The IT Recruiter

A recruiter is a person who selects personnel for a given vacancy such as salesperson, administrative employee, operator, among others. An IT Recruiter is a selector who chooses information technology personnel for a vacancy of this kind, such as developers, graphic designers, QA, among others.

Although an IT Recruiter is a personnel selector, they have very particular characteristics. The vast majority of IT recruiters hold undergraduate or graduate degrees related to the areas of Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, and Business. In addition, they must have knowledge of technology; while it is not necessary for them to be professionals in the IT field, it is necessary for them to have broad knowledge of technology. IT recruiters usually take courses and/or training related to new technologies. It is public knowledge that technology constantly advances and changes; the IT market follows this pace and the IT Recruiter must be up to date on these developments, technologies, and the profiles being requested.

Other skills an IT Recruiter must have are social and interpersonal skills, such as the ability to communicate effectively, relationship building, and a great capacity for organization. An IT recruiter is aware that they must place candidates in companies with different cultural customs and must foster this adaptation. For example, many people from India start working for companies in the United States, having different customs and habits, and both the company and the candidate must adapt to one another.

Another skill would be proactivity. The IT market is extremely competitive, so a developer with advanced seniority will receive several job offers per week. Part of their skills will be finding (headhunting) the candidate and retaining them throughout the whole selection process and even retaining them in the company. Headhunting is a fundamental process in the search for IT personnel, but it must not be the only tool, nor should it be as aggressive as some recruiters tend to make it. For example, they contact the candidate without knowing where they live or reading their professional profile, through a copy-paste message that they have sent to 20 other IT professionals. When the candidate replies no, they neither say hello nor goodbye. Courtesy and kindness are fundamental skills in any profession.

Tools Used by IT Recruiters

Technology and digital tools are indispensable for IT Recruiters. Some of the tools they should use are described below.

Perhaps one of the best-known professional social networks is LinkedIn. It has a database of 100 million profiles/resumes. In 2017, it was credited with 72% of interviews and 65% of hires in the United States. This professional social network allows recruiters to find the profiles they are looking for by simply typing keywords into the search bar. It also allows them to build a professional network and interact with its members. LinkedIn offers free accounts with limitations, and the special premium account for recruiters costs approximately 110 dollars per month; the latter offers several benefits and access that the free account does not have.

As usual, Google has a tool for everything, and personnel selection could not be left behind. Although Google for Jobs is a recent tool, it was created to compete directly with Indeed (a job search engine). It has four features: access to salary information, location filters, marking of saved jobs, and selection of the job sites that candidates want to use to apply.

Behance is another social network, but in this case it is for creatives, such as web designers. It offers the possibility of showing a person's portfolio, that is, their previous work. This allows the IT Recruiter, when they need to hire a designer, to review the work the candidate has done.

According to Aberdeen, 57% of companies use pre-hire assessments to test the knowledge, skills, and other qualifications of their candidates, so providers in this space are in high demand. Such is the case of Evalart. Evalart offers the possibility of evaluating various types of knowledge (including IT), personality traits, and skills. The recruiter can evaluate the candidate through a platform where they send the test or tests to the applicant's email. Afterwards, the results of the test or tests will appear in the recruiter's account. A very interesting detail that Evalart offers is that, beyond the pre-designed tests the platform provides, the recruiter can create their own test, with questions, answers, and scores.

ATS, or Applicant Tracking Systems, are another of the tools the IT Recruiter must work with, since 90% of large companies and 68% of SMEs use them. This category is the largest in recruitment software and in 2018 it saw a large amount of migration between the various ATS.