The 3 things that you are making you not connect with your candidates during an interview

A successful interview is not the one that results in a hire; it is the one in which the interviewee feels that they are speaking with a peer, with someone who can “speak their language”.

A lot is read and heard about this topic: “Recruiters do not have technical knowledge, they do not know what they are talking about,” “The recruiter did not provide me with any information about almost nothing”, “It was not an interview, it was just them asking questions, and provided no information about the company or role”, etc. 

Over the years, I discovered that those phrases that I had heard so many times were true, unfortunately real. Now, how can we change that? 

The initial interviews (or screening) that 90% of us, recruiters, execute, lack technical information about the proposal or position we seek to present and sell. This fact considerably reduces the possibility that the person we are interviewing (and the dozen of others who have been interviewed along the way) will continue to be interested throughout the process unless the company itself manages to “close” the circuit quickly by providing the context that, at first, was missing.

We can avoid and improve those first steps without having to be engineers or developers, we can provide the information and details that help to sell and better show what our client/company offers and maintain a “comprehended” boundary with the person that is walking the path of a job change with us.

Brief tips for a successful recruitment in IT:

*Context and information about the company we are featuring (be it a client or my employer). If, as  recruiters, we cannot provide valuable information about the company, its current situation in the market, how they are growing, and why they are hiring new employees, it is difficult for the person on the other side to imagine working at it. Part of the job of our selling speech needs to ensure that the interviewee gets excited about the possibility of working for our client/employer. 

*Clear definitions of the actual technical need. For that, we had to have spoken with the client or technical team, asking for details that would allow me to have a “rough” idea of where the product/project and the technical team is standing concerning their work. (The questions/orientation of the information will vary according to the position that is sought to be filled)

At this point, it is essential to clarify that it is not suggested that we are obliged to have technical knowledge nor to be experts in development, infrastructure, or Machine Learning. However, part of the commercial task (we already discussed this in our previous post) implies minimal training that lets us know what we are talking about. I am NOT referring to the IT recruitment courses that are sold everywhere; I am referring to something more linked to understanding tools, technologies, and the software development cycle as a whole (we will return to this in future posts). We should ask ourselves why we are working in technology, why we have chosen that over other industries to expand our business/career. 

* Accurate knowledge of how and why that position is open to new candidates. 

It is essential to understand why and how the role is going to add value to the project/company; we need to transmit and share that with our interviewee. If we don’t understand it, we can hardly explain it to someone on the other side.

BELIEVE in our recruiter role as the person trained to be the enduring connection between a company and a person interested in it. If we have the knowledge and realize the true value of our role, we will be more successful in the outcome. This, I believe, occurs in any task that is faced and in any position. The challenge in recruiting is high, and the daily frustration we face is vast. Still, it is a challenging role, a role that can make a difference in the growth and formation of a company and, particularly, of a technical team.

We are not asked to understand everything, to know in detail what CircleCI, and Mokito are used for or what reactive programming is. Nor will they pretend that we know how to write three lines of code when interviewing them. But it is worth a lot, and it changes a lot to be able to talk about what we know or can find out, what we can understand.

The technical effort can be a plus that will undoubtedly be worth a few “pins” to whoever is interested. Our role is, once again, about knowing what we are talking about and having the honesty to assume what we do not know. Our focus should not be only the number of hires, the final result, but on leaving the good process honored so that people trust our work again; choose us again.

By Agostina D’Alo. Founding partner at BeRecruiting.