Article: How the tech space is leading the change

Talent Acquisition

How the tech space is leading the change

The right place to find suitable IT candidates has shifted from generic hiring platforms to programming websites
How the tech space is leading the change
 

Another new trend that is emerging is engineering tech blogs. These blogs act as a great source of attracting the right talent pool

 

There is great demand in the market for talent. Earlier, candidates were choosing to move from one company to the next. Now a candidate has two to three offers to choose from and is deciding the next employer considering the right fit for himself. This trend has come about due to the emergence of a number of start-ups in the IT space within the last five to six years. These companies are looking to hire quality talent and are willing to pay compensation at par with bigger MNCs along with compelling benefits and growth opportunities.

Earlier, the hiring platforms were Naukri.com and Monster.com and other online repositories. The IT industry evolved and the talent moved to programming websites like GitHub and Source Overflow where recruiters could judge the candidates on their performance. Companies have now streamlined their hiring processes even more and we have seen the emergence of a lot of programming contests and hackathons as ways of hiring and judging talent.

This transformation has also been a direct offshoot of the changing use of social media. Earlier, there used to be a handful of sites where developers used to hang out, learn programming and interact with each other. This saw a change with the emergence of GitHub and Hackerank and other such websites where the community of both active and passive candidates converged. So the right place to find the suitable candidates has shifted a lot. Companies looking to hire programmers and developers now have to market themselves on these websites. Another new trend that is emerging is engineering tech blogs. These blogs act as a great source of attracting the right talent pool. Companies have started releasing their code so programmers can see the great work that they are doing inside the company and be motivated to join such organizations.

A lot of companies are using their careers page as an interactive platform as well. Rather than having just a normal form for recording data and the resume, a number of companies are posting challenges for candidates to solve. They can enter their data only after solving a certain challenge. This ensures that a basic level screening is already done and even the candidate feel more involved.

Quora does a number of contests within their organization. Once a contest is over, they post some of those challenges on the careers page and these are open challenges for anyone to solve. A lot of candidates solve it for fun and submit these challenges on the company page. This practice has become their greatest source of finding high quality talent and also building a talent pipeline.

When hiring socially, a prospective candidate already has access to the company’s Facebook and Twitter profiles and their blogs and has gone through the company’s social footprint to be very well informed about it. So when looking to get the right candidate through social hiring, one is already looking at a candidate that is interested and there isn’t a lot of selling that needs to be done by the recruiter. It is just about finding the right fit.

When I was in college, companies used to conduct entrance exams, which went on for two to three hours. These answer sheets were then manually corrected and follow-up interviews went on till the wee hours of the night. This scene is now seeing a gradual shift and companies are moving to online assessments. The time saved with online assessments has also given companies the opportunity to go to more colleges.

However, with the emergence of so many different platforms and communication challenges, companies need to become obsessed about candidate experience. A bad candidate experience is a crime. Be it calling someone for an interview, changing the time or making someone wait, the candidate should always feel informed. Even after an interview is over, the candidate should never feel like he is not getting information about his interview status or feedback in case he gets turned down. Even if a candidate is rejected, he should still be saying good things about the company. This seamless process has to be brought about by merging technology with recruiting and making it a culture. All policies and practices should be people centric and candidate experience should be the king. If companies are able to streamline this process and utilize social right, there will always be more candidates in the pipeline than they can take.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #TalentAssessment

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