Looking Behind the Mask: How to Truly Evaluate Technical Professionals

Much like a good Halloween costume, job candidates often ‘dress up’ to impress employers and get a job offer. Companies are later surprised to find out that their new hire isn’t the superhero they thought. How does this happen? What do recruiters need to look for in an interview or from a resume to make sure they’re not disappointed by a less-than-ideal hire? Here’s how to un-mask your IT candidates and make sure you see the true them.

  1. Ask the right interview questions: You want to ask about experience, but you also want to make sure that you’re asking about the candidate themselves. Questions that reveal their values and personalities are important. Ask what’s important to them outside of work. Ask about how they’d react in certain scenarios involving common employee pitfalls like time management, deadlines, interpersonal team relationships, management, and more.
  2. Reference the resume: If you want to make sure that someone is who they say they are, ask them questions from their resume. If they listed that they grew an accounting business by 200%, ask them what strategy and steps they took to do that. You want to make sure their story lines up with the facts they’ve given you.
  3. Call references: Doing your due diligence is always smart. Asking for professional and personal references from every candidate – and actually following up with them over phone or email – can be another step in an already lengthy hiring process, but it can reveal potential problems along the way and is a worthwhile way of evaluating your recruit.
  4. Do a background check: Not every business can or should do this, but many businesses find reasons they shouldn’t hire a candidate by using a 3rd party to conduct a background check on an employee before officially hiring them. You may have a genius programming candidate who was also convicted of stealing from their first job, which they didn’t list on their resume. Background checks are becoming a more common way to give your hiring managers peace of mind.

Need help finding the right talent?

Finding the right candidates for your business is key to your success. We can help you vet the candidates interested in your open position and make sure you get matched with top talent every time. Call our staffing experts at Open Systems Inc today.

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