5 most common problems of employers in the selection of IT-specialists from the point of view of the recruiter-outsourcer
This article is based on my speech at HR Meetup # 5, held on October 5, 2018 in Rostov-on-Don.
My name is Igor Sheludko.
I have been an entrepreneur in software development and sales since 2000. I have a higher technical education. I began my career as a programmer, and also managed small teams.
')
About a year and a half ago, I started commercial recruiting of IT specialists - that is, not only for myself and my projects, but in favor of outside companies. In 2018, I “closed” 17 fairly complex vacancies for 10 companies. There were about a dozen companies I worked with, but could not or did not have time to help. Basically, I selected web developers, it was possible to select analysts and project managers.
Over the past year, I talked closely on the selection issues both with the heads of companies and projects, and with HR specialists and accumulated a number of interesting observations that I want to share with you. I saw the problems of companies from the outside, I was not obliged to adapt to them or help companies justify their failures. If I saw problems that I could not solve, I simply refused the order.
Probably, I will not make for you any discoveries, most likely I will repeat what you have already heard or read before.
An article about common problems in the process of recruiting IT-specialists, who create themselves as leaders in IT-companies and recruiters. At times it may seem that I criticize those methods that you personally like and you think that it works fine for you. If you think I'm talking nonsense, then please write about it in the comments.
Problems are ordered not by importance, but rather in the order of their manifestation in the selection of a new employee.
As usual, the selection of specialists. There are two main strategies. The difference between them is who takes the initiative to start active communication - a recruiter or a candidate.
The first I conditionally call “passive search” - this is when an employer or recruiter creates a job and lays it out through a variety of channels and resources, after which it waits for responses and processes them - sorts the candidates for decent and unworthy for further study.
Obviously, this strategy works well when the company-employer is well-known, prestigious. To work in it is reliable and profitable. This option also works well in mass selection and for a number of specializations in IT. For example, when you need interns, juniors, when qualification requirements are not high. Also this option normally works for programmers, in cases when long-known and popular technologies are used (maybe even outdated technologies). When there are a lot of specialists, the demand for them is not excessive and they respond well to vacancies.
I conditionally call the second “active search” - this is when you comb through the places where candidates gather, starting from the resume bases (such as a head-hunter and my circle) and I don’t even know where the boundaries of this path end. Attending conferences, meetings and even parties, where potential candidates gather, is also an active search.
In IT environments, HRs and executives often believe that the “passive search” path is not effective and it is imperative that we actively “hunt” to find a good candidate. I noticed that they talk about it almost as often as about the fact that cold calls no longer work in sales. The root of both problems, in my opinion, is in the wrong application of the technique.
Active search and “hunting” is a difficult, expensive and time consuming job, so the bearers of the “hunting” idea usually don’t want to do it themselves. They are almost always looking for someone to hand over this - managers dream to hire a clever HR or external recruiter who knows how to "hunt." And HR-s want a recruiter-outsourcer who has his own “secret” channels and candidate databases. From this person, it is absolutely necessary to actively “hunt”, to create a stream of candidates, not only from those available on the market, but also those who are not actively looking for work.
I met carriers of such ideas. They insisted that they dug HH themselves and there was no need to search there, they needed candidates from other channels without fail. I successfully found them candidates for HH and closed vacancies, I only had to disguise my resume so that they did not understand that these candidates were from HH and did not get upset.
What is wrong with Hunting?
Firstly, if the “passive search” does not give the responses of relevant candidates at all for, say, a month, then this definitely indicates that something is wrong with your vacancy. Either you have described there a mythical creature that does not occur in real life. Or your offer is very bad and no one wants to deal with you. Why the proposal may be bad and how to improve it, I will consider a little later.
