Comparing Apples to Oranges
What to look for in an IT recruitment company to save time, money and to find your next best contractor
In the highly competitive technology sector, projects are only successful if you can deliver them. In order to accomplish that goal, the skilled developers on the team often make or break the project. Few people know this better than senior IT hiring managers who often struggle to fill empty seats on their teams. This can hurt a company’s ability to remain competitive and jeopardize their ability to deliver projects on time and on budget.
To solve this issue, many senior IT hiring managers are turning to specialized IT recruitment companies to help them hire contractors who have the right skills and experience to get the job done. But not all IT recruitment companies are the same.
Before choosing such a company to assist with your IT development needs, ensure you get to know how those companies find and support the candidates through their journey to eventually arrive, and stay, as part of your team.
Experience
Choose a company that has been in business for a long time. The IT industry moves fast and a company that has seen many changes to technology needs, developer education, and even the way projects are run will be able to better help vet the ideal candidates for your IT project.
Look for an IT recruitment company that understands your end goal which is to help you optimize their project proficiency and profitability, not just fill an empty seat. Further, as the tech sector is very broad, choose a company specialized in the area of skill you require such as one with proven experience in finding specialized contractors. There are companies out there who serve niche areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IT cloud security.
Candidate Process
Be sure to ask your potential contractor IT recruitment company what their internal process involves. In doing so, you are looking for information about how they choose and evaluate the talent in their pool. How do they recruit? How do they advertise for open positions? Do they have repeat candidates who have completed their previous contractor projects and want to find work through this company again?
At this stage, you are also looking for ways that the IT recruitment company saves you time and money. Knowing you don’t have weeks of time to interview ten or more potential candidates, how are they able to put the fewest, most ideal candidates in front of you to save your time and the company’s money.
The three most important questions to ask are:
1. On average, how many candidates will you have me interview?
If the answer is more than five or if there is a general “as many as it takes” you may want to consider another firm.
Our firm has this process extremely refined. On average we send companies 2.3 candidates per position. This helps to reduce the amount of time senior hiring managers need to spend interviewing potential candidates and compresses the amount of time it takes to actually provide a potential candidate with a job offer.
2. How do I know you’ll send me candidates who will be the right fit?
At this point, you need to hear that the IT recruitment company, while understanding their own area of IT specialty, also understands that every company is different. In order to really understand this, they’ll need to show you they will take the time to understand your organization.
Our firm spends a considerable amount of time getting to know an organization before we evaluate whether or not we will be able to recruit ideal contractors for their IT projects. The reason we are so efficient once we take on a client is that we make sure we understand their organization, the projects they are working on and the technology they are using. This helps us to then find candidates with the right set of skills and experience.
3. What is your candidate acceptance rate?
It can be very frustrating, not to mention a waste of time and money, when a candidate does not accept your offer. This typically means you are very nearly back to square one with your process. Be sure to understand if there is a process behind the company’s desire to support the candidate in securing their next role.
Our recruitment process also works because we work closely with potential candidates after they have been offered a job to answer any lingering questions they might have. This is a critical step in the recruitment process because in most cases, highly skilled candidates often have two or three competing job offers at the same time. To help them choose the best next contract for them, we work closely with them to make sure we understand their motivations and follow up through their decision-making process. By following this process we have an 81 percent job acceptance rate and have successfully filled 71 percent of our mandates.
Will They Stay?
While these stats are certainly helpful, we also take a lot of pride in the fact that once a contractor is hired, 91 percent of all contracts are completed. This is a critical component of what we do for our clients because at the end of the day the most important thing is that they are able to deliver projects on schedule and within your allotted budget.
Next Steps
If you are struggling to attract and retain talented IT developers, it might be time to consider opening your eyes to the substantial talent available to you in the IT contractor pool. Be sure to work with an experienced firm to help you find the talent that you need.
We’ve built up decades of expertise in the software developer contractor space and have processes and systems in place to aid our clients with hiring and keeping the best contractor talent. Contact us today to see how we can share our many years of experience and roster of client success stories with you and help your next AI project succeed.