IT recruiters are often bashed by the people they recruit because they don’t understand technology. This is unfortunate, but it is also unfair.
Most IT recruiters enter the space via an agency because staffing firms are one of the few businesses willing to hire recruiters who have zero experience. Many of them don’t like the pace, being managed by KPIs or the fact that commission is a big part of their compensation. A recruiting firm is good training ground to get the basics — sourcing, overcoming objections and closing — and many of them switch to the corporate side when they have sufficient experience.
However, now they are hiring FTEs, but they are probably still dealing with the the same technical deficit that they had when they started recruiting. Training seems like the logical solution, but that’s easier said than done.
For openers, an employee has to stop doing their job no matter what the subject may be. The real trick when trying to teach recruiters about technical subjects is that most of the content is based upon memorizing terms and definitions, which doesn’t scale. So the challenge is how do you introduce technical training to recruiters in a way that doesn’t take too much time and have it elevate their ability to engage with Engineering.
That is exactly why we created the Engineering Engagement program.
We work with clients to create a standard framework for a job intake call following our WORK Methodology. Most managers have no clue as to the information a recruiter needs to do their jobs and largely describe JDs that rely on a blizzard of buzzwords. We will work with the TA organization to create technical interview templates that map to their commonly recurring job profiles. TA will gain true mindshare with Engineering by asking questions that show evidence the candidate has the knowledge to produce the work artifacts that will be asked of them on the job.
When we deployed our Technical interview platform in 2016, it was done to offer recruiters a framework to create and conduct a detailed technical interview without needing to be technical themselves. We have recorded some remarkable customer wins, including one software client who generated a 70% interview-to-offer ratio. Jobvite did a study that shows the average I-to-O average is 17%.
Our interview tool helps a recruiter incrementally increase their technical insight by showing the question and answers with highlighting that focuses on the key parts of the answer. As much as our users start absorbing technical insight, we didn’t feel that went far enough. That is why we created the TechScreen Certified Recruiter program in 2021 and embedded the content right into the product. It is far more than a training curriculum; it is going to revolutionize learning itself
We defined a new methodology called Dynamic Engagement, which has 4 primary pillars:
- You must vastly simplify deeply technical subjects
- It must be served in such tiny slices that it can be instantly internalized for future use
- It must be delivered in real time, as the user is performing their primary job
- There can be no need for rote memorization of the content.
We break down complex subjects across topics like Application Architecture, Networking, Databases, QA, DevOps, The Cloud, Web Services, Big Data, IoT and Cybersecurity. We don’t just offer definitions of technical terms. We explain how things came into being and how things work using simple analogies with everyday entities. We explain application architecture by comparing it to parts of a car, we explain object orientation by comparing it to sections of a house and we explain TCP/IP by comparing it to the postal service.
We went one step further, because reviewing the actual modules requires you to stop recruiting and review the material. We extracted select slides from each module and share them like individual flashcards so a user can review it and ask a question like “Discuss the Pros and Cons of taking the Microservices approach”, or “Can you explain ACID properties of a database and how they work?” or “What happens during a SQL Injection attack?”
Each of these slides are static, but they come with narration to explain what is on the slide. Users can cherry pick these “knockout slides” to ask laser-focused technical qualification questions without needing to know anything about the subject or commit it to memory. The ironic thing is that the information comes with such illustrative simplicity and in such small volume, users will start retaining the content after a few uses.
We have effectively merged two traditionally disparate business processes: Recruiting and Training. We have figured out how to take Training content and position it so a recruiter can use it do their job: Qualify candidates. IT Recruiters now have a scalable way to exponentially elevate their technical insight with the best example of “on-the-job” training in the industry.