Tag Archives: IT recruiting companies

IT Recruiters Work Late

The IT staffing industry is certainly not a 9-5pm.  IT recruiters typically get into the office at 8am, then work until 6-7pm at night.  The most successful technical recruiters then check their Blackberry or iPhone throughout the night and respond back to any strong/interested candidates for their IT jobs.  The very best IT recruiters Boston also jump back online to conduct additional IT job searches from the comfort of their own home.

Due to the fact most all job boards, such as Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder and now Linkedin, and now many IT recruiting companies also have web-based databases such as Bullhorn, technical recruiters Boston can do much of their work from home and see the same user interface as they would in the office of their respective IT recruiting firm.

Therefore, if you’re entertaining becoming an IT recruiter, be sure you know what you’re getting into and the hours you’ll need to commit to in order to be successful.  The harder technical recruiters MA work, the more commissions they ultimately make.

Submit Your Resume to An IT Recruiter or Client?

You see an IT job posting for a company that you’re very interested in working for – then you see the same position posted by various IT recruiting companies.   Who do you submit your resume to and do you submit to mulitple IT recruiters.  The answer might surprise you.  Submit your resume to the technical recruiter at the IT recruiting firm that is most reputable and/or you have a relationship with.  Here’s why:

1)  Submitting directly to the client could go into an HR black hole.  Remember that not HR are trained to recruit on IT jobs.  Therefore, even if they receive your resume, they may not know whether your a fit for the position.

2)  Once you submit your resume directly to the client, you’re “their property.”  Therefore, if IT recruiters Boston try to submit you thereafter, the company could reject it (then never even contact you).

3)  The IT staffing company may have a relationship with the direct hiring manager.  Therefore, by working through the IT recruiting agency, your resume may not only go directly to the source, the IT recruiter may be able to pursuade the IT manager to speak or meet with you based on their relationship.

Therefore, working directly with IT recruiting agencies is your best chance of landing that next information technology opportunity.

Power Hiring in Technical Recruiting

Technical recruiters on top of their game understand that placing technical candidates within any industry isn’t just about matching a skill-set to an IT job description. There’s a lot more to consistently producing winning candidates who clinch IT jobs than pure background & skills. The IT recruiters who understand the issue of fit will be the one who comes out ahead in most cases.  Technical recruiters who consults mentors who have been in the staffing industry longer than themselves will find that they can learn from techniques developed by veterans of the industry — a practice known as benchmarking. Top performing IT recruiters Boston who have developed strong benchmarking strategies have a track record of success stemming from their ability to continually replicate the process of making strong information technology candidate recommendations that result in strong hires.

What are the secrets to identifying a high performer? A technical recruiter will have limited access to a candidate — perhaps communicating by phone & email, & sometimes in person, but for limited periods of time. With only a small window of time available to assess a candidate’s strength’s, weaknesses, personality, culture fit & potential red flags, a technical recruiter has to have an arsenal of pointed questions. An ineffective question is wasted time, so IT recruiters need to constantly analyze what each question they pose during screening reveals to them about the technical candidate. If even one question IT headhunters tends to ask an IT candidate doesn’t have a solid answer to this question, the question should be discarded. Time is of the essence, so a question that fails to bring new information to light takes up time both a candidate & IT recruiting companies can’t afford to lose. An efficient interviewing process is one example of a benchmarking strategy, but the best way to learn more is to network directly with IT staffing companies with high placement rates. Contact successful technical recruiters on Linkedin, or at tech networking events & ask them for their thoughts. The quickest route to achievement is to benefit from other’s trial & error, & resulting sucesses.

IT Recruiters Should Prep Candidates For Counter Offers

Counter offers can be heartbreaking for IT recruiters.  After putting in countless hours into their IT search, meeting with prospective candidates, coordinating IT job interviews and helping streamline a new hire, having a candidate back out of a placement due to a counter offer can be very deflating.   To help ensure prospective candidates don’t blindside your technical recruiters, we suggest IT recruiting companies do the following:

1)  Provide training:  Teach your IT recruiters Boston how to properly roll out an offer.  Create a checklist that technical recruiters need ask a candidate when attempting to get their committment for a new IT job opportunity.

2) Be thorough:  When going through a “lock down” checklist, be as thorough as possible.  If they’re working, find out what their motivation is to leave?  Is it the commute?  People they work with?  Opportunity?  Financial stability of the company?  If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then even after a strong counter offer, the candidate’s situation will likely not change.

