Full title: Shape Your Hiring Process to Attract & Engage Better Tech Talent

Speaker: Erica Woods

For more see the table of contents

---

Notes

• Motivation for talk: 8 candidates declined in a row

Top 10 reasons managers lose good candidates

• Lack of flexibility/WFH
• Lengthy process
• Rigorous process/bad experience/over interviewed
• Poor engagement
• Not “sold” (poor marketing)
• Inaccurate/incomplete job details
• Unrealistic requirements list
• “Too many cooks” issue
• Not enough money
• Counter offers/better offers

Think about

• How many steps?
• How long between?
• How long total? – ideally 2-3 weeks. Or 1 week for great candidate
• Where can we lessen?
• Personal mentality?
• What else can we do with candidates we like?

Other problems

• Rescheduling interviews so many times
• Communicate roadmap if more appealing
• Titles that don’t have meaning – “I don’t work there; I don’t know what that means” – ex “Solution Engineer 3”. Add “we are looking for someone to act as <common role name>”
• 456 different BA titles across clients

Position attractors – 10P model. Include some in job description. Can divide and conquer so different interviewers cover different ones. Also good checklist if you are interviewing.

• Purpose
• Project
• Problems – ex: what do in next 6 months
• Priorities
• Place – ex: location vs remote and place within organization, size of team
• People
• Perks
• Pay
• Path/Potential
• Pain Points

80/20 rule

• Identify candidates with 80% of the requirements
• Make rest nice to have
• Identify growth opportunities
• Communicate training opportunities

Rapport

• Chit chat
• 92-93% interviewees are nervous
• 2 minute rule start out
• Other specifics about yourself
• On video, eye contact (with camera) and show hands
• Commonality via resume/linked in
• Understand motivators and align responsibilities and tech stacks
• Help visualize working there
• Physical or virtual background as icebreaker
• Bring up stuff from Linked In – shared connections, info

Candidate scorecard

• Points given for various skills. Also text areas
• Ask team what important for all positions with respect to soft skills
• Differentiate between culture fit vs role/tech skills
• Share with hiring partners so get better candidates over time
• In Germany, can’t keep the data unless candidates consent. Not all candidates will give it.

AI

• Market research (skills, salaries, insights)
• Job descriptions – ask to make more attractive for role
• Candidate vetting/skills identification
• Interview questions
• Communications (offer or rejection letters)

Other notes

• Review process annually
• Remember your interview experience and what care about as candidate. Would you apply for this job?
• Copilot can help clean up job descriptions. They use good language
• All apex recruiters are skillset focused.
• Requirement “what I need; list of skills” vs opportunity “here’s how this will be a fulfilling career move”
• Candidates now taught to ask AI to learn about person
• If intimidating because of social media, have recruiter humanize you by telling a story
• Candidates often felt bombed even when did fine. Managers ask an escalated line of questioning; you aren’t going to know anything

My take

I was a little tired. A few sentences in this little boy walks in. Erica invites him to sit down. He does and then says his mom might worry where he is because he was in the bathroom. Then left. So cute and woke me right up.

Erica warned us several times up front it is a marketing heavy presentation. That was fine; different perspectives are nice. Overall good, I do wish it was targeted more to the audience. Some of the stuff is things developers/architects/teams can’t just change. Similarly, a Project Manager position as the job description example isn’t the best fit for the attendees of this conference. But there were also lots of things that the actual interviewer can do. Audience interactivity was great