Here’s what to avoid: 

1. Don’t look at education only: A well-known school or graduate degree doesn’t necessarily tell you if a candidate will be good at a job. Remember that education is only one part of what has shaped a candidate, and a more critical factor might be if they’re agile and smart enough to do the job, which isn’t always apparent by graduation alone.  
2. Don’t focus on the brand name of past employers: Looking at prior employer experience can be a helpful tool that gives you a foundation of information about your candidate, but getting too hung up on past employers can be a mistake. The resume is a launching point and a good source of initial guidance. The most important thing to do is focus on the candidate and not get hung up on a past employer. Even if that company was successful, you can’t correlate their success with your candidate. 
3. Don’t hire someone who knows only what you need them to know: Hiring on skills alone can hurt your business. It can end up driving you to focus on the wrong talent, leaving qualified people behind. Relevant experience can be a tremendous asset, but what can be much more important is the desire to learn and the ability to deal well with the need to be constantly improving. If they can talk about complex topics intelligently, they can likely learn the requirements of the job and excel at the role. Ultimately, hiring someone who has a basis of knowledge but is also teachable is good for your business.  

The truth is that hiring – where there is so much qualified talent in the market – can take a long time and be very difficult.  

Our expert team can help.  

With years of IT hiring experience, we keep up with the needs of the industry and can spot great talent easily, helping you find the best fit for your open positions. Get in touch with our team today.  

The post Struggling to Hire Good Developers? Here is What You Might be Doing Wrong appeared first on Open Systems Inc..

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 3^rd 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.

The post Looking Behind the Mask: How to Truly Evaluate Technical Professionals appeared first on Open Systems Inc..