In a mythical land far, far away…
Tech recruiters and talent acquisition specialists have been rumored to live in harmony with unicorns and purple squirrels. In this magical world of recruiting, a typical day looks something like this:
10.00 A.M. – Recruiters open their emails, check for job requirements and post one little job posting.
11.00 A.M. – Computers audibly shaking, you can hear the whir of thousands of applications pouring in!
Noon – You present the perfect candidate for the vacant role, gift-wrapped to your hiring manager.
Oh well, that was a good dream while it lasted! As seen above, there are plenty of misconceptions floating around about tech recruiters and how they should be able to rub a lamp, make a genie appear, and solve all the hiring problems in the world.
The actual reality looks something like a Taylor Swift song—sleepless nights, fear of not closing open roles under tight deadlines, and wistfully wishing for this magical land of recruiting to be a real one, with lyrics that go:
3 a.m. and I’m still awake, I’ll bet you’re just fine
Fast asleep in your city that’s better than mine
Recruiting teams have their work cut out for them and no two tech recruiters ever had the same journey in their career path. We’ve gone around and spoken to our internal recruiting team in depth to understand what their day looks like and what happens at each stage of the hiring lifecycle. Hop on, let us take you for an intriguing ride!
A special shoutout to our Talent Acquisition Manager, Preethi Saakre for all the insider information that shaped this blog and allowed us to go into great detail about the workings of a recruiting team!
Behind the scenes of a recruiting team in an organization
Although the overall structure of a hiring process remains the same, there can be slight changes when you are hiring at scale, conducting walk-in interviews, or looking to fill a small number of positions with 2 or 3 candidates. In this article, let’s take a look at hiring for a small number of roles.
Set the tone for the day
The first task on the agenda for the day is to check our email. Get an understanding of what roles are vacant from our hiring managers. And then set up meetings.
While we usually receive emails on open job roles, and top-level requirements to hire for these roles, we do have an in-depth discussion with our hiring manager. Such calibration meetings clarify important information like:
- A debrief of the job role we’re hiring for
- What does the ideal candidate look like for this role?
- What are the must-have skills and good-to-have skills?
- What tech stacks are we looking for?
- How many rounds of interviews do we conduct?
This will greatly help you to create accurate job descriptions and attract the right candidates for your open positions.
In a nutshell, coffee with a side of meetings!
Plan tasks and responsibilities
After our morning meeting, we spend some time answering emails, following up with candidates, and filling out paperwork. Now that we clearly understand for whom we’re hiring, we prioritize our tasks for the day, see which roles have tighter deadlines, and get to work!
Carry out market mapping for open roles
Armed with the requirements from the hiring manager, we begin to gauge the talent pool available in the market to see how many candidates would fit our industry-specific requirements. We do market mapping where we check for details that have been aggregated from several job boards like:
- Compensation range
- Years of experience
- The geographic location of the candidate pool
- Expected notice period
- Diversity of the candidate pool
While all this information is available on LinkedIn, filtering for diverse candidates is only possible on Naukri RMS. This is where you need to make the most of the Google search engine. Hiring for rather niche positions or specific skill sets calls for using boolean search strings and site-wide X-ray search capabilities for highly customized results.
Once you are aware of the kind of talent pool available for your particular open role, we need to go back to the hiring manager to let them know. Post receiving their approval to go ahead, start with sourcing and contacting qualified candidates.
Focus on inbound applications
Now that it’s settled resumes don’t fall out of the sky, let’s see how we go about getting candidates to send their resumes in.
The first thing to do is to distribute the job posting for the vacant position on all job boards. If you are using an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Trakstar, Zoho Recruit, and so on, most job boards would already be integrated with it, making it simple for you to market your job postings.
The candidates that apply through this outreach are tagged as inbound applications. Inbound recruiting relies heavily on your ability to attract candidates—meaning job postings need to be clear and concise, employer branding should be on point, and career sites have to be user-friendly. Prospective candidates need to be excited about working for your company!
Also read: 5-Step Guide To Gender-Fluid Tech Job Descriptions (+Free Checklist)
Source suitable candidates through outbound outreach
The second phase of sourcing for candidates is outbound hiring. This is where you search for and contact all active candidates (those currently looking for a job) on the available job boards like Indeed, Monster, and Glassdoor.
