Improve the Quality of Your IT-Candidate Pool in 5 Steps

Hiring TipsDeveloper Recruiting

Seventy-five percent of recruiters have trouble finding qualified applicants for vacant positions. In addition, highly-skilled candidates are only unemployed for a median of ten days. As a result, hiring teams must be judicious and strategic when sourcing and qualifying candidates.

It is difficult to not only find top candidates, but also identify the most qualified individuals out of the entire applicant pool. With every job posting, you and your team spend hours or even days sorting through the deluge of applications. However, it does not have to be such a time and resource drain.

In order to improve the quality of your candidate pool, we suggest following these five steps to build a sourcing and qualification strategy that will be of great benefit to your team in the long term.

Step 1: Identify your ideal candidate

To identify a quality candidate, you need to create a candidate persona for each open role.

This information will be useful for your team at every subsequent step. Your candidate persona will enable you to source candidates from scratch, create a targeted job description, tailor recruitment marketing materials and ultimately identify your top candidate early in the recruitment process. It is crucial to distribute information about the candidate persona and job expectations to everyone involved in the hiring process, including recruiters, HR professionals, recruitment marketers and hiring managers. Furthermore, it is essential that you disseminate your candidate persona to every individual in your company and promote employees to recommend eligible candidates through your employee referral program. Recruiters can get better quality hires through referrals, who boast 25% higher profit than candidates sourced from other platforms — making referral bonuses well worth the cost of investment.

It is important to consider qualified employees who are already with the company for promotions, before looking outside. Internal employees are often your best candidates because they already know your business and company culture. They will be more likely to stay with a company that values the work they’ve already contributed.

Step 2: Utilize job descriptions to sort out unqualified candidates

It is important to create unique job descriptions for each open role that reflect the candidate persona you created, no matter how or where you source candidates. The job description will serve as a checklist for both the recruiter to identify qualified candidates and for job seekers to determine if their skills and experiences will set them up for success in the role.

It has been shown that men are more likely to apply for a role if they only meet 60% of the job requirements, whereas women will only apply if they meet 100% of the job requirements. By including a laundry list of skills and experiences you want, you unintentionally weed out perfectly qualified candidates. Instead, focus on a few specific and critical requirements for the role.

A large number of job descriptions still include education requirements when the majority of candidates don’t actually need a bachelor’s degree to be successful in the role; this is not ideal. Requiring a bachelor's degree or higher on your job description significantly reduces your pool of eligible candidates when less than one third of Americans have such a degree. When only 37.7% of software developers have a bachelor's degree, focusing on skills (both soft and hard) can help you identify the best candidates.

Make sure that you do not lose any potential candidates who meet your qualifications when you simplify your application process. Candidates are often discouraged from completing an application process because it is too long or complicated. As a result, you may be narrowing your candidate pool without realizing it.

Step 3: Understand & Screen for immediate disqualifiers

It is important to screen for critical skills early in the recruitment process to save your team time while focusing on the candidates you are really serious about, especially when you are hiring for highly technical roles.

The job description should only list the skills needed for the role As candidates progress through the talent pipeline, you will need to continue to weed out those who are not qualified.

If you want to find the strongest candidates for technical roles, you should use technical skills assessments.

If you are looking to staff your company with the help of an agency, be sure to choose one that is familiar with the skills required for the position you are looking to fill. If you want to reduce your reliance on staffing agencies and focus your time and resources on a long-term recruitment strategy, it may be worth your while to invest in these tools and resources in-house. Implementing these changes will improve the efficiency of your recruitment process.

Step 4: Attract top candidates with recruitment marketing

Developing an excellent recruitment marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to improve the quality of your candidate pool, as well as attract, engage and nurture relationships with qualified talent. Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing tactics to promote an employer brand at every stage of the recruitment life cycle.

It is no longer optional to include social media recruiting as part of your recruitment strategy, as 80% of both active and passive candidates look for their next job on social platforms.

Attending recruitment events is an effective way to market your company and roles to potential candidates. This company provides a novel opportunity for candidates to share their skills and experiences in greater detail than what would be possible through traditional means such as resumes. These 12 recruitment event ideas may be of assistance if you are having difficulty getting started with hosting or attending industry events.

Keep your careers page up-to-date with the latest information on your company culture, open roles and benefits.

Step 5: Reduce unconscious bias in sourcing

Unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias, is a type of discrimination that occurs when people unconsciously ascribe certain attitudes and stereotypes to an individual or group of people.

• Resumes with foreign-sounding names are called back for interviews.
• Men have a twofold chance of being hired in comparison to women, regardless of the hiring manager’s gender.
• The likelihood of a woman getting a job increases by 25-46% when the applications are anonymous. Unconscious biases can prevent exceptional candidates from being hired and companies from building an exceptional team of diverse employees. The first step to reducing bias in your workplace is to educate your team about diversity and the different types of unconscious bias.

Some simple tips to reduce unconscious bias and improve the quality of your candidate pool include removing gendered pronouns from job descriptions, making your application process blind to factors that provide information about a candidate’s demographics, and consciously creating a diverse hiring team for each open role.

It is important to be aware of unconscious bias when expanding your candidate pool, so that your team can identify and address any related tendencies, beliefs or behaviors during the earliest stage of the hiring process.

If you want your team to improve the quality of your candidate pool, there are a number of ways to go about it. Every team is different, so you'll have to figure out where your time, money and other resources will be best spent. It is important to establish recruitment metrics so that you can track the progress of your team as it implements changes and improves its strategy. Doing so will help your team determine which tactics are actually effective in improving your candidate pool.

By continuing to build your talent pipeline, you can encourage high quality candidates who you don't hire to join your talent community.