What Is Technical Recruiting?
Let’s start with the basics and answer this core question ‒ What is technical recruitment? This involves defining job requirements, sourcing tech candidates, screening and assessing their skills through technical and behavioral interviews, making hiring decisions (and in some cases, onboarding new team members). Correspondingly, technical recruiters are specialized in working with tech roles, meaning software developers (front-end, back-end, and full-stack), ML & AI developers, DevOps specialists, Data analysts, etc.
Sounds simple enough, yes? Yet, Huntly is an innovative tech recruiting platform where IT recruiters can apply their expertise, as it’s a community of professionals passionate about their occupations, willing to thrive in their careers, reshape the industry, and in turn earn decent money.
Tech Recruiting VS Traditional Recruiting
As you can guess from the namings and definition of tech recruitment in the previous block, the difference between tech and traditional (also known as general or non-tech) recruiting lies in the positions they associate with. Speaking about the IT industry, non-tech positions include but aren’t limited to marketing specialists, content writers, sales managers, project managers, or administrative positions, etc.
Contrary to talent acquisition specialists from other fields, tech recruiters need to have special knowledge of technologies, understand the purpose of their use, ask correct tech questions to assess the candidates and be able to differentiate the right answers from the wrong ones.
Top Tips For IT Recruiters
Whether you’re a new or professional tech recruiter, keep in mind the following tech recruiting strategies to find the best tech talents.
Develop a Deep Understanding of Technical Roles
As I have already mentioned, this quality is important for tech recruiters. So for example, if you’re looking for a React developer, you should have an understanding of technologies such as React itself, JavaScript, Redux, JSX, etc. If you need to hire a Web3 developer, pay attention to their familiarity with programming languages like Solidity, Rust, or Vyper, Web3.js or other libraries, as well as core web development technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
One of the tips to hire IT specialists is to not only learn the names of technologies but also understand when and why software engineers use each of them. Taking this into account, tech recruiters should take special courses to get a basic understanding of the IT sphere and its technologies. It’s also a frequent occurrence when tech recruiters have a previous background in software development or quality assurance ‒ such experience helps them spot top tech talents quickly and effectively.
Use Niche Platforms
Quality sourcing is one of the core steps that increases the chances of hiring the right specialist. While you can surf traditional job boards, you’ll benefit much more from using tech-focused sourcing tools to find relevant candidates. Some of the most popular tools are GitHub, StackOverflow, and LinkedIn.
In case you need to find a software developer with narrow skills or expertise, I want to share one of the most useful tips for IT recruiters: take advantage of an X-ray search. Also known as Boolean search, this sourcing approach allows you to use Google to find candidates with very specific parameters. The main commands used during the X-ray search are:
- quotation marks to search for a specific job title of technology,
e.g. “front-end developer”;
- AND to include all keywords necessary for the search,
e.g. “React” AND “Angular” AND “Node.js”;
- OR to look for one of the required technologies,
e.g. “React” OR “Angular”;
- parenthesis to join different requirements,
e.g. (“JavaScript”) AND (“React” OR “Angular”);
- NOT to exclude a specific parameter from the search,
e.g. (“React” OR “Angular”) NOT “Vue.js”.
And if you add a specific site at the beginning of your search query, you’ll also get a list of profiles from that source.
Thus, using the Boolean search is one of the most powerful recruiting strategies when searching for technical positions. It provides you with precise results and saves you a lot of time.
Craft Clear Job Descriptions for IT specialists
A clear job description is a must in technical recruitment: it saves you the trouble of filtering out irrelevant CVs by attracting only the right candidates. The more comprehensive the job description is, the more relevant pipeline you’ll get. So before you move to other IT recruiting strategies, make sure to have a detailed JD on hand.
At Huntly, we understand the importance of a clear job description, so we do our best to provide our recruiters with the most detailed information from our employers. In addition to a comprehensive description of every vacancy on our platform, we have a special Huntly Insights section. This block gives our recruiters additional information they need to select the best-matching talents (and sell the position to them).
Build a Personal Recruiter Brand
While this piece of advice doesn’t lie on the surface, you shouldn’t neglect to work on your personal brand. If you’re a self-employed or freelance recruiter, this might become one of the most beneficial technical recruiting tips for you. When looking for a developer, you don’t just do mechanical tasks but also need to talk to candidates and catch their attention. You definitely need to possess strong communication skills to do this. However, that might not be enough. Top tech talents want to work with top professionals and an outstanding personal recruiter brand can help you build strong connections with the most prospective candidates.
To build your brand, you definitely need to be an active social media user. A LinkedIn profile is a must, plus you can actively use Facebook and X (Twitter) to promote yourself. Make sure to share expert content there as well as good reviews from former and present employers. That’s how you showcase your expertise and build trust with your contacts (who just might become your top candidates one day).
Implement Technical Assessments
As a tech recruiter, you’re responsible for organizing the hiring process in a way that demonstrates the maximum of a candidate's skills, and this is where tech interviews come into play. But before inviting your candidates to a tech interview, one of the good IT recruitment strategies I would advise is to ask them to do a tech test. This will help you spot the most promising candidates and gauge their tech skills during an interview. It’s important to hold such interviews with a hiring manager or tech lead since they usually have a deeper tech background and can evaluate a candidate’s expertise with more precision.
Often, this is the least favorite part for many tech recruiters. Candidates often refuse to perform test tasks or just disappear. Also, it may be difficult to pick a time slot on a Tech Lead’s tight calendar. But you can avoid all of that on Huntly since all tech interviews and assessments are performed by our clients without your participation. So, you just need to make sure that you upload a CV of a relevant candidate and earn decent bonuses for the sourcing part only.
Engage with IT Communities
The list of IT recruitment tips wouldn’t be complete without this piece of advice. The more you communicate with people from your industry the more you grow, both personally and professionally, and this is what we truly believe in at Huntly. That’s why we created a Slack community where we keep in touch with our recruiters, whether they have any work-related questions or just want to discuss recent news in the recruitment technical world.
In addition to joining professional communities and social media groups, you can also attend local or online global IT conferences to network with tech specialists and grow your candidate base.
To sum up, technical recruiting strategies vary greatly, so it’s essential to mix them to succeed in IT recruitment. If you haven’t implemented any of these IT recruitment techniques into your working routine yet, start doing it right away! You shouldn’t try to apply all of them at once, but by starting with one strategy at a time, you can take your tech recruitment results to a new level.
And if you want to grow professionally and financially as a technical recruiter — join Huntly without hesitations. This is the final piece of advice from my side.