You can also use the InMail feature on LinkedIn or tap into Naukri RMS to source high-quality candidates.
Next, we focus on connecting with passive candidates. Especially when you are hiring for niche tech roles, passive talent would be a good bet. GitHub and StackOverflow are hotbeds of tech talent—you can see projects developers have worked on, languages and frameworks they are interested in, and so on.
This is a crucial step to getting closer to finding that elusive unicorn candidate, who you know will be just the right fit for the open role! A recent LinkedIn report shows that 62% of talent teams find more high-quality candidates through sourcing than inbound applications.
Also read: 21 Tech Recruiting Tools To Scale Your Hiring
Screen incoming resumes
All the inbound applications are captured on our ATS where every candidate’s data is parsed automatically from their resumes so it’s easy for you to go through it.
If we are hiring for generic tech roles, for instance, a software engineer with 0-1 years of experience, we directly send a screening test to the candidates. We check whether they have cleared the coding assessment or not and shortlist them accordingly. Then their profile is forwarded to the hiring manager.
For certain roles that can be tough to assess like front-end roles, even if the candidates have not entirely cleared the test, we forward the results to the hiring manager. They would further check for the candidate’s thought process and logic used while attempting to solve the problem before either shortlisting them or rejecting them.
Schedule interviews for shortlisted candidates
As discussed in the calibration meeting mentioned above, the number of interview rounds is already decided. All that remains is to set up interviews between the candidates and the hiring managers. If the candidates are mid-senior level developers or tech leads then their next round of interviews would be with the CTO and the CEO, accordingly.
For those who have been selected in these rounds, we next set up a meeting with our HR team to assess the candidates for culture fit.
This would be the last round of interviews. Post this, we begin discussing the compensation, perks, and benefits with the shortlisted candidates.
Sidebar:
Most recruiters would share a common journey up until this point in the hiring process. We carry out supporting tasks for all the above steps, in some capacity every single day.
Roll out the offer letter
Once the salary negotiation discussions are wrapped up, it is time to send the official offer letter to the candidates who made the cut. While this is an exciting part of the recruiting process, as we know, a recruiter cannot rest easy until— “Good hiring doesn’t end with finding the right person. It ends when the right person starts working for you!” – By anonymous
But not just yet. We have to do our due diligence first to ensure we’ve vetted the candidate thoroughly:
- Complete required background checks
- Call references and talk to the candidate’s previous managers
Getting verbal acceptance from your candidate before sending out the letter can increase the chances of them signing on the dotted line.
And then, **drum roll please!**
We roll out the offer letter to our candidate.
Nurture candidates to improve candidate engagement
Once the candidate accepts the offer letter and you are certain they will be joining the company, then proceed with your candidate engagement practices. We set up a buddy for them who will be able to familiarize them with the team after they join. We encourage the new hires to come to the office so they can meet different teams, understand how things work, and get a basic idea of their roles and responsibilities.
This helps make the “dreaded first day” easy for the candidate since they already know what to expect and whom to reach out to in case they are stuck.
Time for onboarding
A general practice for talent acquisition teams is to connect the selected candidates with the onboarding team, 10 days prior to their joining the company. This ensures the candidates have a smooth transition and have everything they need for the first day, including their laptop, email access, and other things.
To welcome your candidates and make them feel like they belong right from the start, send them company merchandise, goodies, and swag that they can use.
Also read: Streamline Your Recruitment Process With These 7 Tips
To understand a recruiter’s job in a nutshell, here are 7 things that the recruiting team at HackerEarth carries out on a daily basis!
No magic potion, just plain hard work
Well, we tried to bust as many myths as possible about recruiters and tech recruiting in general. The bottom line, our job is to match the best person to the role and hiring manager—we are the people who bring in the people!
If you think that sounds simple, we are here to tell you it’s anything but.
One of the major reasons for penning this article was to bring to light the amount of effort that goes into finding the perfect candidate. As you can see, it is a LOT. We do have some tricks up our sleeves but that’s the extent of it. No potions, genies, or wands are involved!
As always, happy hiring 🙂