3)  Prep your candidates:  Every time IT headhunters roll out an offer to a candidate who is currently employed, be sure to prep them for a counter offer from their current client.

4)  Ask hypothetical questions:  IT recruiting agencies should make sure their technical recruiters ask hypothetical questions when preparing their candidates for counter IT job offers.  Examples of some hypothetical questions would be:  “What would you do if your company countered?”  “Is there anything your current company could do to keep you if you gave your notice?”  “Is there any financial number that would keep you from leaving?”

While prepping candidates for counter offers won’t guarantee the IT job seeker won’t turn down your opportunity after the fact, it certainly does help minimize the risk for technical recruiting companies.

IT Staffing Agencies vs Human Resources

For IT recruiting companies, human resources is a department that often sparks feuds and a source of friction.  However, in some cases, HR is actually a critical ally for IT staffing firms and various independent technical recruiters.  Here are two scenarious that provide positive and negative repercussions when HR and IT staffing companies collide:

Positive:  In many companies, all contract and permanent IT hiring is channeled through human resources.  Therefore, from the perspective of IT recruiting firms, getting to know the key HR figures is a key component to success for technical staffing agencies.  Furthermore, instead of getting to know every line manager, from the Help Desk to Applications Development, IT recruiters can focus their effort on building relationships with just a handful of key personnel in the Human Resources department to secure all open IT jobs.

Negative:  Some HR departments look at IT recruiting agencies as competition and fear their job may be on the line if they outsource too many high-tech positions to technical recruiting companies.  Therefore, it’s

Additionally, some HR departments are in an internal power struggle with the various IT managers and staff to get everything centralized.  Therefore, when IT staffing agencies circumvent HR and get information technology needs directly from hiring managers, this undermines everything they’re trying to do from a process persective.

Therefore, while HR and technical recruiters can work well with one another, and ultimately need one another, there can be friction in many situations.  IT recruiters Boston never know until they contact each new client as every company is different.

Can Facebook Help Your IT Job Search?

Everyone’s favorite social networking site, Facebook, plans to launch its own job board later this summer. The board will aggregate IT job postings from third-party sites and make them searchable to Facebook users. Considering the massive reach of the site, 955 million monthly active users, of which more than half are daily users, 552 million, the idea may seem like a dream for all IT recruiters, IT job seekers, employers or IT recruiting companies. Two debates are raised however on the effectiveness and appropriateness of Facebook as a professional IT job seeking and technical recruiting tool.

One fundamental question for Facebook’s potential new job board is how to publish open positions to its multitude of users. The site exists to promote social networking and while it may be one aspect of this, IT job searching is not the main reason people visit Facebook. If IT jobs were to solely take the form of ads on the side of the page, they could likely be ignored as most other ads on Facebook are. Another proposed idea is to include job postings directly in newsfeeds, using information in a user’s profile and timeline activity to match particular interests or skills. Considering the way we use Facebook, newsfeed job postings may be annoying and overlooked. Maybe Facebook should call up one of Boston’s top IT staffing firms and have our web designers and programmers create the solution.

As AVID IT recruiters Boston can tell you, matching the perfect candidates with our IT job openings is tough work. Considering my own carefully maintained Facebook profile and those of my many friends, it seems the information published by Facebook users may not provide the best source for matching technical jobs. Facebook profiles most often do not include extensive information about one’s professional experience, interests, or skills. Listing a workplace or position is not even a profile requirement.  Take a look at Facebook’s professionally minded step-sister, LinkedIn, on the other hand. LinkedIn by design is a means to display your information technology career information in detail and invite employers and IT recruiters MA to view it and reach out. A Facebook profile showcases very different aspects of one’s life – 1000s of pictures from college and your recent family trip, life updates and that great song you just listened to, rather than your project details at work.

There’s always the risk too of showcasing the wrong personal life details with the wrong professional contacts. People have failed interviews and lost jobs for precisely this reason. If Facebook users were to alter their profiles to make them more professional in nature and appealing to IT recruiting firms, by deleting those photos of you and your college roommates at the bar in matching pumpkin Halloween costumes (guilty) and adding complete professional resume details (boring) wouldn’t we lose the appeal and charm of our most beloved and addicting work distraction (just kidding, boss)?

LinkedIn was built as a professional networking site, allowing users to make connections with people they are not necessarily friends with, or may not even know personally, but who may provide insight into a desired career. We understand Facebook as a place for friends to connect and share socially with each other (even those 200 “friends” you’ve barely, or never, met but you still convince yourself it’s not creepy to look through every picture from their last trip to the beach.) While all IT job seekers should be using LinkedIn to connect with other IT professionals who offer networking opportunities and career advice, do you really want to “friend” your IT recruiter on Facebook?

