverse Recruiting Days we review resumes, conduct mock interviews, and offer deep dives into specific job roles.
Tips for effective recruiting
Recruitment is a nuanced process that requires extensive research, thorough procedures, and finesse in order to produce high-quality hires with regularity. With that in mind, here are out top-three tips for effective recruitment:
• Look internally before externally: there’s a good chance the best candidate for your position is already working for your organization. Internal candidates are already familiar with and contributing to your corporate culture and goals. Given their past success within your organization, it is reasonable to expect they will continue to excel in a new position.
• Reach out to “passive” candidates: there is a good chance your ideal candidate is not actively looking for a new job and will not respond to your job board ad. Why? Because they’re likely already employed elsewhere. After all, why wouldn’t your competitors also want to employ your ideal candidate? Therefore, effective recruiting requires you to look outside of your applicant pool for top talent. Encouraging your staff to attend industry conferences and participate in professional organizations; developing relationships with local university business schools (or other relevant departments); searching social media sites (i.e. LinkedIn) for strong resumes from candidates who might not be actively looking for a new job; and encouraging your employees to refer people they know or are connected to are all important mechanisms through which to expand your recruitment network.
• Hire the sure thing: according to two authors and experts, you should hire the person who is already excelling doing the exact job in your industry. Past success, in other words, is the best indicator of future success.
In late 2009, Meebo co-founder Elaine Wherry set up a “recruiter honeypot” using a fake online persona named Pete London. In the hopes of hiring a great recruiter to fill engineering vacancies at her company, she wanted to test how recruiters would interact with a fictitious engineer.
The problem was, every single response disappointed her. From boilerplate emails to white lies and conflicts of interest, Wherry was so dissatisfied that she ended up not selecting any of the 382 recruiters in the hiring process. Instead, she simply hired more engineers as hiring managers and asked them to start recruiting “on the side.”
This is the exact type of outcome you want to avoid if you’re an IT recruiter. Luckily, it is more than possible to achieve success on the job once you’ve mastered the right techniques.
What Is an IT Recruiter?
If you’ve just started your recruiting career, you may be wondering if the IT niche is worth pursuing.
An IT recruiter, or technical recruiter, specializes in information technology (IT) and other tech-related fields. Many recruiters are independent professionals or work for recruitment agencies. Others work “in house” at a single company.
Like other recruiters, an IT recruiter’s responsibilities include finding and screening qualified candidates, arranging interviews, and acting as a liaison between companies and prospective employees. Ultimately, recruiters are responsible for finding a good fit for an open position.
What Are Some Important IT Recruitment Skills?
Most recruiters aren’t experts in the nitty-gritty of tech, but they should have at least a basic knowledge of current technologies. It’s also ideal for IT recruiters to have well-developed soft skills. Recruiters spend much of their day dealing with people, so being personable, empathetic, and open-minded is essential. Here are some crucial skills for IT recruiters:
1. A Willingness to Learn
In IT, stagnation isn’t an option. According to Michael Clegg, CEO and Managing Partner at Q Works Group, “the ability to learn is critical [as an IT recruiter] due to the fast-changing technologies.” You’ll need to keep up with the latest developments in the field, or risk being left behind by competitors.
2. Persistence and Determination
Chris Beazley, director of the IT recruitment firm Edison Hill, reminds recruitment rookies that “it's never a done deal until someone is sitting in that seat, so persistence and commitment are essential.” As a recruiter, you’ll need to follow up politely but persistently, and you should be able to quickly pivot if things aren’t working out as planned. These skills are especially essential in the highly competitive tech world, where 81% of professional developers are already employed full time (according to Stack Overflow’s 2021 developer survey).
3. Patience
Nadya Kanarieva, Global Technology Recruiter and Founder at Phoenix Career, cites patience as a desired quality in IT recruiters. “You need to invest the time in really familiarizing yourself with the technological areas you will be recruiting in: the popular IT solutions and skills in the sector, the major players, the market dynamics, the terminology used by industry insiders … [and] the latest industry developments.”
4. Organizational Skills
Like recruiters in any field, IT recruiters should have an organized process. This includes targeting suitable candidates, creating a specific and enticing job description, looking for talent in the right places, and ensuring that screening and interviews are effective.
Data offers some interesting insights to help you optimize your recruitment process. By making some small changes, you may be able to improve your results. For one, DevSkiller Top IT Skills Report 2022 shows that you’ll get the fastest response time if you send candidates a coding test on a Wednesday. This might be because such tests are labor intensive, and many developers prefer to finish them before the weekend.
Another tip is to think creatively to find hidden talent. An estimated 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates, so recruiters who look elsewhere will have an advantage. By checking GitHub, partnering with local universities, or using talent networks, IT recruiters can reach candidates who are less likely to already be saturated with offers.
5. Communication and Relationship-building Skills
One of the main takeaways from Elaine Wherry’s Pete London experiment was the failure of many recruiters to develop genuine relationships with candidates. Most of the messages that the fake engineer received were generic or looked similar to one another. The ones that stood out were tailored to Pete’s interests and skill set, highlighting the offer’s benefits to him and his career by using the second person (“you”).
For effective IT recruiting, building relationships with clients is also important. Claire Williams, former Technical Recruiting Manager at The Phoenix Group, suggests using great listening and communication skills, and taking the time to understand each client’s needs and culture. “Each client has a unique environment. A good IT recruiter ‘gets it’ early on that it is way more than a tech skill set that companies are looking for—they want candidates that share their passion and vision.”
Improve Your IT Recruitment Skills For Successful IT Hiring
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 13% job growth for computer and IT occupations between 2020 and 2030, which is much faster than the average for all other occupations. By taking the time to improve your IT recruiting skills and build your career, you can position yourself as an expert in this profession.