My recommendation is very simple - “tighten up” the vacancy until it starts to give more or less relevant candidates. And only after that it makes sense to start actively looking to increase the flow of candidates if there are few of you who have come. The first thing I do when I take an order to work is to find out in detail the requirements and previous search experience. Then I rewrite the vacancy in my own way and place it on HH. On the responses and communication with the candidates, I draw conclusions about what should be corrected in the vacancy.
Secondly, in order to “hunt”, that is, to attract people who are currently not in need of a new job, you need to offer better conditions than the candidates now have and better than the market average.
If you are not ready to fight for the candidate in the auction until the very end, offering the best conditions, then most likely “hunting” will not bring you the desired result. Usually, attempts at “hunting” without the willingness to make a very attractive offer lead to the following situation. You actively “lick” the candidate and he is having an interview. Then you give him your rather typical offer. He gently refuses you and, conditionally speaking, "hangs your offer on his wall of trophies." As soon as he is a little offended in his current work, he takes a pack of offers from his wall of trophies and goes to the authorities to prove his value. Most often this ends with an increase in salary at the current place and a reasonable increase in the candidate's self-esteem. If he is fired, then he will go over the companies that made him an offer and, possibly, will resume negotiations with you.
Effective “hunting” requires from the employer preparation and readiness to make the best offer possible for the candidate. Decisions need to be made quickly, and the time for meditations to give candidates is not enough - literally 2-3 days.
How to improve your results in a passive search?
First you need to take this thought: recruitment is selling. Your vacancy is a product called "work in our company." For this product candidate pays you the most valuable and limited resource - the time of his life. You offer him money, and in return he gives you his life. Money is certainly an important thing, but they can be obtained in a mass of ways in different places. You can even save money and cost less by doing work that you like. And the life of a person is one and it is very short.
As you understand, good quality goods and attractively packaged goods are sold much better than goods packed in haste. No one likes salespeople who “push in”, mislead, speak misguided, pathos phrases or try to immediately create hierarchical relations in which the employer is above the candidate.
To improve your job, study at least some modern approaches to sales, read about customer focus, customer development. In the text of the vacancy, start talking mostly not about yourself, but about the candidate. Tell the reader of your job about the benefits of working for your company. At the same time, you need to be sure that these are really significant benefits. You can learn about these benefits by talking with employees who are already working for you. Ask them why they chose this company, which expectations were met, and which ones did not, why they continue to work here, how they would recommend your company to their friends.
Do not clutter the beginning of a vacancy with the praises of your company. Few things can be compared in terms of the degree of aversion, which is caused by the pathos praise of the company for several paragraphs at the beginning of the text of the vacancy. If it seems to you that the candidate necessarily needs to know about your company, at the beginning of the vacancy, when you mention the company name, give a link to your promo site for candidates, where everything is described in detail. If you really want to write a few paragraphs about the company right in the vacancy, it is better to do it at the end. Respect your reader - first give important information to him, and then additional information that seems important to you.
Before publishing a job, it’s worth testing several text options on your employees and then testing the changes in the posting process, communicating with the candidates, asking what exactly attracted them to the job. Experiment, test and track.
Selection is a funnel, a pipe into which candidates enter with some speed. If the pipe is long and the way is long, then the candidates “fall out” and do not reach the end. They accept offers from other companies whose selection is easier and faster.
A normal, comfortable selection procedure is one phoned to eliminate gaps in the resume and one interview, during which a proficiency check is performed. If you need the opinion of several specialists, why not put them all together or not to record the interview, of course, with the permission of the candidate. After a large and detailed interview you can give a test task.
A large and complex test task that requires more than 2-3 hours is bad. First, the candidate and so what to spend his time, for example, go for interviews in other companies. Secondly, time is money and only low-skilled personnel are ready to work for a long time for free.
If you want to certainly give a difficult task, then at least come up with an interesting, original task, from the performance of which the candidate will receive some benefit for himself. Better yet, come up with several test tasks and give the candidate the opportunity to choose one of them. If the task requires more than 3 hours to complete, offer a payment or a bonus for a successful completion.
