3 Ways to Save Technical Recruiter Time and Meet Hiring Targets Faster
Read our blog to learn how technical recruiters can identify, assess, and interview software engineering candidates efficiently so you can reach your hiring goals faster.
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Technical recruiters and talent acquisition teams are more likely to reach their goals when they can move faster than the competition. This means identifying, assessing, and interviewing software engineering candidates in a consistent process with as few obstacles as possible. Removing these obstacles can help teams get offers to the right candidates faster, improve onsite to offer ratios, and save valuable recruiter time that can be repurposed for strategic initiatives like improving the candidate experience.
In this blog, we will discuss three keys to saving technical recruiter time and reaching hiring targets faster.
- Keep more of the right candidates in the funnel with deeper coding skills insights
- Streamline candidate and recruiter email communication with a single dashboard
- Give developer candidates control with technical interview self-scheduling
Let’s dig deeper into each point.
Keep the right candidates in the funnel with detailed coding skills insights
Keeping more of the right candidates in the funnel can save technical recruiter time—improving hiring outcomes for both candidates and teams. Consider that the typical coding skills assessment exclusively evaluates the functional correctness of code. This means candidates who use the right
algorithms and approach to solving problems can slip through the cracks. When candidates are erroneously filtered out, that means recruiting teams need to replace them to ultimately reach their hiring goal.
When SHL’s research team reviewed the code developed in the coding skills assessment by 120,000 early career candidates, they found that just 36% would have been successful based on functional correctness alone. When looking at candidate solutions that included the correct algorithms and approach to programming, that pool of successful candidates increased to 52%. In fact, one of our clients is a leader in the eCommerce space who kept 45% more candidates in the funnel.
By evaluating and scoring logic, not just functional correctness, recruiters can keep more of the right candidates in the funnel and save themselves significant time sourcing candidates.
What can you do?
- Quantify the cost of technical sourcing. Work with your sourcing agencies, sourcing solutions, and internal team to determine how much it costs to source a software engineering candidate.
- Get familiar with how your coding skills assessment determines success. Can a great candidate be identified by coding skills insights like logic and programming best practices? If so, it may help you keep more of the right candidates in the funnel.
- Align with your software engineering leaders on what success looks like. Is your team more interested in how a candidate solved a problem, rather than landing on precisely the right answer? If they are, this could be a great opening to discuss new ways to keep candidates in the funnel.
Keeping more of the right candidates in the funnel can save technical recruiter time—improving hiring outcomes for both candidates and teams.
Streamline candidate and recruiter communication with a single dashboard
The technical recruiter is the candidate’s best friend. Recruiters are the guide and helping hand in what should be a great step forward in the candidate’s career. But often, simple things like links to assessments and useful information about the software engineering culture and the team can get lost in email. This can lead to lower sign-up rates, lower completion rates, and the efforts put into building a great brand are unable to make an impact on the candidate.
Alternatively, streamlined and consolidated communication creates the opportunity for higher sign-up rates, higher completion rates, and a clear expression of the employer brand. All of which can save technical recruiter time, allowing teams to reach hiring goals faster.
What can you do?
- Create a unique dashboard for each candidate. By simplifying access to assessments, interviews, and other important information recruiters can reduce the risk of relevant links getting lost and needing to be resent—or forgotten altogether.
- Give candidates a roadmap. Use this unique dashboard as a plan for the candidate and recruiter. The simple approach of explaining the key steps in the hiring process can keep candidates in the funnel because they know what to expect and when.
- Develop authentic employer brand content. Show who you are in this dashboard. The hiring manager, team, and innovative projects on the engineering roadmap are all compelling reasons to continue in the hiring process. These can be very straightforward videos filmed
on a phone or computer that answer the very simple question: Why should I work here? Believe it or not, you do not need high production values to create content that tells a great story.
Give developer candidates control with technical interview self-scheduling
According to the VP of People and Talent at a prominent fintech firm, “interview scheduling is a black box.” A recruiting leader at a commercial real estate infrastructure start-up shared that the back-and-forth communications required to get an interview on the books are a “waste of recruiter time.”
It takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours of emailing, calling, and texting to get a technical interview scheduled between an interviewer and a candidate. It will take even longer if a panel interview is required. Considering that it typically takes 10 developer candidates to make one hire, teams could be spending up to 20 hours per role just on interview scheduling.
These delays can negatively impact speed to hire, onsite to offer ratio, and ultimately when hiring targets are met. If the process is time-consuming, and candidates frequently drop out, why not give them the power to schedule their own technical interviews?
What can you do?
- Survey your team. Quantify how much time is spent in technical interview scheduling by an estimation. Do 10 technical recruiters each spend 10 hours per week doing scheduling? If so, that is a clear opportunity to speed up the process and improve the likelihood of meeting hiring goals.
- Test a tool. Non-integrated tools can be easy to test on a one-off basis, but they may ultimately fall short when it comes time to scale regionally or globally.
- State your case and scale. Use your survey results and outcomes from your test to state a business case for a self-scheduling solution integrated with your technical interviewing platform.
Technical recruiters can save time and reach their hiring goals faster by focusing on reducing the obstacles to identifying, assessing, and interviewing software engineering candidates. Make the process more straightforward for both the recruiters and candidates, for that is the key to successful technical hiring.
SHL Technology Hiring helps organizations hire software engineers faster and more objectively. Book a demo with our first-class team of experts today!
