The Pain Of An IT Recruiter, And How To Make Sure That It Doesn’t Hurt

You found the ideal candidate, conducted him in all interviews, made the employer happy, but the person suddenly refused the offer and stopped answering calls. Is that familiar? Together with the expert, we figured out what to do to prevent this from happening.

Yuddhapon Prateep, Co-founder of FP Recruitment & Executive Search, spoke about the pains and problems that a recruiter working in the development industry has to face and how to solve them.

The main problem is the lack of personnel

The sphere seems to be at its peak and finding an employee is quite simple. Only this is deceptive, analytics show that the market today is the candidate’s market, there is a shortage of personnel and it will only grow. Due to the digital transformation in all areas of the economy, due to the rapid development of these same technologies, candidates do not have time to pump new skills and adapt to the environment. Therefore, good employees are worth their weight in gold, and job openings are long and difficult.

Let's figure out how to collect a strong funnel in IT and hold candidates for an offer on it, which they will be happy to accept.

Pain # 1: Developers aren't looking for work

To get the primary funnel, you need to understand where your target audience is. By default, the developer is not looking for work: he simply does not need it. They search only when salary expectations increase or if you want new challenges and tasks.

Forget about outdoor areas. In my experience, one candidate may receive up to 50-100 offers from recruiters in a very short time. Needless to say, such an employee has nothing to do on job boards. Therefore, the recruiter has to look for closed sources, to collect his base. Here the concept of passive candidates appears - those who are not looking for work, but with a good offer, may be interested and accept the offer.

You can look for such guys at different venues. It can be:

Facebook, Twitter, and Line are the fastest way to reach candidates, in particular, on the Line social network, large groups of Ruby and Python developers;
Github
LinkedIn
group chats in Telegram;
Slack, if you can find out the address of the workgroup;
Stack overflow
GetLinks on which there is a convenient search for specializations.

Several plugins optimize the work of recruiters with these sources. For example, PropellQ integrates with Google Chrome and helps generate queries and effectively search on LinkedIn, GitHub, Facebook, and Twitter.

Using these sources, we expand the funnel. And when a resume appears on hand, you can think further.

Pain # 2: Candidates do not respond to the job offer

The lack of professional staff is not only a matter of IT-sphere. A good recruiter is also not easy to find. Today it's not enough to be able to effectively sort, the skills of a marketer, psychologist, and sales manager have become especially appreciated.

The task of the HR specialist is not just to find the right job seeker, but to correctly formulate the message, sell the benefits of moving from one company to another, and create value for the candidate. If all this is not done, you will lose the battle to more powerful hunters. Mastering technology and using the same plugins is easy. Also, you must be able to convince.

Option "Hello! My name is Yuddhapon, I'm an IT recruiter, and I have many interesting vacancies for you! - it doesn’t work anymore.

Find out all about the candidate. The first thing a recruiter should do is to think about why a candidate should change a good place with an excellent team and other goodies. Therefore, it is important first to properly understand his motivation, and then to get in touch. I treat the first dialogue with the candidates as the first date. My goal is to get to know each other better and exchange compliments. Praise the developer for the cool code on GitHub, use GetLinks and find out how the applicant lives, which is important for him. Simply put - we immediately get acquainted and praise, only then we make working proposals.

Get carried away. It is important to be a good psychologist and even a little copywriter. The text "We need a talented developer ..." is bad, they will not interest anyone. Describe the project and technology so that you want to come and try what you do there. If Forbes wrote about the company - mention it, if you have a cool CEO - write too. List all the benefits that you have. undefined A person should have the feeling that in a new place he will not engage in nonsense, but save the world.

Keep track of statistics. I recommend communicating with passive candidates by e-mail. You can use various services that help you track whether an email is open and read or not. This is very convenient because with their help you can determine your response rate.

If you found 100 applicants and 30 percent answered you, then this is already cool! You work with cold candidates. Do not forget about follow-ups. In Thailand, developers can receive up to 50 such letters in a year or two. It could be something like: Don't break our heart. We are constantly looking for Java developers. You need to maintain a quality base also to track when a junior turns into a middle specialist.

In short, work on your skills. Today, a psychologist, a sales manager, a marketer, and even a copywriter are new recruiter identities that are vital for the funnel to not fall apart.

Pain # 3: Candidate Loses Interest

How to make the coveted candidate not change his mind? Remember that a working candidate is already taken, you are recruiting him. Therefore, a person needs to be arranged in all possible ways.

