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.
Tag: Tips
Reinventing recruiting by removing automation
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.”
Tech Recruiting: Improve your outreach ROI
At humanpredictions, we detect signals that tech people leave on public websites indicating they are open to making a move. We use those signals to form our proprietary “hp Priority” score. When recruiters focus their time and energy on high hp Priority scored candidates, they increase their rate of placement and have a higher return on investment with outreach efforts.
Round-Up Recruiter Emails: Let’s-Be-Real-People | May Edition
Our team gets a lot of requests for help with writing effective emails for sourcing and recruitment.
So, we thought: why not share real emails that actually worked?!
Our customers have shared great examples of emails that have sparked interesting dialogue and yielded great results. So we’ll be sharing these personality-filled emails with you for inspiration on a monthly basis going forward.
The Challenge for Veterans in Tech
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.
Your Developers Are Leaving You & It’s Not About the Money
If your developers are leaving you, then it’s time to reflect on your Money Mindset. Do these statements ring true for you?
- “They’re just going to leave in a year or two anyway, what’s the point in investing in them now? I can’t afford to just throw money away like that.”
- “We all know developers make 20% increases with every move they make. What company can afford to retain their teams with numbers like that?”
Sound familiar? This mindset would both keep quality people from joining your team, and drive current people away. Furthermore, these statements reflect a huge error in thinking about money and retention. In this blog entry, we will debunk some of the myths…
The Payoff of Hard Work and Apprenticeships
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.
Problems in Paradise – The Apprenticeship Challenge
I’m a huge supporter of apprenticeship programs because I’ve seen the opportunities these programs create for career changers, beginners, and life-long learners, but there are challenges companies should consider in the planning stage. As Dave Hoover said, “not many people talk about apprenticeships being harmful, but they can be if not done correctly.” In thinking about this statement he made in the recording of a podcast I interviewed him for (to be released later next month!), I wanted to know more. What types of challenges did companies face when building an apprenticeship program and what should companies be thinking about before getting in knee deep?
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=&1=&I’ve witnessed companies that struggle to afford software developers turn to apprenticeship programs to meet their skill demand, but what was often overlooked in that decision was the required time investment it takes. Any given team and engineering manager has to understand having a junior person on the team is going to require a certain amount of coaching and teaching. Whether investing financially or with time, there is an investment that has to be taken into consideration.
For Digital Bridge Solutions, they needed talent that wouldn’t break the bank as they scale their team to meet business demands. Yet they knew that in building an apprenticeship program they needed to be prepared to invest an adequate amount of time to get their apprentices up to speed, Joseph Purcell, Senior Developer and lead for Digital Bridge Solutions’ new apprenticeship program explained.
Meanwhile, almost every engineering team at Signal has junior people on it.
Shinji Kuwayama
Apprenticeships: The Building Blocks
Recruiting is Broken
I hear all too often that recruiting is a mindless job and I’d take offense to it except it’s not a false statement when talking about today’s average recruiter. Recruiting has turned into a button-clicking job that doesn’t take a lot of thought, problem-solving, or consideration for the craft that it used to be. Put simply, recruiting is broken.
Instead of trying to hack recruiting with Google and LinkedIn by researching everyone with Java in their profile and then emailing all of them with the same or similar emails, use better tools to solve problems. Hacks should be around things that don’t require relationships. Research is great. Dig deeper though. Not sure what I mean? Check out these posts: Resist the Spam or Intentional Recruiting for Diversity. There are some great research tips in there.
Let’s hack which humans you should take time to send a message to, but not the message itself. Don’t send a mass email. Your outreach should be a very personable thing. Remember that you are helping someone invest in their future and know that they’ll be spending a large amount of their daily, weekly, and annual hours at work. That’s a lot of responsibility and opportunity to impact someone’s life. It’s not something that should be done by someone that knows nothing about the job or the company they’re recruiting for.
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:
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