A test before an interview is generally a very bad practice. There are still companies that are trying to do that. If you are not Yandex, Mail.ru or Avito, then most likely every first candidate will not do your test before the interview. In order to want to do a test task, the candidate must talk with a company representative, ask questions, hear after the interview that he is interested in the company. After you mentally communicate, the test task looks more appropriate.
I often encounter vacancies where the requirements set out in the text are noticeably different from the real ones. Usually the requirements are written by the development manager or team leader or someone else who understands the needs. And then the recruiter for these requirements is looking for candidates, clarifies their experience in accordance with the requirements and arranges an interview.
In large companies, often at the first interviews, it turns out that candidates are weak. Also often there is another extreme - when in the requirements of a vacancy everything that hypothetically could be useful is described. As a result, a vacancy describes a mythical creature that does not occur in real life.
What to do in such situations?
First you need to decide what exactly our desired employee will do every day, what tasks he will solve. To do this, you need to “try” the person who wrote the requirements on how often this or that knowledge and skills indicated in the vacancy will be required. It is necessary to try persistently until he tells everything. Until you figure out the real requirements, the work will go in vain, not only for you, but also for colleagues who conduct interviews.
It is not a secret for anybody that among programmers and other “arrogant computer scientists” it is considered that recruiters are “dull”. This view is based on the observation that recruiters often do have a little knowledge of terminology and concepts in the subject area.
What can a recruiter do? To study - to study the activities of the company, to know how work processes are organized, what technologies are used, to understand in general terms the essence of the tasks and tools used.
What can a company manager do? You need to make sure that your recruiter sufficiently understands how your company works, what projects it does, what technologies it uses. Train the recruiter with the help of some technical specialists and test the knowledge gained with the help of other specialists. Continue until you get a satisfactory result. Such work does not take too much time, but you will be sure that your recruiter does not come across as “stupid.”
About myself
My name is Igor Sheludko.
I have been an entrepreneur in software development and sales since 2000. I have a higher technical education. I began my career as a programmer, and also managed small teams.
')
About a year and a half ago, I started commercial recruiting of IT specialists - that is, not only for myself and my projects, but in favor of outside companies. In 2018, I “closed” 17 fairly complex vacancies for 10 companies. There were about a dozen companies I worked with, but could not or did not have time to help. Basically, I selected web developers, it was possible to select analysts and project managers.
Over the past year, I talked closely on the selection issues both with the heads of companies and projects, and with HR specialists and accumulated a number of interesting observations that I want to share with you. I saw the problems of companies from the outside, I was not obliged to adapt to them or help companies justify their failures. If I saw problems that I could not solve, I simply refused the order.
Probably, I will not make for you any discoveries, most likely I will repeat what you have already heard or read before.
What is the article about?
An article about common problems in the process of recruiting IT-specialists, who create themselves as leaders in IT-companies and recruiters. At times it may seem that I criticize those methods that you personally like and you think that it works fine for you. If you think I'm talking nonsense, then please write about it in the comments.
Problems are ordered not by importance, but rather in the order of their manifestation in the selection of a new employee.
Introductory information
As usual, the selection of specialists. There are two main strategies. The difference between them is who takes the initiative to start active communication - a recruiter or a candidate.
The first I conditionally call “passive search” - this is when an employer or recruiter creates a job and lays it out through a variety of channels and resources, after which it waits for responses and processes them - sorts the candidates for decent and unworthy for further study.
Obviously, this strategy works well when the company-employer is well-known, prestigious. To work in it is reliable and profitable. This option also works well in mass selection and for a number of specializations in IT. For example, when you need interns, juniors, when qualification requirements are not high. Also this option normally works for programmers, in cases when long-known and popular technologies are used (maybe even outdated technologies). When there are a lot of specialists, the demand for them is not excessive and they respond well to vacancies.
