Ask the Expert: How IT Recruiters Place Candidates
What happens during the IT recruitment process? What does an IT recruiter look for in a candidate during the recruiting process? How do they find their IT candidates?
These questions top the list on what IT job seekers ask about most. This week, we’ve attempted to offer answers to these questions. Our blogs routinely offer direct advice to the IT job seeker’s journey of finding their dream IT role. We’ve taken a different angle by asking one of our IT recruiters to explore the process of placing a candidate from their perspective.
There are not many recruiters who can say they’ve been in the same position as their candidates. Most can only empathise with their struggles.
itContracting Senior IT recruiter Paul Evans had been working across IT Management, Field Engineering and Technical Support roles for most of his professional career.
He was originally recruited to become our resident Database and CMS administrator, helping to tidy up the candidate database. Yet, soon he became more involved with reference checks and candidate filtering.
“Basically because I worked in IT, I could always spot a good candidate! At first glance, I knew exactly who this candidate was in terms of their ability and skill set capacity,” says Paul.
Now one of itContracting’s Technical Resourcing and Recruitment team, he has since expanded his already broad skill set into staffing, payroll solutions, accounts management and IT recruitment.
Paul’s blog will give you some insight into how recruiting works, and you will hopefully take away some ideas that can be leveraged against your own job seeking journey.
All about the Timing
Whether you are looking to fill an open position or trying to stay in touch with candidates as they move from company to company, sourcing and placing contractors can be time-consuming and intensive work for any recruitment professional.
Recruiting contractors is all about speed and timing. Agencies are often competing to submit the best candidates first, which means you need to be the first to know when great talent is available.
In relation to speed, LinkedIn is a valuable tool for sourcing candidates. With over six million professionals identified as contractors globally on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Recruiter, you can set up an alert in LinkedIn Recruiter and get a notification immediately when a contractor in your target market, signals that they’re open to new opportunities.
Staying In the Loop
Contractors often using this feature have signalled they are open to new opportunities before they updated their curriculum vitae or even posted it to job boards. This is useful as I can check in with them regularly and keep them updated on new IT contracting roles coming to the market.
Other resources such as Monster, Irish Jobs and Computer Jobs, again help to source good applicants in their fields. Yet my own background in IT gives me an added advantage that I can relate to their experience and also know instantly if they are a good fit for our clients.
Paul’s IT Recruiting Process
Once identified, I contact the potential applicant to get a feel for their requirements and to discuss the opportunity at hand. It’s a great way to understand the candidate, and it hopefully puts them at ease if they know they are talking with a technical professional and I understand their expertise.
Discussing their career trajectory is important; I like to know where they want to go professionally within their chosen field, and this includes discussion on location, salary expectations, and their requirements of the role, and to give them some information on the company recruiting.
Once the potential candidate is happy for me to put them forward for consideration, I work with them to sharpen up and update their CV, which is then passed onto the client.
Once this is received and reviewed and the client confirms they are happy to proceed to interview process, I contact the candidate to arrange an interview and also have a follow up call with them to get feedback on how they think it went.
From here, depending on the length of the interview process and time frame of the position fulfillment, I either receive or retrieve feedback from the client on any candidates interviewed.
This information is then relayed back to the candidates and I make an offer to the successful applicant, arranging the start date. Reference checks are processed before any contract is issued and follow I company procedure from here with my colleagues for this process.