Selecting the Right IT Recruiting Firm for You

Finding the right IT staffing company can be difficult….especially in an area like Boston where there are so many IT recruiting firms to choose from.  To help you find the right technical recruiting company that is right for you, and ultimate an IT recruiter who you can build a relationship with, try the following approach:

1)  Cast a wide net:  Do a Google search for IT recruiting companies.  Consider doing a more targeted search if there is a geographic location you’re looking at such as IT recruiting companies Boston.

2)  Look for reviews of each technical staffing firm, then narrow your list down to 8-10 IT recruiting agencies that have the best feedback.

3)  Review the websites of the list of IT staffing firms on your short list and narrow it down to your top 3-5 IT recruiting firms.

4)  Contact each IT recruiting company and speak with one of their technical recruiters.  If you feel comfortable with the person, set up a time to meet in person.

Building a relationship with an IT recruiter is one of the most important components to a successful IT job search.  This will ensure he or she calls you first the minute the appropriate technical jobs opens up.

Coping with Competitive Atmospheres in the Technical Industry

Technical candidates have a range of company atmospheres that best match their personal comfort levels. Some IT pros prefer finance environments, which tend to be fast-paced & high-stress, while others find working at a nonprofit or educational institution more their preference. Regardless of what point on the scale of competition a company lies on, however, what most companies will have in common is some range of competition – between coworkers, between competitors, or simply as a team effort to achieve company goals. How technical candidates cope with stress will determine whether it drives them forward or holds them back. Technical recruiters, who are familar with coping techniques for stress because the nature of their jobs is high on competition, deadlines & unexpected turns of events, are in an ideal position to advise technical candidates entering a potentially stressful work environment on best managing within the atmosphere.

Technical Career Development

Technical candidates can make use of a variety of tools as they seek to map map out a path to career advancement. Technical professional development can happen through membership in a technical organization, through networking with other technical professionals, or through mentorship. Technical recruiting companies can provide key tools to technical candidates to facilitate their potential for success. Among the interview prep services an IT staffing firm can provide to boost a talented technical candidate’s chances of interview success is interviewing role play. Especially for technical positions that involve a phone screen & face-to-face interview stage, a technical recruiter willing to guide a technical candidate through a practice run of each type of interview will have a much higher chance of placing a solid candidate than IT recruiter who preps a technical candidate minimally.

When IT recruiters coach technical candidates for interviews, they should be sure to cover several main topics. Environment is key subject for a technical recruiter to go in-depth on, as a candidate who is technically proficient, but not a culture fit won’t pass final interviewing rounds. Another often overlooked, but significant factor to familiarize a technical candidate with is the company’s organizational structure, and more importantly, the hierarchy structure of the specific company group the technical candidate would be working with. Sample interview questions will also help a technical candidate to formulate answers that are concise & consistent – crucial for a good interviewing “story”. Reviewing common questions such as inquiries about long-term goals will help a candidate respond effortlessly when the real deal comes around. Finally, a little positive encouragement never hurt anyone’s interviewing chances! Letting a candidate know they’re a natural fit for the role (if it’s your genuine opinion) & that they’re in a great position to perform to win during the interview will be a plus for a technical candidate & IT recruiters’ chances of a successful placement.

Leading in Technical Engineering

Technical recruiters who want to best understand how to identify top candidates for technical engineering positions should have a good understanding of the role of a technical engineering leader. The ability to recognize leadership traits & categorize leadership ability or potential separately from other good professional qualities will make recruiting for management-level technical engineering roles easier. Directors in technical recruiting understand that there are technical, functional & interpersonal aspects of technical leadership. A technical engineer in a leadership function needs to have a range of skill-sets that a technical professional in non-management levels of the same role may not have, or need — at least until he or she advances into a leadership role!

The important skills – what should IT recruiters know about the skills a technical engineer should have when coaching a technical canditate seeking to enter a leadership role for the first time? A technical engineer expecting to enter a management role should be prepared to collaborate with product management to define a product roadmap, hiring motivated employees, interfacing regularly with senior management, and adressing budgeting concerns. Management in IT is different from non-management technical positions, so technical recruiters and technical candidates who understand what’s involved to make the leap will be best positioned to reap the benefits of the preparation.