How to be a Successful Technical Recruiter in a Competitive Market

Being a successful tech recruiter is a moving target, as tech evolves rapidly, many organizations need to move quickly to staff new projects and initiatives. 

Tech recruiting has proven particularly challenging over the last two years, as many employers accelerated digital transformation amid the pandemic, the rapid rise of remote work, and increasing economic pressures. The good news is that even if you’re an experienced recruiter or new to the tech hiring world, you can still learn to improve your chances of success in your tech hiring initiatives, no matter the global market.

Before diving into the advice, let’s look at the challenges currently facing tech recruiters. Earlier this year, Salesforce’s Global Digital Skills Index revealed that tech skills are lacking across job functions, with 76% of respondents reporting they don’t feel prepared to meet the demands of a digital-first workplace. Within the tech industry, the talent shortage continues to grow alongside stiff competition for top talent — especially if you hope to engage with tech professionals who were recently laid off or are thinking about making a move. 

No matter how you slice it, the stakes for technical recruiters are high — but there are many effective strategies tech recruiters can adopt to come out on top. 

Recruit the whole candidate

Historically, tech recruiting has focused on skills first, and everything else about the employer-employee relationship comes much later, including conversations about work location and schedule, organizational culture, workflows, compensation, and benefits. Now, job seekers across all industries are just as interested in the things that influence their quality of life and work-life balance as they are in the day-to-day job requirements and career potential. Recent research tells us that workers in the tech industry report a better work-life balance than other sectors, and we can assume they want to keep it that way.

Recruiters must be prepared to answer any and all job seekers’ questions about your organization. Ideally, you’ll also be able to share recruiting content (careers website, videos, virtual events) that helps job seekers get to know your org before or after they apply. Having these kinds of “self-service” options available to job seekers can help build interest and engagement before they get a chance to speak with you.

Read more like this: The Tech Recruiter Handbook 2022

Leverage internal engineering teams

Recruiters don’t know everything that engineering teams do — and nobody should expect that they’ll learn. So it’s vital to have a strong relationship with your internal engineering teams and work together as partners to find the talent they need. Good (meaning clear and regular) communication goes a long way toward building trust. 

In tech hiring, “hard” skills (like coding) get most of the attention, but evaluating candidates for “soft” skills (or “core competencies”) is just as important. To learn how to be a successful technical recruiter, you need to understand how engineering teams work, what collaboration methods they use, and what soft skills a new hire will need to be successful in their role.

Working closely with internal teams on talent acquisition is called “collaborative hiring,” — and it might be the best-kept secret for successful technical recruiting. Collaborative hiring can help recruiters improve (i.e., more effective) at their job and produce better hiring outcomes for engineering teams.

Use the right tech tools to support talent acquisition 

Having a close relationship with engineering managers and their teams is essential when it comes to skills assessments when hiring for technical roles. Your tech teams will help set guidelines around what types of skills you need to identify in a potential hire. 

Fortunately, today’s technical recruiters have access to tools that make skills assessments for tech candidates easy. CodeCheck allows recruiters to gather objective information about a candidate’s knowledge relevant to the role in question, and CodeLive facilitates live whiteboarding sessions so engineering teams can run code interviews at scale. 

The Codility Task Library and templates help hiring teams create tests that effectively evaluate a range of skills, and our candidate profile feature provides a seamless illustration of each candidate’s journey, including assessment scores, for easier hiring decisions.

With these tools, our clients have saved time, boosted employer branding, engaged with more candidates, improved gender equity, and increased retention. To learn more about the benefits of the right technology, explore these customer stories:

• Unity saved 2,000 hours of recruiting time over 90 days
• Okta expanded its talent pipeline and tested 2,399 candidates,
• Zalando is on track to achieve a 40% female workforce by 2023 

Build scalable and inclusive recruiting processes

Creating a more equitable and inclusive hiring process — both in experience and in outcomes — is the responsibility of every tech employer. Communicating your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is an important first step in recruiting because many job seekers will not pursue an opportunity with an organization that doesn’t have a transparent position. Glassdoor research found that 76% of job seekers say DEI is an important factor, and 32% would not apply to work at an organization with a lack of diversity among its workforce.

It’s just as important to look at your recruiting practices and processes. Skills-based hiring supports equitable recruiting decisions by providing evidence-based information on candidates and reducing the impact of unconscious bias. It’s easy to weave skills assessments into a smooth and transparent candidate experience that gives every job seeker a sense of fairness. 

More on valid testing: Five Benefits of Using Valid Online Hiring Tests for Technical Jobs

Share feedback with candidates

According to LinkedIn, most (94%) job seekers want feedback throughout the recruiting process but less than half (41%) report receiving it. You can set your organization apart from your competition by creating a communication plan for sharing interview feedback with all candidates, including those who don’t advance, especially if you want to keep them in your talent community for future openings.

Constantly striving for progress

Learning how to be a successful technical recruiter is a never-ending process. With the steps outlined above, you can hone your strategies and skills to continually produce better results and increase your satisfaction in your new role. Truly successful technical recruiters also help influence organizational culture, leading to a more equitable, inclusive, and productive workforce. 

Get started with a product tour today, and learn how CodeCheck and CodeLive can support your journey to becoming a successful technical recruiter.