Evie Jenkins
5 ways smart recruiters find the right agile resource
- September 19, 2018
- , 2:51 pm
- , Advice for Employers
As part of our Future of Work series we’re looking at what it takes to find, manage and retain agile talent. The following is from our comprehensive deep dive on building agile teams, which you can download for free here.
These days, those involved in recruitment need to look at what a person can bring to the organisation, regardless of their qualifications and experience. This is especially important for an agile team. Hiring managers also need to ensure their offer is attractive as possible, and that goes beyond money.
ClearHub spoke with Talent Acquisition Partner for Shop Direct, Simon Halkyard, to get some insight on hiring the best tech talent. Here are five ways in which this can be done:
1. Defining the job, not the skills needed to do the job.
Before beginning the sourcing process, have a session with the people who will be involved in the hiring process to identify the actual job requirements. This should include at least five objectives — actual deliverables that need to be achieved. Skills shouldn’t be ignored of course, especially for technical roles. The tool-specific skills (e.g. Jira, AWS, Java) of the ideal candidate should be considered.
2. Experimenting with different hiring methods and tactics.
Unless outsourcing to a service like ClearHub, whose resourcers already do this kind of activity, there are numerous tactics to consider as part of the hiring process. Due to high competition, organisations have to appeal to passive candidates, as well as active job seekers. Here are some examples of tactics:
- Pay to post the role on a relevant job board or aggregator site
- Headhunt candidates using LinkedIn (paid options offer more access) and other platforms
- Use an internal referral scheme
- Attend job fairs
- Network at IT events
- Participate in forums and other online channels
- Paid digital advertising (e.g. Google, social media)
- Offline advertising (e.g. billboards, tube, print media)
- Email marketing and direct mail
3. Focusing on mindset and values.
For an agile team, recruiters look beyond a person’s CV and are careful that the CV doesn’t limit them from meeting great candidates. This should also be factored into the interview process.
The key here is emotional intelligence (or EQ). EQ is the capacity of an individual to recognize emotions – their own and those of others. Teamwork and communication is essential for an agile team, and a key component of productivity, so questions that unlock such information should be considered. Organisations often use personality profiling for existing teams, and in their hiring process, to ensure a good fit.
4. Give the candidate what they want!
A simple, yet often overlooked aspect of hiring that is especially important for tech roles. If someone is the right fit, smart recruiters make sure they sell the role.
As Simon explains, offering flexible working is a no-brainer when trying to attract the right talent: “Candidates are not asking for flexible working, they are demanding it. In a candidate driven sector such as tech you nullify a huge amount of candidates if you dismiss this as a fad or temporary. Flexible working is here to stay and just like we do with customers we need to listen and adapt to the needs of candidates if we are to hire the best ones.”
5. Being open and honest.
Hiring the wrong person is expensive (ClearHub discovered as much in a recent study) so ensuring the hiring process is a dialogue, rather than a one way conversation, is important. Being open about the organisation’s culture, team structure, any upcoming changes, expectations and the frequency of change, for example, will avoid any future disruption.
In it you’ll learn:
- Tangible advice on hiring the right people for your agile team.
- Insight on how to ensure your team can collaborate better, while maintaining agility, regardless of their location.
- A hot take on distributed teams and how you can utilise the human cloud to hire specialist talent, with expert advice from Atlassian.
