According to a report by the World Economic Forum, “65% of tomorrow’s workers will have jobs that don’t exist today”. Digital transformation and technological advancements are changing the future of work, creating more specialized roles and changing the labor market.
This change is not uncommon – the labor market has evolved for years, in response to technological advancements. Jobs are lost, more are made. However, rapid digitalization has increased the pace of this change – and its magnitude.
Naturally, IT and technology companies are at the heart of this transformation. As the future of work continues to evolve, businesses must revamp their talent sourcing efforts and invest in reskilling and upskilling their workforce.
And thus, technical screening for IT companies remains imperative. In this article, we’ll cover the merits of technical screening, the fundamentals of conducting it successfully, and the widely employed multi-stage process.
Why is technical screening vital for IT companies?
And how can it benefit your business?
1. Address the skills gap
The widening skills gap has become a pressing issue, and IT & technology companies have been hit hard due to the specialized nature of their roles. Unfortunately, enterprises don’t have the independent resources to tackle the skills gap at its core; at the academic layer.
However, companies can close the skills gap internally by:
- Improving their talent sourcing, through technical screening and skills-based hiring.
- Reskilling and upskilling their workforce, allowing employees to assume more specialized roles.
Closing the skills gap internally allows companies to stay competitive and help employees develop professionally.
2. Prioritize merit-based hiring
Merit-based hiring prioritizes a candidate’s skills and experiences, but companies struggle to achieve true merit-first recruiting. This is because unconscious biases plague the recruitment process, influencing hiring decisions at the cost of merit.
Fortunately, advancements in technology, especially AI and automation, have helped minimize unconscious biases from the hiring process. In technical screening, employers can leverage AI-powered scoring and predesigned skills tests to reduce involvement from recruiters and hiring managers.
3. Hiring at scale
IT companies may struggle with hiring at scale due to:
- Resource and budget constraints. Hiring at scale requires vetting hundreds or even thousands of applicants, requiring substantial resources.
- Role complexities. Filling multiple, specialized roles is challenging, especially considering IT positions may require specific skills tests for evaluating applicants.
Fortunately, technical screening helps combat these challenges by helping recruiters standardized the evaluation process. Moreover, with the help of technical screening platforms, HR teams can automate labor-intensive, repetitive tasks.
4. Reduce time to hire and cost per hire
The time to hire and cost per hire are vital recruiting KPIs that some HR teams live in fear of. When recruiters are expected to do more with less, standardized systems and technology can help reduce hiring times and costs by streamlining the hiring process.
For example, recruiters can leverage skills assessment platforms to evaluate thousands of applicants remotely, simultaneously. Automated scoring systems ensure candidates are evaluated quickly, helping them transition along the recruitment funnel and reducing the time to hire.
5. Acquire top talent
Ultimately, prioritizing merit, mitigating unconscious hiring bias, and streamlining the hiring process help companies acquire the best talent. Leveraging technical screening platforms also helps improve the candidate experience by easing applicants’ transition through the recruitment funnel, and ensuring that they’re evaluated fairly.
With a positive candidate experience and a commitment to merit-first hiring, recruitment teams increase their chances of acquiring best-fit talent.
How should IT companies approach technical screening?
IT companies need to devise recruitment strategies that incorporate technical screening; the screening itself cannot define the process.
1. Assess how it fits into the wider digital transformation picture
Digital transformation has become something of a buzzword, but there is merit behind the hype – digitalization is indeed a necessary step for modern companies. Those that fail to embrace digitalization have an expiration date.
Thus, as companies digitalize and accelerate technology adoption, they will need to fill more specialized roles – either internally or externally. Some IT leaders, like Infosys, rely on a combination of upskilling internal talent and sourcing external ones.
HR teams need to anticipate hiring needs, factoring in their company’s digital transformation, through HR forecasting. Recruiters and hiring managers will need to leverage technical screening as part of their acquisition strategy for these new roles.
➡️ Read more: How To Analyze Hiring Needs And Leverage HR Forecasting
2. Engage the right people
As roles become more specialized, tech recruiters may struggle to design accurate evaluations and screening processes. HR technology has attempted to bridge this gap, with skills assessment platforms offering role-specific test templates and question libraries. However, HR teams may still face challenges – and they should consult internal expertise when necessary.
Existing employees, including team leaders, are better suited to understand a role’s needs. They can identify requirements for cultural fit and necessary skills and even aid in test design. Thus, as roles become increasingly specialized, HR teams must engage internal leaders while designing the technical screening process.
