Techie Dummy Tutorial: Tips for Hiring Tech Talent When You’re Not an IT Expert

Modern business praxis doesn’t necessarily dwell on tech talent industry experts running particular targeted business fields; these days, it is not uncommon to have a Lawyer be the CEO of a Tech company, a Communicology expert chair an Art Gallery or an Economist run a Creative joint of Content and Copywriters.

It goes without saying that the selected supervisors whose professions differ from the collective professions of their appointed teams hold their positions for a reason:

• They know how to pick the right teams of experts to assist them in choosing the right candidates
• Their pre-screening questions are always tailored superbly and often target every individual’s resume
• The background check of the candidates they aim to employ is always done to a T
• They use trusted online software services
• The candidates’ skills assessment tends to be conducted with a keen attention to detail

As statistics point out, apart from having amazing hiring results relying on online software services (like Anomadic), the abovementioned hiring methods alone actively reduce the risk of hiring the wrong people by a large percent.

These methods promote a culture of neat, diversified and dedicated hiring screening route in the long run. If you are in the business of hiring professionals whose field of expertise you are not exactly familiar with (in the case of this article – hiring tech talent), we’ve put together a list of useful advice that will help you optimize your hiring practices, spot the right tech talent quickly and reduce the risk of taking on the wrong people.

The guidelines are as follows:

Hire IT Experts to Do the Tech Talent Hiring

Turn your currently employed IT experts into a hiring team to avoid choosing candidates that don’t match the requirements. If you are only starting and you’re just putting together your winning IT gang, hire trusted IT experts to do the interviews. No matter how great an interviewer you are, you may routinely overlook candidate skills that may turn out to be crucial for an IT job, later.

Do remember that every hiring team should consist of:

• A Tackler
• A Teller
• A Tailor
• A Tester

In pairing these four hiring styles and the IT expertise of your chosen interviewers, you’re fashioning a winning hiring team.

So, to avoid crippling your company over time by hiring candidates that don’t fit, trust the IT-savvy to do every individual candidate skill assessment themselves and be a part of the hiring process with you every step of the way.

Fashion a Set of Questions Related to the IT Industry

While candidate pre-testing hasn’t really proven popular among the candidates of any industry, this is actually one of the best ways to exclude the weak links at the beginning of interviews and save yourself some valuable time.

The IT skills assessment should primarily come in a form of an IT quiz the candidate is to give answers to during the first interview. Since you are not a techie yourself, either link up with a software service to help you automatically create an IT-focused quiz for your candidates or hire outsourced IT experts to do it. Once the candidates pass, they move to the second round of interviews and the actual testing of their applied IT knowledge.

Examine Your IT Talent’s Soft Skills

While any form of candidate CV Validation and background check (such as pre-employment screening for international jobs and pre-employment checks related to the candidate’s results in their previous firms) does play a huge role in deciding on the talent you are going to hire, the future of IT industry lies not only within the candidates’ expertise in the field but their soft-skills set, as well.

As the IT industry is constantly changing, for the IT employees to be successful, adaptability to those ever-changing circumstances is paramount. Adaptable talent is extremely valuable going forward as these professionals are people with a learning dexterity, they are up for a challenge and enthusiastic about a change. Cultural fit plays an important role as well given the IT industry is everything but a single-country oriented business.

Working in the IT industry means being in communication with professionals around the globe, following their work and working with them on coming up with a solution. Naturally, these people won’t necessarily have the same skin color, religious beliefs or the same cultural, economic and social backgrounds as your company’s employees but that, in the IT industry, mustn’t be an obstacle at any cost.

Tolerant and inclusion-oriented employees are the best employees, remember that. Yet another very important soft skill is the talent’s team spirit and willingness to collaborate with colleagues and partners across teams, partners, companies and vendors. In the modern world, this employee cross-functionality is essential. Look for the candidates that are not only adequate for the job, but exceptional.

As the IT industry is growing incredibly fast, you want your employees to grow along with your company and contribute – not get stuck at a standstill.

Test Your Chosen Candidates

Again, this is a very useful trait for any company’s workforce in the making; being a non-techie you alone won’t be able to put together an IT test and do the skill assessment yourself but your IT experts will. If your budget doesn’t allow hiring IT experts to create individual tests for every candidate you are planning to sit with, hire an IT consultant to come up with just a few tests.

Example: if you are interviewing 10 candidates, have three IT tests made and pass them around randomly to the candidates. Make sure candidates who sit next to each other don’t get the same test out of the three.

Bear in mind that it doesn’t matter whether the candidates are sitting the interview for a full-time employment or an IT contract job, they still need to produce satisfactory scores. Consult with the previously hired consultant on the percentage the candidates need to score or pay them to review the test results. Online software skill testing service may be another option for the companies that would rather go in a different way.

One of the best software skill testing solutions comes with the still young but very trending – Anomadic; a part of Anomadic’s extended service is providing tests in a large variety of fields that range from language, specific skills, and subjects to other industry-focused fields. So, if you are not a fan of outsourced IT help, you know what to do!

All of the above will definitely help you narrow down your choices and even find the right candidates, but the absolute best way to hire an IT expert is to know at least something about the industry. So, leverage your resources, get creative and go for it. Or – form a partnership with an IT expert who’ll help conduct interviews in the long run.