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Making Good Impressions in the Recruiting Process

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The impressions you make throughout the recruiting process impact how candidates feel about working for your company. This affects whether current and future candidates decide to apply with or accept job offers from your organization.

Many candidates share their impressions of a company on Glassdoor or other employer review sites. This influences whether other job seekers decide to apply to your openings.

As a result, you must form positive impressions throughout your recruiting process. These tips can help.

Follow these guidelines to make positive impressions on candidates throughout the recruiting process.

Share Clear Job Descriptions

Use simple language to describe the job duties and responsibilities.

  • Choose gender-neutral language to encourage people of all genders to apply.
  • List the top three to five requirements to open up the role to more applicants.
  • Include the most important information first.
  • Use bullet points, active verbs, and short sentences to ease reading.
  • Share whether the role involves managing team members.

Streamline the Application Process

Make it simple to apply for a position.

  • Ensure your careers page is easily visible and navigable.
  • Provide short, clear application directions.
  • Let candidates apply without creating an account and logging in.
  • Offer LinkedIn or resume parsing.
  • Limit your application process to one page.
  • Make your application mobile-friendly.
  • Ensure your file size limits are generous.
  • Provide free-response spaces to copy and paste writing samples or URL links to work samples.
  • Email a confirmation for application submission.

Regularly Follow Up

Let candidates know whether they are advancing to the next step of your recruiting process.

  • Email an interview invitation or rejection as soon as possible.
  • Use a human email address to message candidates.
  • Respond to candidate questions, thank-you notes, and follow-ups.
  • Talk with candidates over the phone before asking them to complete a skills test or assignment.
  • Clarify the directions and timeline for the test or assignment.
  • Thank candidates for finishing the test or assignment.
  • Clarify the next steps in your recruiting timeline.
  • Provide hiring updates along the way.

Clarify Interview Expectations

Send candidates a calendar invitation with interview information.

  • Include how many interviewers are involved, their names, and whether they will be live or virtual.
  • Share how long the interview should be, where to park, and how to enter the building.

Conduct the Interviews

Begin each interview at the scheduled time.

  • Offer the candidate water or coffee.
  • Explain the interview process.
  • Maintain eye contact as often as possible.
  • Ask the same questions of applicants for the same job.
  • Take notes.
  • Thank the candidate for their time.
  • Let the candidate know when you will be in touch.

Follow Up

Let candidates know as soon as possible whether they are advancing in your recruiting process.

  • Include whether you will consider the non-selected candidates for future opportunities.
  • Provide a job offer if appropriate.
  • Send a candidate feedback survey.

Looking for Additional Advice?

Partner with RightStone for more help with your recruiting process. Find out more today.

Reducing Bias in the Hiring Process

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Biases in your hiring process impact the diversity of your workforce. These conscious or unconscious beliefs cause certain candidates to be hired rather than others who may be more successful in a role.

Your employees’ diversity impacts their creativity, innovation, and productivity. This affects your company’s bottom line, reputation, and competitive edge.

As a result, taking steps to reduce biases in hiring is in your best interest. The following suggestions can help.

Implement these tips to minimize bias in your hiring process.

Educate Your Hiring Team

Train your hiring team on unconscious biases. This includes unfairly treating a candidate because of their race, skin color, or national origin. It also involves bringing aboard a candidate because their background, beliefs, and interests are similar to the decision-makers’.

  • Identifying unconscious biases helps your hiring team understand how their perspectives impact hiring decisions and workforce diversity.
  • Include what to look for and what to avoid during interviews.
  • Hold your hiring team accountable for minimizing bias in their hiring decisions.

Update Your Job Descriptions

Your job descriptions need to be as inclusive as possible to increase diversity in your candidate pools.

  • Include gender-neutral language.
  • Use a clear job title, such as “Application Developer” or “Data Analyst,” to attract the right candidates.
  • List only the three to five necessary qualifications to perform the work to increase the number of females and people of color who apply.
  • Mention any accommodations that can be made for candidates with wheelchairs or special needs.
  • Use HR software to uncover other biases involving race, age, physical ability, or other protected classes.

Require Skill Tests

Testing for the necessary IT skills lets you compare candidates based on their performance rather than personal characteristics. This indicates whether a candidate would be successful with your company.