I conditionally call the second “active search” - this is when you comb through the places where candidates gather, starting from the resume bases (such as a head-hunter and my circle) and I don’t even know where the boundaries of this path end. Attending conferences, meetings and even parties, where potential candidates gather, is also an active search.
Problem number 1 - Choosing a search strategy candidates
In IT environments, HRs and executives often believe that the “passive search” path is not effective and it is imperative that we actively “hunt” to find a good candidate. I noticed that they talk about it almost as often as about the fact that cold calls no longer work in sales. The root of both problems, in my opinion, is in the wrong application of the technique.
Active search and “hunting” is a difficult, expensive and time consuming job, so the bearers of the “hunting” idea usually don’t want to do it themselves. They are almost always looking for someone to hand over this - managers dream to hire a clever HR or external recruiter who knows how to "hunt." And HR-s want a recruiter-outsourcer who has his own “secret” channels and candidate databases. From this person, it is absolutely necessary to actively “hunt”, to create a stream of candidates, not only from those available on the market, but also those who are not actively looking for work.
I met carriers of such ideas. They insisted that they dug HH themselves and there was no need to search there, they needed candidates from other channels without fail. I successfully found them candidates for HH and closed vacancies, I only had to disguise my resume so that they did not understand that these candidates were from HH and did not get upset.
What is wrong with Hunting?
Firstly, if the “passive search” does not give the responses of relevant candidates at all for, say, a month, then this definitely indicates that something is wrong with your vacancy. Either you have described there a mythical creature that does not occur in real life. Or your offer is very bad and no one wants to deal with you. Why the proposal may be bad and how to improve it, I will consider a little later.
My recommendation is very simple - “tighten up” the vacancy until it starts to give more or less relevant candidates. And only after that it makes sense to start actively looking to increase the flow of candidates if there are few of you who have come. The first thing I do when I take an order to work is to find out in detail the requirements and previous search experience. Then I rewrite the vacancy in my own way and place it on HH. On the responses and communication with the candidates, I draw conclusions about what should be corrected in the vacancy.
Secondly, in order to “hunt”, that is, to attract people who are currently not in need of a new job, you need to offer better conditions than the candidates now have and better than the market average.
If you are not ready to fight for the candidate in the auction until the very end, offering the best conditions, then most likely “hunting” will not bring you the desired result. Usually, attempts at “hunting” without the willingness to make a very attractive offer lead to the following situation. You actively “lick” the candidate and he is having an interview. Then you give him your rather typical offer. He gently refuses you and, conditionally speaking, "hangs your offer on his wall of trophies." As soon as he is a little offended in his current work, he takes a pack of offers from his wall of trophies and goes to the authorities to prove his value. Most often this ends with an increase in salary at the current place and a reasonable increase in the candidate's self-esteem. If he is fired, then he will go over the companies that made him an offer and, possibly, will resume negotiations with you.
Effective “hunting” requires from the employer preparation and readiness to make the best offer possible for the candidate. Decisions need to be made quickly, and the time for meditations to give candidates is not enough - literally 2-3 days.
Problem number 2 - Packing jobs
How to improve your results in a passive search?
First you need to take this thought: recruitment is selling. Your vacancy is a product called "work in our company." For this product candidate pays you the most valuable and limited resource - the time of his life. You offer him money, and in return he gives you his life. Money is certainly an important thing, but they can be obtained in a mass of ways in different places. You can even save money and cost less by doing work that you like. And the life of a person is one and it is very short.
As you understand, good quality goods and attractively packaged goods are sold much better than goods packed in haste. No one likes salespeople who “push in”, mislead, speak misguided, pathos phrases or try to immediately create hierarchical relations in which the employer is above the candidate.
