{"id":1164,"date":"2023-08-03T14:53:02","date_gmt":"2023-08-03T14:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techscreen.com\/?p=1164"},"modified":"2023-08-03T14:53:02","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T14:53:02","slug":"tool-built-to-screen-it-candidates-actually-was-meant-for-salespeople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techscreen.com\/tool-built-to-screen-it-candidates-actually-was-meant-for-salespeople\/","title":{"rendered":"Tool Built to Screen IT Candidates Actually Was Meant for Salespeople"},"content":{"rendered":"
When I started TechScreen in 2015, it was meant to scale the process I had been using to screen IT candidates dating back to the late \u201990s. Learning how to ask detailed technical questions to developers took a very long time, but I saw the value in being able to determine which candidates were worth the time of hiring managers by grilling them on technical merit.<\/p>\n
This applied to whether I worked for an agency or was consulting to software companies. I was motivated to help agency and corporate recruiters by giving them the ability to ask detailed technical questions and keep up with the answer. As we hit the market in 2016, people who saw our tool immediately thought it was meant for recruiters, so we would be directed to the executives who managed them.<\/p>\n The shops that had strong management would enforce utilization to maintain quality, but many more shops left it up to the recruiters to make their own decision to use it to screen candidates. We had two severe examples of this.<\/p>\n In one case, a firm that does in the low 9 figures in revenue had 21 seats and tried us for 3 months. Four recruiters did 20 or more interviews, seven did between 1 and 5 interviews and 10 of them did 0. Another firm who does a significant eight figures in revenue had 12 seats. One person did 54 interviews, one did 2 interviews and 10 of them did 0. Unsurprisingly, both of those clients quietly went away.<\/p>\n There were other shops who used the tool to screen candidates, but they wouldn\u2019t tell their clients this extra level of detailed screening was happening on their behalf. Some were worried about setting an expectation that managers would demand a technical screen report for each candidate. Most of them never involved their sales people in the process, so their teammates had this powerful screening capability but they wouldn\u2019t know to tell their clients that their firm could screen more effectively than their competitors.<\/p>\n