Conduct Structured Interviews

Ask the same questions in the same order for the candidates interviewing for a role. This provides an objective foundation to evaluate candidates.

  • Use a rubric to score the answers from 1 to 5.
  • Encourage your hiring team to take notes on each candidate’s answers.
  • Discuss your team’s findings to make a hiring decision.

Get Help with Hiring

Let RightStone help add IT professionals to your team. Reach out to us today.

4 Reasons Why You Should Consider Hiring Temp Workers

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Many hiring managers think they know the value temp workers provide. Some believe that temps are a thing of the past. In reality, temp workers are a core part of the U.S. workforce that may even be underutilized. 

Temp workers offer valuable skills, almost on-demand, and they do so without slowing down your business. The story of temp workers in the U.S. is a long one, and these essential employees have shaped the American workforce for the better in surprising ways. Do you need to scale your team? Here’s why you should consider hiring temp workers.  

Scale Up During Your Busy Season 

Whether you’re a ‘seasonal business’ or not, your industry likely goes through predictable peak periods where your teams are run off their feet. 

Hiring temporary workers helps you meet your needs during peak periods without worrying about paying the bills during your slower months. 

For example, you might choose to scale up before the holidays as clients prepare their sites for the season’s traffic. 

Get the Talent You Need During Short-Term Projects 

Do you have new or occasional clients who have unique needs? Taking on specialty projects requires an employee who offers those skills. But few can afford to hire these team members as permanent employees. 

Using temporary or contract workers means you can get the skills you need when you need them without worrying about finding something for them to do 365 days a year. 

Introduce Employees to Your Company on a Trial Basis 

More and more employers hire based on culture and personality rather than skills. Screening for culture isn’t easy. Moreover, even if you think the candidate is a great fit, they may decide the job isn’t for them a few months down the line. All of a sudden, you need to start the process over. 

Choosing the temp-to-hire route allows you to bring on new team members to experience the culture for themselves. The contract gives both of you an out at the end of the working relationship, which saves you from re-hiring a few weeks or months down the road. 

Save Money on Hiring 

Hiring a new employee is expensive. Back in 2015, Deloitte said the average company spent $3,500 on hiring a new employee. Given the talent shortage in IT and other industries and increase costs, you can expect it to be higher in 2020-2021. 

Working with contract employees saves your team from spending resources and productivity on finding one employee and gets you the talent you need faster. 

Ready to expand your team?

At RightStone, we know how vital temporary employees are in IT. We’ve helped change the game. Get in touch to learn more about how we place candidates with the skills and personality to help your business succeed. 

Ready to Expand Your Team? 3 Signs It’s Time to Hire

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As a business owner, you know that when you hire is as important as who you are. Adding a new employee too early or too late could derail even your best-laid plans. How do you know when it’s time to take the leap and put out the ad? These are the three signs it’s time to find a new helping hand. 

You’re Missing Out on New Opportunities 

You know you’re ready to grow your business, and prospective clients want to join in on the fun. However, you can’t find time in your production schedule or calendar to bring on a new client much less serve them well. So, you have to let them go, essentially handing their business to your competition on a silver platter. 

Missing out on new opportunities is a classic sign you need to hire. A new member of staff costs money, but they help your current team add value to every account and enable you to take on new ones. 

Your Top Performers Struggle to Meet Deadlines 

Everyone misses a deadline once in a while. However, when you reach a point where you’re paying overtime hours and your team still can’t pick up the speed on their turnaround times, then they may need the extra help. 

Hiring an extra pair of hands takes work off everyone’s plates so they can get the job done on time. 

You Need to Pitch In Every Day 

As a leader, you have a lot on your plate — like the fate of your business. You need to focus on big picture goals and management. If you’re not at the helm of your company, it doesn’t take long for a business to go off-course. Once it does, it could take months to right it again. 

While every leader should get involved in the day-to-day work, it shouldn’t dominate your schedule. Your team needs you at the helm, steering the ship. 

If you find yourself rolling up your sleeves and doing the legwork more often than not, then you could be in need of a new employee. 

Do You Recognize These Signs? 

Hiring strategically has as much to do with the timing as it does the candidate. If you are turning away business, watching deadlines fly by, and find yourself in the weeds, then you likely need to hire ASAP. 

Are you on the hunt for an extra pair of hands? RightStone can help. Get in touch to learn how the RighStone 360 process can help you get the candidates who will grow your business. 

