The Long Walk Of Recruitment
The second part of a series dedicated on recruitment for technological industries
The following post comes in continuation of a text published about recruitment. While the first take on the subject was more focused on the why, this is more focused on the process or framework. After your decision regarding which profile and wish skillsets, you want to onboard on the project or team, the following step is to put into action your vision.
What to prepare?
Assess the material and resources at your disposal. Is important to clarify what the job is intended for and plan how you will find the new colleague. Typically a process is composed of multiple phases:
Vibe check
Hard skills assessments
Rounds of interview
Team round
Bear in mind the more steps you add to the process, you are no longer managing recruitment but running a marathon. Is normal the more demanding the expertise requirement is, the more demanding should be the process. But also, your budget should accommodate such a level of difficulty. Example: If you have a series of 3 or 4 rounds of interviews with technical and practical assessments, you should make abundantly clear that you are paying above the market value and your project is highly motivating to work on. Your position should be the prize that an ambitious candidate should work to achieve. If you are setting the bar high for an average position, there are simply easier ways to get a pay rise out there. You will get only the desperate or candidate without choice. Therefore, you might not get the quality you would like.
Vibe check
This can save so much of your time. Normally this is done by a simple phone call with the candidate and access motivation and expectations. Both on-task and project-oriented roles and tasks, but for money as well. Be clear and direct on the salary expectations and if the candidate’s level is aligned with your budget. If not, simply wish the best of luck and continue for the next candidate.
If you notice that your budget is below the majority of your expectations, is possible the project team needs to reassess the budget or go back to the drawing board and do market research. Probably the project won’t have the available resources needed to onboard a person with a given level of skill or seniority. Just act according to the reality that you are facing, and avoid going on low-hanging fruit and recruiting the wrong person for your needed position. Is better to change strategy than manage bad work.
But the most important is to assess early on any misalignment with the position and the candidate's motivation for making the change. The goal is to avoid the investment of time with a candidate that would never be a choice. This won’t be bulletproof and during the process, some candidates might even take the initiative and leave the process with more data at their disposal. However, these candidates needed more data to make an informed decision and they would be engaged if the position was more aligned with their ambition.
The assessment
Most recruiters in technical positions, tend to organize a test to make a first hard level assessment. The magic here is how to make this assessment a reality. On paper, passing on a test seems a good idea. In practice, recruiters exaggerate the test duration, and questions misaligned with the reality of the position, making it more academic and less interesting to understand if the candidate has a good level for a given skill.
Respect the candidate’s time as well as yours. Is not feasible for a candidate who might be on several processes, to spend time on endless tests. The process needs to provide a good experience for the candidate as well. If your process takes too much effort, the candidate simply will forget the heavier process and dedicate more time to another mission with lower entry efforts. Unless you are managing a project for Google or Apple, which has a crowd of fans who target to add that entry in CVs. Even those companies, eventually will lose their momentum when the effort is not aligned with the compensation package.
You can use online platforms like HackerRank or Coderbite to perform technical tests to facilitate your selection process. And depending on the popularity of these platforms, the candidates would adapt easily to these tests. But take in consideration that the online or offline tests should not be 100% of your selection criteria items. Meaning is not because the candidate has 100% on your test, that he\she will be your top performer. Is important to have a minimum score but don’t give the test the weight that it doesn’t deserve. With the advent of AI, it will become easier for candidates to fake online test answers. If the average of your test is a 50% score, act very suspicious when you see a 100% score.
The technical assessment is just a tool at your disposal. Don’t make it too hard, not too easy. Don’t make the candidate spend 2 hours on tests, where maybe 30 min would be enough. Use this tool responsibly and aligned with your requirements.
Rounds of interviews
This is where the action will take place with the most promising candidates. Even if you don’t adopt vibe calls or technical assessments, this is the part where you will meet the new colleague. Typically, the rounds should have some sort of script or structure. Identify what will be assessed, when, and how.
The most important is to have time to explain the position, go through a set of practical and situational questions prepared beforehand, and reserve some time for the candidate to ask questions. This round of calls is bidirectional, and not only a Project Manager or Recruiter would need to sell the project but also the candidate needs to understand what is signing for. If a candidate says the project is very interesting and asks nothing about it, is probably because is saying the same thing to the other 200 recruiters. A truly interested candidate makes pertinent questions, not for the sake of just making those inquiries, but because there is a genuine interest.
But remember that you are not running a checklist, but a conversation with multiple parties. My recommendation is not to go strict on the framework and not allow maneuver in the conversation. Just let the conversation flow using your work prepared beforehand as a guideline. You should focus on allowing your candidate to shine. You want to get the best persons for the job, so allow multiple personalities to shine and show their vision and feedback.
Team round
This is the most interesting and the most challenging step to implement on some organizations. Have the possibility for the team to get to know the candidate and help on the decision process. The recruitment also needs to take into account if the candidate would adapt well to the team. This is not a matter of whether the future colleague will attend all the beer and football events organized by the team. The most important is to understand if the person would adapt to working with the new colleagues. Of course is a difficult topic to assess, but the risk is at least mitigated with a casual conversation between the project team and the candidate. It can have work-related questions or even hobby-related questions. The main objective is to understand if the personalities match. At the end of the day, you would decide and select your team members. But feel free to take feedback whenever you can.
But this round can lose its efficiency in leadership roles. Managing projects and teams might produce unpopular decisions that fundamentally only people with experience with the burden of leadership could understand. Meaning, that a team of developers and analysts might not be ready to provide valuable feedback about their new Project Manager. Maybe a forum of managers would be a better forum. Or a mix between the two. Just play around with what you can put in place and try to make a good use of the tools at your disposal.