2018 Tech Recruting Report

Editor's Notes

• #2: Laura: Welcome to today’s program...
• #5: Vivek
• #8: 76% of recruiters and hiring managers that participated in the survey felt like their relationship is at least good or excellent. Let's click down on those that identified their relationship is excellent. Looking closer, hiring managers are roughly ½ as likely to say their relationship is excelled with their recruiting counterpart I would like to ask you our audience today where you believe you relationship is with each other. Laura please Pop the Poll. Vivek to ask Gaurav -- “ what best practices are you recommending to customers on building a healthy relationship. Gaurav -- there’s an opportunity here for recruiters to manage this perception by proactively seeking out hiring managers’ is and understanding the skills they need on thier team. This going beyond just a job description and setting expectations, communicating any discrepancies, and agreeing on a plan forward to achieve the shared goal of hiring the right developers.
• #9: Recruiters can help manage this perception by working with their hiring managers to really understand what skills
• #10: Gaurav to ask question Recruiters have a unique challenge: Hire great people, but also hire fast. Meanwhile, it’s common for hiring managers to rather not hire at all than hire the wrong person. Hiring managers’ top three priorities are all focused on quality: the right skills & culture fit, future performance, and retention. Because recruiters and hiring managers see success differently, they could be inadvertently creating friction that holds them back from achieving their ultimate goals.
• #11: Gaurav -- 30% of hiring managers and 20% of tech recruiters agree that aligning on expectations is a major hurdle in building a strong partnership with their counterpart. Recruiters should understand the nuances of the technical skills for in each role. What are the crucial “must haves” for a fullstack developer versus a back-end developer, for instance? Is your fullstack developer expected to be more focused on the front-end? In this case, you’d have a narrower search when sourcing. As a byproduct, candidates will appreciate relevancy of the roles you bring them. The mismatch in measuring success also explains why getting timely feedback is recruiters’ number one hurdle. For hiring managers, recruiting is often an additional priority to building and shipping products and managing their existing teams. But on the flip side, if they’re not giving timely feedback on candidates to recruiters, they run the risk of creating a poor candidate experience and losing out on great hires in today’s competitive market. Awareness of each other’s metrics of success is an important component of constructive conversations and, ultimately, better alignment. Gaurav to Vivek -- Vivek we got some great insights on core competencies that engineer teams are looking for and
• #12: Vivek: A lot of people emphasize knowledge of tools, like programming languages on the resume. Over 90% of hiring managers care about problem solving more so than knowledge of tools, which are teachable VMware and vSphere story is good here: Where they couldn’t fill the role for 6+ months. But they were looking for too specific of knowledge.
• #14: Laura to take this over. Finding qualified candidates is every company’s #1 challenge Across the board, teams at both large companies (>1,000 employees) and small to medium-sized companies (<1,000 employees) feel that “finding qualified candidates” is the most difficult or time-consuming part of the recruiting process. And that’s in line with what recruiters and hiring managers say they need to strengthen the recruiting process: both parties indicated that improving sourcing was within their top 2 priorities
• #16: Most people find candidates in the same way Finding the right opportunity is often still about who you know, rather than the skills you have, unfortunately. Referrals are the #1 way that recruiters and hiring managers find tech talent. While referrals can be a good source for talent, they can also lead to homogeneous teams and companies, ultimately affecting overall diversity and leading to bidding wars for the same limited pool of pedigreed talent. Companies should use a more standardized approach to find and evaluate hires based on skill. In other words, every referral candidate should go through the same rigorous evaluation and interview process as other candidates. The interview panel should also not be influenced by the referee. By focusing on the candidate’s skills, rather than who brought them in, there are fewer biases, which expands the talent pool.
• #18: Gaurav
• #19: Vivek: Hiring managers and technical recruiters both want to invest in the recruiting process, just not at the same points When asked what they’d invest in to strengthen their technical recruiting process, hiring managers and technical recruiters both had ideas for improvements. Hiring managers indicated that they’d prefer to invest in skills assessments and sourcing improvements, whereas technical recruiters would rather invest in sourcing improvements, then in tech talent branding. While skills assessments can help quickly cut down to the most qualified candidates, tech talent branding can help to attract desirable candidates in the first place. Both perspectives may have something to teach here. Gaurav: Hiring managers should rethink tech talent brand to help find qualified developers Even though sourcing is the biggest challenge, and recruiters want to invest more in fixing this, recruiters are more enthusiastic about tech talent branding than hiring managers. In the hyper competitive developer market, building a strong tech talent brand is an underrated strategy to garner more self-selected candidates into your talent funnel. This entails building public-facing assets, like engineering blogs, securing conference speaking opportunities, and creating a local community around the product you’re building. Some of the best tech companies, like Stripe, Slack, and Twilio have brands that developers love. Strong tech talent branding is a long-term investment. The stronger the brand, the more organic applicants you get, and the easier it is to attract talent in the future. The success of a strong tech talent brand is more dependent on engineering than recruiting; and yet, recruiters are almost twice as likely to invest in tech talent branding than hiring managers. There’s an opportunity to educate hiring managers on the merits of tech talent branding.
• #20: Laura to ask At some point or another, anyone who is involved in tech hiring finds a gem of a candidate who wouldn’t pass the resume screening. This was the case for Randstad’s head of data science who found a gem by the name of Adriana Rivera, a software developer who made her return to programming after a 14-year hiatus as a stay at home mom. Luckily, her programming skills spoke louder than the gap on her resume. Programming is not conducive to traditional resumes. Consider that over 70% of developers are at least partially self-taught, according to the 2018 Developer Skills Report. If you’re vetting candidates by CS degree, you’re missing out on millions of skilled candidates.
• #21: You don’t need to have a CS degree from a top school to be a good developer and our research shows that recruiters and hiring managers understand that. In fact, 75% say they’ve hired a great candidate from a non-traditional background. When asked what 3 most important qualifications they look for before an onsite, both technical recruiters and hiring managers agreed that previous work experience is their top priority (77%), followed by years of experience (45.8%), and personal projects (37.3%). On the flip side, more traditional asks, like skill certifications or prestigious educations both ranked in the bottom half of the priority list. The bottom line: Hiring teams are much more interested in the proven skills and historic performance of a candidate than they are in their “pedigree”.
• #22: Vivek to do the conclusion.