➡️ Read more: Tech Interviews – 5 ways to assess a candidate’s cultural fit
3. Leverage technology
As we’ve alluded to, HR technology plays a vital role in technical screening for IT companies. In a simpler capacity, applicant tracking systems (ATS) and recruiting platforms help companies automate aspects of technical screening, including interview scheduling and tracking applicants at scale.
However, mature tech skills screening software not only automates processes, but also improves the quality of test design and implementation. Tech screening software offer:
- Test libraries. With thousands of role-specific test questions.
- Test design functionality. To design remote assessments at scale.
- Assessment and proctoring technology. Which allows recruiters to conduct technical screening at scale, while ensuring fair play.
- Automated scoring. To minimize unconscious bias and ensure merit-based hiring.
- Bulk assessment functionality. So HR teams can hire at scale, within their budget.
Technology is thus a vital part of conducting successful, fair technical screenings at scale.
4. Design systems and structures
For technical recruitment to be successful, HR teams need to design defined hiring processes, with clear screening, evaluation, and interviewing stages. In tech recruitment, multi-stage recruitment processes (we’ll look at these in the next section) are standard.
When designing your tech recruiting process, it’s important to prioritize ‘filtering’ the initial wide talent pool to reveal top performers. These high achievers can then be evaluated more comprehensively, through different tests and interviewing processes. In general, it’s not feasible for HR teams to thoroughly assess the entire applicant pool – hence the need for prescreening.
5. Commit to candidate experience
HR teams may feel pressured to fill roles quickly to meet internal needs. However, it’s important to remember the purpose of technical screening, and recruitment in general, is to acquire the best-fit talent. And to achieve this goal, employers must deliver positive candidate experiences.
HR teams must therefore prioritize the candidate experience when designing the hiring process, from as early as crafting a job description to the end onboarding stage. Recruiters need to identify ways to reduce friction, such as leveraging automation to improve correspondence, or providing feedback after evaluation.
Collecting feedback at crucial stages – such as after conducting a remote skills assessment – will help recruiters identify areas of friction to improve them.
➡️ Read more: Top 5 Ways To Enhance Technical Candidate Recruitment Experience
The multi-stage tech screening process for IT companies
Multi-stage recruitment processes have become common in general, but IT and technology companies have specifically adopted a similar, standardized methodology. In general, IT companies – including leaders like FAANG and megacorps like Infosys – follow some variation of the format:
- Initial CV/resume screening. This may be done manually, or with the help of an ATS, or both. This stage helps eliminate unqualified applicants.
- Phone screening. This may be a simple phone interview with general questions or a technical screening with structured questions. The phone screening aims to narrow the pool of qualified applicants.
- Skills assessment tests. These may be conducted on-site or remotely through the use of skills assessment platforms. The purpose of this stage is to evaluate candidates’ practical and problem-solving skills.
- Face-to-face or remote interview rounds. These interviews are usually conducted by different members of the recruiting panel, including members of the team for which the applicant is applying.
While the specifics of the process vary from company to company, the general structure remains consistent.
Leveraging WeCP (We Create Problems) for technical screening
As we’ve covered, HR technology plays a vital role in technical screening and the future of tech hiring. Or, rather, the now of tech hiring.
WeCP (We Create Problems) is an integrated tech recruitment platform used by global IT leaders, including Infosys and MindTree, to improve tech talent acquisition. WeCP lets HR teams:
Create talent pools with one click
Connect with and nurture your talent pool across different channels, making sure your company has quick access to top talent when its time to fill new roles.
Leading test design capabilities
WeCP’s question library includes over 150k questions to vet over 2000 technical skills, helping IT companies design custom tests and evaluate applicants at scale.
Conduct fair, bulk assessments
WeCP’s cheat-proof technology, including AI-proctoring, question shuffling, and plagiarism detection, ensure fair play. And automated scoring, which assesses candidates across 12+ performance metrics, minimizes hiring bias and prioritizes merit-first hiring.
WeCP’s platform is equipped to assess applicants simultaneously in bulk, whether you need to vet 100 candidates or 100,000+.
Do more, with less
WeCP has helped our partners reduce hiring times by x18 and cut hiring costs by 65%. Hire the best talent within your budget, on time.
Getting started with WeCP is easy – and free.
Ready to hire your future workforce?
With an extensive library of 150k+ unique questions for more than 2000 technical skills and precise candidate report analysis for faster decision-making. WeCP was able to cater to the New Jersey (US) based Tech Giant – Ness Digital Engineering by reducing their hiring cost by 65% and eliminating the manual candidate screening process.
Contact us for more information.
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