Hiring the right employees can elevate your business to new standards. But finding the right employees or candidates is not always easy. Many applicants have vast experiences and backgrounds, but not all may fit well within your company. This is why you need a tech recruiting strategy to cut through the noise and find the right developers, coders, and workers for your business. 

Here are 9 tips to improve your tech recruiting strategy:

How to Refine Your Tech Recruiting Strategy

1. Optimize your job description with relevant details

One of the most important—and often overlooked—tech recruiting tips is to design a clear and detailed job description. It is crucial to inform candidates and applicants of what is expected of them. The job description is the best place to set expectations and clarify goals.

Ideally, you want to fill the description up with important and relevant information. It is easy to copy-paste an existing job description from other companies similar to yours. However, their needs and your organization’s needs may not be the same. At least, not always. For example, your future employee may not need all of the skills as another company’s employees. Therefore, take the time to create a description that caters to your requirements.

2. Contact potential candidates with job-specific info 

Next, when you are sourcing and recruiting tech candidates, you want to be ready to share job specifics and answer any questions they may have. This further helps set expectations as new candidates come into the hiring process and familiarize themselves with your company and its mission. 

Most candidates prefer email as a communication channel. Recruiting cold emails can be tough to write, but the more personalized they are, the more chances that you will hear back from the person you are interested in interviewing.

Be prepared to answer questions about the company, what day-to-day work would look like, and what benefits are in store. It also helps to tell the candidate why you think they’re a good fit for the position and the company. This shows them that you have done your research and see a clear vision for them within the company.

3. Make tech stack clear in job ads and descriptions

This part of the tech recruiting process is crucial. You want your candidates and applicants to know beforehand what tech skills are required and desired. On the other hand, candidates want to know what technologies they will be working with. 

Over 51% of candidates are looking for languages, technologies, and frameworks they will be working with when job-hunting (Stack Overflow). The best thing to do is add the tech stack within your job description to make it clear as early as possible.

4. Look for talent outside of geographical borders

In our time of technological advancement and remote work, you don’t need to limit your tech recruiting to local candidates. International tech recruiting opens up opportunities to engage with talent you might otherwise miss with local recruiting. This is even more prudent in countries that have a low percent of developers and coders. 

If you are worried about communicating and working across geographical boundaries, there are multiple tools and services you can use to maintain productivity and efficiency:

• Cloud-based content, file, and project management systems — G-Suite, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Trello, Teamwork, etc.;
• Whiteboard collaboration tools — Miro, Figma, etc.;
• Video conferencing tools — Zoom, Google Meet, etc.;
• Cloud communication tools that let you communicate internationally for low rates — local and international toll-free numbers, call forwarding, etc.;
• Team chat and collaboration tools — Google Chat, Slack, etc.

These tools are designed to help remote teams work together by sharing files and communicating in real-time. The pandemic showed us that we can make remote working work. So, why not go beyond local borders to find skilled talent?

5. Look beyond keywords in CVs and resumes

While it is a good practice to screen resumes for specific keywords that matter to your business, there’s a chance that you may miss out on a good candidate just because they didn’t add a certain keyword. 

Depending on your need and time available, you may want to consider looking at resumes that don’t include desired keywords. Do a quick check for experience and education. Additionally, time-permitting, you can do quick calls to screen these applicants. Some companies choose to do this when they have a small applicant pool and want to expand it.

6. Keep skill-testing short and relevant

You can improve the interview process by knowing what skills to test for and making sure these are mentioned in the job description. There’s no real point in surprising your candidate with a test. In fact, you can quickly weed out those who are inexperienced by mentioning the testing process within your description.

And while it may seem like a good idea to develop a long and rigorous testing process, you want to keep it short and relevant. Test skills that are needed for your business or organization. Communicate the purpose of the test and give plenty of time for completion. Some best practices when it comes to tech skill-testing—your test should be:

• Based on a work sample;
• Relevant and short;
• Graded with scores and feedback;
• Objective and assessed with updated testing methods.

When you take the time to create a skill-testing process that is highly relevant and test with the right methodology, you will attract high-quality candidates and increase completion rates.

7. Improve the interview process

The hiring process can be exhausting and overwhelming for both recruiters and candidates. The goal, therefore, should be to create a less stressful yet efficient process. Here are some ways to improve the interview process and increase candidate engagement:

1. Make the process clear in the job description.
2. Make the compensation clear; over 70% of candidates consider salary information a critical factor in applying to a job.
3. Respond to new applicants faster.
4. Cut down on areas where time may be wasted.
5. Negotiate interview times and formats.
6. Streamline and automate the process with an applicant tracking system (ATS).
7. Share information about the company and social media channels.
8. Be responsive and offer feedback.
9. Ask for feedback from all applicants (hired and not hired).
10. Measure the performance of your candidate engagement and tech recruiting strategy to find areas to improve.

The bottom line is that you want candidates to have a good experience with your company whether or not they make the cut. You want to retain good talent, and an unnecessarily tricky hiring process can dissuade some candidates from moving forward. And you may lose them to competitors. Additionally, you want to encourage candidates who don’t make the cut to come back and apply in the future.

8. Stay up-to-date on the latest tech and trends in recruitment

As with anything, it is vital to keep up with the latest in your industry. What new trends or tools are people talking about? Join communities and follow experts and leaders. Test out new technology and apps and see how your business might be able to utilize them. For example, you may consider checking out Clubhouse as a recruiting platform.

9. Explore recruiting tools and software

Finally, consider investing in tech recruitment software to help streamline your process. Recruitment software comes packed with a variety of tools and features to help make your hiring process efficient. For example, AmazingHiring offers a variety of features and tools such as:

• Candidate finder and pre-assessment;
• Talent mapping;
• Search engine optimization;
• Messaging platforms;
• Email automation with templates;
• Email campaign tracking;
• ATS updates;
• Screening tools;
• Candidate engagement tools;
• Integrations, and on.

You can use these tools and features to improve your recruitment process, ease the burden, expand the search, and find the right candidates.

Conclusions

Make it easy for your business to recruit the right employees for your tech team. These are the employees who will improve your products and services and contribute to the overall success of your brand. If you haven’t given any of these tech recruiting tips a chance, start now! Experiment till you find what works best for your needs.

Happy hiring!

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Cover photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com (Unsplash)