To improve your job, study at least some modern approaches to sales, read about customer focus, customer development. In the text of the vacancy, start talking mostly not about yourself, but about the candidate. Tell the reader of your job about the benefits of working for your company. At the same time, you need to be sure that these are really significant benefits. You can learn about these benefits by talking with employees who are already working for you. Ask them why they chose this company, which expectations were met, and which ones did not, why they continue to work here, how they would recommend your company to their friends.
Do not clutter the beginning of a vacancy with the praises of your company. Few things can be compared in terms of the degree of aversion, which is caused by the pathos praise of the company for several paragraphs at the beginning of the text of the vacancy. If it seems to you that the candidate necessarily needs to know about your company, at the beginning of the vacancy, when you mention the company name, give a link to your promo site for candidates, where everything is described in detail. If you really want to write a few paragraphs about the company right in the vacancy, it is better to do it at the end. Respect your reader - first give important information to him, and then additional information that seems important to you.
Before publishing a job, it’s worth testing several text options on your employees and then testing the changes in the posting process, communicating with the candidates, asking what exactly attracted them to the job. Experiment, test and track.
Problem number 3 - Too many stages of selection
Selection is a funnel, a pipe into which candidates enter with some speed. If the pipe is long and the way is long, then the candidates “fall out” and do not reach the end. They accept offers from other companies whose selection is easier and faster.
A normal, comfortable selection procedure is one phoned to eliminate gaps in the resume and one interview, during which a proficiency check is performed. If you need the opinion of several specialists, why not put them all together or not to record the interview, of course, with the permission of the candidate. After a large and detailed interview you can give a test task.
A large and complex test task that requires more than 2-3 hours is bad. First, the candidate and so what to spend his time, for example, go for interviews in other companies. Secondly, time is money and only low-skilled personnel are ready to work for a long time for free.
If you want to certainly give a difficult task, then at least come up with an interesting, original task, from the performance of which the candidate will receive some benefit for himself. Better yet, come up with several test tasks and give the candidate the opportunity to choose one of them. If the task requires more than 3 hours to complete, offer a payment or a bonus for a successful completion.
A test before an interview is generally a very bad practice. There are still companies that are trying to do that. If you are not Yandex, Mail.ru or Avito, then most likely every first candidate will not do your test before the interview. In order to want to do a test task, the candidate must talk with a company representative, ask questions, hear after the interview that he is interested in the company. After you mentally communicate, the test task looks more appropriate.
Problem number 4 - Differences between job requirements and real requirements
I often encounter vacancies where the requirements set out in the text are noticeably different from the real ones. Usually the requirements are written by the development manager or team leader or someone else who understands the needs. And then the recruiter for these requirements is looking for candidates, clarifies their experience in accordance with the requirements and arranges an interview.
In large companies, often at the first interviews, it turns out that candidates are weak. Also often there is another extreme - when in the requirements of a vacancy everything that hypothetically could be useful is described. As a result, a vacancy describes a mythical creature that does not occur in real life.
What to do in such situations?
First you need to decide what exactly our desired employee will do every day, what tasks he will solve. To do this, you need to “try” the person who wrote the requirements on how often this or that knowledge and skills indicated in the vacancy will be required. It is necessary to try persistently until he tells everything. Until you figure out the real requirements, the work will go in vain, not only for you, but also for colleagues who conduct interviews.
Problem number 5 - "Stupid HRs"
It is not a secret for anybody that among programmers and other “arrogant computer scientists” it is considered that recruiters are “dull”. This view is based on the observation that recruiters often do have a little knowledge of terminology and concepts in the subject area.
What can a recruiter do? To study - to study the activities of the company, to know how work processes are organized, what technologies are used, to understand in general terms the essence of the tasks and tools used.
What can a company manager do? You need to make sure that your recruiter sufficiently understands how your company works, what projects it does, what technologies it uses. Train the recruiter with the help of some technical specialists and test the knowledge gained with the help of other specialists. Continue until you get a satisfactory result. Such work does not take too much time, but you will be sure that your recruiter does not come across as “stupid.”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/444668/
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