Hiring new personnel is an intensive journey that requires considerable time and effort to find the right person. However, bringing on someone without all the necessary skills can negatively impact staff productivity, profits, time to market and customer engagement. With all this pressure and an impending skills shortage, it’s necessary to rethink your strategy when it comes to enlisting qualified IT professionals. Let’s take a look at some innovative IT hiring tips to help you succeed:
1. Look for cultural fitness
Candidates should have skills necessary for the job, but they must also fit seamlessly with the business culture. CIO senior writer Sarah K. White noted that organizations
should focus on foundational character traits like honesty, positivity and the ability to be developed. This will require continual transparency throughout the process and engaging candidates in conversation. Look at the applicants who proactively reach out to you and are excited to work for the business.
Focusing more on cultural fitness means focusing less rigidly on their resume. A candidate’s aptitude, potential and achievements might not be tied to a traditional resume, and leaders shouldn’t assume that a college education is needed to be successful. Gathering a diverse group of people with various backgrounds, education and experience can improve information sharing and staff capabilities.
Look for someone that will be a good cultural fit to your team.Look for someone who will be a good cultural fit to your team.
2. Simplify the process
Traditional hiring processes can take a significant amount of time, wasting energy and resources for those who don’t make the cut. Employers often start off with rounds of phone interviews, followed by in-person meetings and skills tests. By the time all is said and done, candidates are burnt out and anxious for the results. Red Caffeine contributor Abby Cheesman suggested
getting to the essence of what makes the candidate stand out. Creating a better application process will appeal to all potential hires, both now and in the future. Answer prompts will help better understand an applicant’s excitement, fit and experience for the job.
It’s also important to make interviews more interactive. Assign homework prior to the interview and go over it during your meeting. Allowing them to try out the work will help you get a sense of how candidates think about the problem as well as how well they communicate and deliver work. In essence, you’ll be satisfying a lot of unanswered questions simply by making the interview more interactive and engaging in substantial conversation.
“Combinations of assessment techniques will help leaders better predict who will be successful in a job.”
3. Use a combination of assessment techniques
The interview processes you use will make a big difference in assessing candidates appropriately and receiving quality answers. Wired contributor Laszlo Bock suggested while a
work sample test can be a key indicator of how someone will perform on the job, it doesn’t factor in other necessary skills, and many jobs don’t have nice, neat pieces of work to test someone on. Candidates must understand how to collaborate with others, learn and adapt to uncertainty, all of which can’t be truly shown from a single test.
General cognitive ability tests can be a good addition to the interview process, as they gauge capacity to learn. Using combinations of assessment techniques will help leaders better predict who will be successful in a job, as they can reveal critical information without asking wasteful questions. It will be important to ask questions that won’t trigger biases and use structured interview setups to maintain consistency across applicants.
Hiring the right IT personnel can be challenging, which is why organizations should innovate their interview processes. By leveraging different assessment techniques, simplifying the steps and looking for cultural fitness, leaders will have an easier time identifying candidates that will be successful in the position. For more information on a better way to vet candidates and find qualified applicants, contact prosourceIT today.