The IT Talent Shortage Is Still On – How Are Companies Connecting with Top Talent?

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It’s common knowledge that IT staff with in-demand skills are in short supply. The combination of the allure of big tech and the high demand for specific skill sets are making it harder than ever to attract top talent. At the same time, if you can’t hire those in-demand workers, you can’t compete.

Workers with skills in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data science, and Python are some of the most sought-after in the country. Everyone wants them, but they have skills that you can’t learn overnight. Many of these workers dedicated years to building up these skills, and now, they’re reaping the rewards.

How do you connect with top talent if you can’t compete with Google and paying sky-high salaries isn’t an option? 

Improve Your Image

In-demand employees know they can seek out top salaries. While big money is attractive, it’s not what matters most, particularly to many millennials and members of Gen Z. They place as much weight on who they work for as they do what they earn.

Before you start trying to lure in new talent, ask yourself: what makes your company attractive?

Does your website include up-to-date information about what it’s like to work with you? What are your Glassdoor reviews like? What are your current and past employees sharing about you?

Your image needs to be stellar so that when a prospective candidate looks you up, they like what they see.

Ask for Referrals

You already have one of your best recruiting resources: your employees. Employee referrals are a phenomenal way to hire new staff. Not only are they cost-effective compared to advertising a position, but employees only refer the kind of people they want to work with.

Let your employees know that you have a referral scheme in place. You might be surprised by the number of employees who have a friend who would be a good fit!

Consider Contract Staff

The current hiring landscape means more and more skilled employees are also using contractor roles rather than hunting down full-time gigs. What’s more, today’s IT landscape also means that you don’t need to hire full-time permanent employees for every role. 

Contractors add real value and desirable skills to your team over the short-term. By turning to contracts, you get access to desirable skills when required without requiring a full-time commitment from either party.

Are you on the hunt for someone with cybersecurity or AI skills? We’re ready to help connect you with talented candidates who will add real value to your team. Get in touch to learn how we do what we do.

Tips for Hiring a Programmer When You Don’t Know Coding

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In order to be able to identify and recruit high-quality employees, managers in the IT industry need to understand the specific types of experience and technical expertise that they should be looking for in a candidate. This can often be a straightforward task: if a role requires a candidate to be certified in a particular type of cloud-services platform, for example, any manager can easily find out if any given candidate meets that requirement by simply asking for his or her certification. Difficulties can arise, however, if a hiring manager does not have some basic fluency in the more technical programmer jargon. In other words, it can be tricky for managers to get a clearly defined understanding of a candidate’s experience and skills without first becoming familiar with the language of the trade.

The aim of this post, therefore, will be to provide IT managers who are newcomers to the “language” of programming with some tips for hiring top-talent candidates.

Tips for Hiring Programmers

1. Understand the job requirements.

Before you interview a candidate for any role, it will be essential to first familiarize yourself with the idiosyncrasies and unique responsibilities of that particular position. In many cases, this will require you to meet with a supervisor or colleague who will work closely with the new employee. You’ll want to find out: what are the most challenging technical aspects of this role? What are the character traits that will be conducive to success in this position? You won’t need to become an expert on each of the technical duties required by the role, but you should have an understanding of the general skills that will be required for success.

 

2. Request a portfolio from each candidate.

Having a tangible, visual sample of each candidate’s work experience can provide you with a much clearer understanding of their past accomplishments and unique abilities. It may also be worth consulting with a colleague who is more well-versed in programming to more clearly understand a candidate’s portfolio.

 

3. Don’t forget to discuss the work environment.

It will (obviously) be a priority to find candidates who have the requisite background, experience, and technical skills, but it’s equally important to make sure that you find someone who will fit well within your company culture. With that in mind, be sure to ask any candidate what they value and expect from a workplace, whether or not they’re looking for a role with flexible work options, and if they work more effectively as an individual or within a team-oriented environment.

 

4. Test their skills.

If you’re not intimately familiar with the language of programmers or coders, it can be very helpful to prepare a short examination which will test a candidate’s technical skills. Tests can take place on paper or online and can either be developed in collaboration with other, more technically-fluent.

Connect with Talent Today

At RightStone, we’re working with IT candidates and top employers to make connections that last. To learn more about how to get connected with top talent, we’re here to help.