Make the candidate comfortable. It's normal if such a candidate cannot come to the meeting in the middle of the day or even answer No to the question: Are you looking for work? First, don't give up. Secondly, make the meeting as convenient as possible for the applicant. Think over the details of the interview and coordinate all the points with the technical department and team lead. Make an appointment at a convenient time. It is advisable not to break the acquaintance into several stages - it is all inconvenient. Ideally, those who are responsible for the hiring decision can communicate with the applicant on the same day.

Do not wait for burning eyes. And this is normal. A common mistake is to think that the candidate will come and say from the threshold: I quit everything and go to work for you! The passive candidate needs to be heated at every step, stimulated by his interest. The task of the recruiter here is to conduct initial screening, to make sure that all the skills are suitable. But selling should not be a recruiter, but a team leader. A recruiter can only prepare the latter, give him some advice. For example, do not wait for euphoria from an already established specialist who does not need a job.

Keep an eye on the salary market. It is important to give the candidate a market salary. If a person entered the market, it means that he analyzes other offers: give less - he will go look for something else. As soon as we seduce a passive candidate to come to a meeting, he becomes already semi-passive and begins to glance at the market, so it is important to lead him clearly through the funnel.

Pain # 4: Candidate Refuses Test

Imagine that you invite a person to a first date, but before that you ask: Please pass the test, is everything all right with you? Perhaps the comparison is ridiculous, but giving testing at this stage is a big mistake, which closes the opportunity for good specialists to get into the company. Now many platforms test candidates. But it's good if the team leader makes his case, describes the situation to see how the developer makes a decision, how he thinks and acts in a given situation. This is a more effective way to understand whether it fits the profile of the company. It will be much better if the team leader or senior developer prepares questions for the meeting so that the person passes the test on the day of the meeting or during the interview. Remember that it is better not to create unnecessary obstacles.

Pain # 5: The candidate does not accept the offer

Oddly enough, the offer is one of the most difficult stages. Before making an offer, the recruiter needs to check once again whether the candidate has changed his salary expectations and whether all his wishes have been met - the specifics of the tasks, the convenience of the road to the office and other advantages. In other words, you need to see the motivation: without checking it at all stages, it will not be possible to make a competitive proposal. That's just nothing.

Count the money. There are difficult salary situations: companies can see that the candidate just fits in perfectly, but other developers get 10 thousand less. How to deal with this? Here you need to understand how quickly it will turn out to build a similar funnel. Sometimes it's easier to give the candidate a little more money than to start all over again. Also, there is a way out: not to disclose salary information or to give a slightly different position to justify such an amount.

Get ready for the counteroffer. The recruiter has a terrible dream - we make an offer, the candidate likes everything, but here he gets the counteroffer at his current job. What to do? Find out what he was eventually offered. Explain that since the applicant took such a step, told the management about leaving, then he loses loyalty in the eyes of the company and it's better for him to change his place. You can also discuss with the employer how to make the offer more interesting, expand the field of tasks, think through growth.

Case: refuse twice and still accept the offer

I had a case when the developer refused twice but still accepted the offer. This is a good illustration of the don't give up principle.

The person wanted to switch from Delphi to Java and was ideal because the company just needed one and the other language. The candidate was satisfied with the salary and the road to the office. He accepted our offer, everyone is happy. But at the current place of work, the candidate was made a counteroffer, he called us back and refused. We talked with the team leader and offered a salary of 10 thousand higher, the candidate again accepted the offer. But the next morning a second failure followed.

There was a feeling that I missed something, that the problem was exclusively mine. I took courage and called. I ask: Mr.X, you are ideally suited to this position, you have a place for growth and many advantages. I directly see how you fit in and how you will build a career here. Why are you giving up? And then everything fell into place. It turns out that he found a not very flattering response to the company, from the time when it was "gray." Moreover, the response is not even from the employee, but from an ordinary job seeker. I objected: Do you want to give up your career because of a man who didn't even work here? He fell into a stupor - he said that he did not think about it. As a result, he accepted the offer and soon became a team leader there. Therefore, I recommend that you never give up, use all the leads, correctly identify a motivation, understand why you are not chosen, and always go to the end. You can stop only when they make another offer, which is significantly better than yours and which you cannot interrupt. But not before that.

Summary

IT recruitment is extremely interesting and at the same time difficult field for work. It makes you constantly move and acquire new knowledge and skills. I think that shortly we will all be targeted, at different sites, tirelessly competing with our colleagues. Therefore, you need to constantly learn and pick up from useful experience. Go to courses, watch useful YouTube channels, join interesting Telegram-chats, go to events.

By the way, we invite everyone to connect with FP Recruitment & Executive Search. Let's talk about pains and how to treat and automate them. Let's talk about effective sourcing, about technology brand and how to correctly build it to be recognizable in the industry. And developers will come who will tell you how to better hunt them.

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