At Humanpredictions, we’re on a mission to help tech professionals, of all walks of life, build stronger, deeper relationships with each other. As our world navigates a Fourth Industrial Revolution, every person in the tech industry is walking the same journey to building the future of our world.
As someone who sources and hires technical people, you have one of the best jobs that society has to offer. But sometimes, this reality is tough to remember because—let’s face it—there’s a lot more hard work than glamor in your role.
Between communicating with company leadership, supporting hiring managers, providing candidates with high-touch processes, and the sheer number of times you hear the word “no,” in your day, the work can feel like sorting laundry piles.
What. A. Year. 2019 was filled with growth, learning curves, and plenty of iterations. We can’t believe we’re four years old – and we wouldn’t be here without the support from the recruiting community! Here’s a recap of our notable moments and feature improvements throughout the year.
No one wants to waste their time, or to be inefficient, in their business practices. But sometimes we have blind spots that keep us stuck and prevent us from innovating.
Such is the case in tech recruiting with the commonly accepted practice of searching for candidates based on their job title instead of by their experience level with the required job skill.
Today, as tech talent continues to get increasingly harder to hire, it forces recruiters to adopt a different game plan — especially when trying to diversify to include more people from underrepresented communities. When unemployment is low, this can feel like an impossible task, but we have solutions for you.
On March 2, 2011, an ailing Steve Jobs stood on stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to announce the iPad 2. “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough – it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing,” he told the rapt audience. Speaking with his biographer, Walter Isaacson, toward the end of his life, he recapitulated his philosophy: “I like that intersection [of humanities and science]. There’s something magical about that place.”
For the past several months, we’ve been working on a project our team cares a lot about — we recently launched a diversity initiative and we want your feedback. We created an open source project to catalog the growing list of groups, organizations, and resources for diverse talent in the tech community (e.g. Black Girls Who Code, Lesbians Who Tech, and PyLadies). The point of creating an open source project is to allow anyone interested in this information to have access to it, track the evolution and growth of the list, as well as have the opportunity and ability to contribute to the list and/or the overall project and mission. In this open source project you’ll find the free Boolean search strings we’ve made for any recruiter or hiring manager working in tech to help source a more diverse pool of candidates.
It’s Armed Forces Day this weekend, and we think it’s important to give a big shout out to veterans, and to those that support veterans, as they exit the military and enter into new careers.
It’s not an easy task to start a new career after serving in the military.
Sure, putting an apprenticeship program together requires a lot of work, but have I mentioned there are some incredible outcomes and a great return on that investment that goes beyond financial gains? If you haven’t read the first two articles of this three-part series on apprenticeships, you may want to read about the building blocks and challenges first! I started by digging into what it takes to build a plan for a program and then explored the challenges companies should plan for early.
Before Monster, LinkedIn, and all other software that opened the recruiting floodgates, recruiting was a craft that required strategy, interpersonal skills, and a lot of industry-specific knowledge of your vertical. Today’s recruiter is off-putting not only because they spam a bunch of people at once for the same job, but because modern recruiters also don’t take the time to learn their respective industry. Recruiters lack the vocabulary to truly communicate with the person they’re recruiting and fail to invest time to wrap their heads around the skills, tools, and responsibilities of these positions. Instead, they put a couple acronyms into a search and send an “okay” email that is broad enough to use on repeat to everyone that matches their buzzword bingo.
Recruiting is about building relationships with other humans. At the core of good recruiting you’ll find human relationships combined with being an industry analyst. Recruiters that still specialize in the =&0=& of recruiting know the good, the bad, the challenges, and all that goes into the job they’re recruiting for. These recruiters take time to know the people that develop and hone the skills to do the jobs. These recruiters pay attention to what is happening in the industry with new technologies, demands, pivots, company trends, layoffs, and a lot of times know before the general public.
The craft is dying.
Many recruiters today aren’t really recruiting. Instead, it’s an administrative process management job of managing email campaigns and ATS reports — making it such a mindless career. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying social media and email are bad tools for recruiters to use because they can be great to show “I’m a human that you can connect with!” instead of “I’m a robot that forwarded you several phrases from a job description.” The key is that human authenticity is what inspires people to connect, not blanket emails or spam. One of the most important qualities in a recruiter is trust, and the growing number of bad recruiters breaks the system.
How do you ensure that your team and company are employing good practices? Here are some quality solutions:
=&1=&
