By Mark Knowlton
IT recruiters have a thankless job and are often the butt of jokes and insults from the technical professionals who frequently seek their assistance.
Acquiring meaningful technical knowledge takes more time than most recruiters have or are willing to sacrifice. Plus, the universe of IT knowledge is so vast, knowing where to begin and what source to use just adds to the already nebulous nature of the subject.
Our TechScreen 4.0 platform combines our proven technical interview SaaS tool with our TechScreen Certified Training content, giving us the world’s only Technical Literacy Platform. Users will be able to exponentially elevate their technical insight using our platform to execute their jobs.
I spent over 20 years gradually immersing myself in deeper technical discovery since conducting my first technical interview in 1997. This new platform was designed to let a recruiter inherit similar technical insight in a fraction of the time it took me.
Most people get into IT recruiting by working at a staffing agency, which has a low bar for hiring and a short runway for expected productivity. Most recruiters don’t have the makeup to survive long-term in staffing because of the commission-based compensation and the aggressive tracking of performance metrics. Many opt for a corporate gig to have more consistent income and less pressure once they have a useful amount of experience. By the time they can compete for corporate gigs, they have figured out how to deal with technical terms on some level on their own.
It is this cycle that has created a systemic loop that prevents IT recruiters from acquiring the breadth and depth of technical insight that would allow them to engage with their technical counterparts on a peer level. It goes something like this:
- A new graduate gets hired at an agency by a manager, who knows that 2 out of 3 hires won’t last more than 4 years in the industry.
- Given the low probability of this newbie becoming a star producer, there is zero incentive for them to invest in extensive IT training.
- These new hires either wash out quickly or learns to cope with buzzwords largely left to their own devices.
- The people who survive long-term in staffing just accept the notion that technical knowledge is an exercise based on memorizing terms.
The entire Recruiting industry has either ignored this problem or assumed that the issue was far too big and complex to find a solution. Until now.
TechScreen deployed its SaaS-based technical interview platform in 2016 to help recruiters incrementally elevate their technical insight through conducting technical interviews. We have recorded plenty of client success stories with the interview tool, but we wanted to make it easier for users to absorb and make use of their increasing technical knowledge to screen candidates.
TechScreen 4.0 puts the world’s largest technical reference library at our users’ fingertips while they are doing their job. We vastly simplify advanced technical concepts with coloring book-like simplicity so users can understand it, internalize and use it for qualification purposes.
Conventional recruiting training is meant to be consumed on a standalone basis, during work hours but done in a silo outside of their core job execution. Our training is meant to be leveraged while recruiters are doing their jobs. A recruiter often doesn’t have time to create a 5–10 question interview with our platform before making a submittal. However, they would like the assurance that their candidate won’t crash in a manager’s phone screen.
Our users will be able to make use of the training content to find a knockout question by reading something off a training slide. The training modules are accessible right inside the platform and users can leverage the content to ask qualifying questions without the need to commit anything to memory. All of the other training solutions for IT recruiters are dependent upon rote memorization.
We show how a message goes from one user to another by comparing it to Postal Service. We explain networking’s OSI model by comparing it to the steps involved with ordering pizza for delivery. We compare N-tier application architecture with different parts of a car and we explain a TCP handshake by comparing it to a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. We illustrate object-oriented concepts by comparing them to different parts of a house.
The objective of this new platform is to create what we call Conversational Competence, the ability to spontaneously inject qualifying questions into conversations with candidates. If you are interested in accessing an on-demand webinar that shows the platform in detail, click here.
Mark Knowlton is the CEO & Founder of TechScreen, the world’s only technical literacy platform for IT recruiters