Best Ways to Evaluate Tech Talent (7 Mins Read)

Attracting and evaluating the best technical talent can be a quite difficult job. Some people focus only on a few of the technical skills. Some organizations will have number of people interviewing them. The rapidly changing nature of the modern job makes flexibility an essential component for today’s tech talent. Many tech workers move on to another team once a project is complete or shift to a different company. As flexibility is a very difficult trait to assess based on the past job experience, more companies are turning to behavioural interviewing in order to identify and hire the top tech talent.

To hire the best tech talent a good system needs to be in place and for that we need to take care of the following:

Over focussing on technical skills be costly

 While knowing the technical skills a prospective candidate will bring to a job is an obvious priority, however, this tech skill alone is not enough. The interviewers should also spend some time looking for the soft skills, such as flexibility, resourcefulness, strong decision making skills and the ability to manage emotions successfully at the workplace.

Behavioural interviewing is the method of learning more about a technical candidate by asking “why” more than asking “what”. Like candidates often showcase the projects they completed with a previous employer. Those experiences only demonstrate the skills of the candidate and don’t help the interviewer understand the thought process and the reactions displayed by the candidate at that particular time when the project was worked upon.

To evaluate this critical area, the interviewer needs to ask questions like:

• Why did you choose that particular solution for that project?
• How did you get the other people working on the project buy into your ways of functioning?
• How did you decide which resources to use when you encountered a specific technical problem outside your domain?

Attracting the best candidate depends on an accurate job description

Advertising for the new tech employees in the conventional manner isn’t necessarily the most effective strategy. An accurate job description is needed clearly mentioning the hard and soft skills required for the job. The human resource executives should start by identifying the non negotiable hard and soft skills needed.

It’s also very important to understand what the tech professionals are looking for in a particular role. Many employers are surprised to know that it goes much beyond the package and the benefits offered for the job. Working with intelligent colleagues and engaging in some meaningful work is as important as the compensation for many young tech professionals.

Recruitment process has to be changed

Publishing for an opening on a newspaper or a bulletin board doesn’t attract the top talent anymore. Tech-based companies which look towards being competitive should embrace new methods of finding the right candidates, which include:

Look for the candidate within: 

The existing employees are very much likely to be interested for a promotion. This approach offers advantages as businesses can provide mentoring for the in house candidates in order to ensure that they are qualified for a post. Hiring the top tech talent is becoming increasingly competitive and requires a lot of planning and attention by the employers. Making the wrong selection would be a costly mistake which many startups and businesses in particular can’t afford to make.

Social recruiting: 

Posting for the job vacancies on the various social media networking sites and then following it up with those who seem to be especially qualified can yield the best results.

Passive recruiting: 

Many a times the best candidate is someone who didn’t even apply for the job. Finding the qualified people through LinkedIn, referrals from current employees or even by making a better offer to someone who works for the competition can uncover people who otherwise would have never applied.

Technical Skills

 Technical skills have a very short shelf life and in technical career paths the candidates must always be ready to continually learn. Some positions may call for various skills where most of the candidates will not have all the technical knowledge needed. Asking them about what they read and how they learn can help in determining their aptitude.

Knowledge is very hard to evaluate as people can prepare by memorizing a lot of things. So, it is important to ask specific questions and get the specific answers for that to make out about the real world experience of the candidate. Thereafter, one needs to couple that with some code to troubleshoot or a particular problem to resolve. Most organizations will have people to write codes where some just ask the questions. You have to make a big investment in selecting the right person so you need to make sure that their technical knowledge is up to the mark.

Any technical endeavour has many tools to be used. So, you would want people who can use the right tool for the right job and be highly effective. You need to understand their experience with the tools. They might have used other tools than the company uses and that’s absolutely alright. It is good to be open for in any learning that the candidates might need if the tools are new and very different.

Fit with the Culture

 Culture means a lot of different things to every other person. The organizations must understand their culture and have the rules, policies and processes set accordingly for the employees to fit in the culture properly. You need to make sure that this is evident right from the interview process. If things are informal then the candidates should understand the normal process or the lack of it. Although there are exceptions to everything but as organizations grow they need more formal policies and the culture tends to change.

The other things to look for with the culture are people’s style of working. How will their style of working gel with the team? If you have few intense people already working in an existing team adding another might create more tension in the group. Then chances are that you would not want to get those kind of people in your team. You need to keep all these things in mind while making the right choice.

SUMMARY:

Evaluating and finally selecting the best tech talent is quite an uphill task. In order to succeed, it is very important to know what candidates want and value the most. You need to look for and also provide the flexibility, benefits and the learning opportunities that matter to the candidates a lot. Further, you need to build your presence in the field and invest in the appropriate hiring tools and technologies needed. All these will help you win in the best tech talent acquisition.