The Computer Merchant, Ltd. (Frank Anigbo)
There are many attributes that you must consider when selecting the right IT Candidate to meet your organization’s staffing needs. In this article, we will focus on 4 critical factors that will help determine whether finding an IT job candidate will spell success or failure for your company and the candidate you select.
- Hiring the right candidate for an IT position isn’t all up to the qualifications of the candidates you interview, in fact the road to success begins with an accurate job description and expectations, for the ideal candidate. A good job description targets the job to a small pool of qualified IT candidates whose expectations align well with your organization.
- The right candidate for an IT job must possess recent and relevant experience for the technical skills you need. Unlike most professions, IT skills are especially sensitive to the passage of time; what was high-tech two years ago maybe passé today. In culling down resumes to select qualified candidates for interview, pay careful attention to how recently a candidate utilized skills relevant to your requirements.
- While most job seekers dress up skills to appear more impressive, some desperate candidates may be tempted to downright pad their resumes with completely fantasy skills. Being in the IT staffing industry we see a fair bit of this. Only a relatively small fraction of candidates practice this type of deception but it is a good idea to test the candidate’s real-life knowledge of the relevant skills listed in their resume. If hiring for a C# position, have the candidate debug an intentionally broken snippet of C# code. Also have your staff with sufficient knowledge of the relevant skills ask technical questions, this is guaranteed to flush out unqualified candidates. Lastly, verify employment history with references. For extra help, see How to Spot Lies in a Resume.
- Although I have left this tip for last, it is perhaps the most important one to remember: Hire for attitude. Nothing turns a new hire into a failure faster than the wrong attitude or fit for your organization’s culture. Unfortunately, this is the hardest attribute to discover during the interview process. A technique that helps is to identify a few of your best employees and make a list of the behavior traits that make them a good fit. Ask your candidates questions designed to identify these good traits. Remember, you can always teach technical skills, you will rarely succeed in correcting a bad cultural fit.
At The Computer Merchant, our team of technical recruiters screen hundreds of IT candidates each day, for open client positions as well as pre-qualification of available candidates for recurring IT hiring needs. With our help, selecting the right IT candidate has never been so easy.
