IT Recruiters have always had an adversarial relationship with the audiences with whom they interact: Hiring managers and the talent.
There has always been a fractious veneer to the working dynamic between Recruiters and the Engineering audience with whom they work. A large part of that friction is owing to the fact that Recruiters are not technical, leaving them powerless to technically qualify candidates.
Perhaps it is coincidence that we are celebrating our 247th birthday as a nation this week, but TechScreen is about to declare a sort of Independence Day for IT Recruiters. We will be deploying TechScreen 5.0 powered by AI Verify, which accurately scores and summarizes technical interviews on the fly. IT Recruiters can produce a detailed report on the candidate’s technical performance and present it to the manager.
From the time I conducted my first technical interview in 1997, I always had a dream of how to help all IT Recruiters elevate their ability to engage with Engineers on a peer level. This was the driver behind creating TechScreen as a SaaS platform in 2015. We were an ambitious, self-funded start-up that made it far easier for Recruiters to ask actual developer questions and know what to expect in an answer.
We have seen our clients screen tens of thousands of candidates over the years and they have remarkably weeded out 45% of them on technical merit. It does take some time for recruiters to get acclimated to this process, but going forward, recruiters just need to ask the question on the screen and let AI Verify tell them if the candidate understands the subject.
Not only does AI Verify accurately summarize the candidate’s technical answers, but the manager can listen to any part of the interview they choose by hitting the hyperlink.
“Right now when you use the system, the Recruiter has to determine if the answer is right or wrong. It is entirely subjective based on the recruiter’s opinion,” said Gary Cavanaugh, the VP of Enterprise Partners at Talent Group. “With AI being introduced, the interview outcomes become objective, so this is a game-changer.”
Recruiters will be able to conduct detailed interviews of IT candidates like they always have, but now the analysis is going to be handled by AI Verify. One of the biggest reasons that companies have long lead times to filling software engineering seats is that talent often shies from interacting with recruiters. However, the process also drags because it takes time to technically qualify IT candidates.
All of the other technical evaluation tools in the market remove the recruiter from the process and come in two different buckets: The coding exercises and the self-paced multiple choice tests. Here is a true irony: A company’s investment in technical evaluation tools often undermines their investment in sourcing tools. Technical evaluation tools have many counter measures meant to prevent candidates from cheating, but some of them are very off-putting to developers.
Some tools take over the candidate’s web cam to record their reaction or track their eye movement to see if they are looking at another tab or screen. Others track key strokes, so candidates may be concerned with what happens to that tracker after the interview. Still, some candidates may reply, “I have three offers at my asking price. Why would I spend 90 minutes taking some online test? I just don’t need to do this.”
Now, a client can reliably perform a detailed technical evaluation on a candidate on the very first phone call with AI Verify.
“We think that this is going to be the most impactful innovation in IT Recruiting since email or the browser,” TechScreen CEO and Founder Mark Knowlton. “Think about it for a second. We have been seeing scathing social media posts for decades about how developers distrust or dislike recruiters because they lack technical acumen.
“I once saved a screen grab from a Facebook group titled “Why I Hate Recruitment Consultants,” Knowlton said. “Some of the posts were savage, ‘What do recruiters use for birth control? Their personality’ or ‘They are damn useless and should be shot at dawn’. The page has been taken down, but you could feel the emotion behind the comments. We are giving IT recruiters the silver bullet to screening IT candidates.”
AI Verify will be the only product in HR Tech that performs an analysis on the accuracy of the technical interviews and the efficacy of the answers’ delivery. Artificial Intelligence is being injected into many HR Tech products, but many of them are focused on automating time-consuming administrative tasks or leverage the generative properties of AI to write job descriptions or other types of content.
Indeed.com did a study that showed the US economy burns $160 Billion a year due to the opportunity cost of unfilled seats. TechScreen is taking aim at one of the impactful reasons those seats go unfilled for so long. AI Verify is directly solving the single-biggest gap in the recruiting process: Qualifying technical talent before the hiring manager gets involved.
Recruiters will be able to independently screen developers on the first phone call. TechScreen has leveled the playing field, so if you would like to see how, just let us know.