Top Echelon’s 2017 Industry Reports revealed that 30.8% of recruiters found their clients were too slow to offer potential hires job offers. Unfortunately, this means organizations lose the applicants to their competition. Moreover, with recruiting costs rising, employers are struggling to find the best talent within reasonable budgets.
As a result, tech screening is more vital than ever. Recruiters can use technical evaluation methods to reduce hiring times and costs and optimize the recruitment funnel to increase their interview to offer conversion.
What is tech screening?
Tech screening is an evaluation practice that organizations use to optimize their recruiting process. Unlike resume or CV screening, a technical evaluation does not rely on information shared by the candidate. Instead, tech screening directly assesses each candidate’s conceptual knowledge and practical skills.
Why use tech screening?
Organizations use tech screening to optimize their recruiting efforts and land the best candidates the first time around.
According to the U.S Department of Labor, a bad hire can cost you up to 30% of the team member’s earnings during their first year. Additionally, poor hires can hinder productivity, and you may have to initiate a costly, time-consuming recruitment process all over again.
If your recruitment funnel isn’t optimized, reinitiating the hiring process won’t necessarily land you the right hire.
7 Ways tech screening benefits organizations
Here are some ways in which tech screening improves your hiring process:
1. Employers can evaluate candidates on their conceptual knowledge and practical skills
…Not by what they share about themselves like they would in CVs or resumes. Instead, employers can leverage technical questions or skills assessment tests to vet candidates for their real-world knowledge. For example, you can assess candidates for their knowledge of various algorithms, or use a coding test to determine their experience with a particular framework.
Tech screening mitigates risk from the hiring process and drives more informed decision-making.
2. It trims your cost per hire
Bersin by Deloitte found that the average cost per hire for tech companies is $4,325, which includes external and internal expenses, like job post advertising, travel costs, background checks, etc. While this figure is high as-is, employee turnover can further drive your costs up.
If the new hire isn’t a good fit, employers have to reinitiate the recruitment process again, increasing hiring costs.
Tech screening helps organizations reduce their cost per hire by:
- Streamlining recruiting processes. Employers can leverage tech screening to filter large talent pools and shortlist top performers. This translates to fewer interviews, and hence reduces costs.
- Facilitating better hires. By hiring the right candidates the first time, employers can avoid costly turnover expenses.
3. It also reduces the time to hire
Tech organizations can reduce hiring times by screening applicants in the earlier stages of the recruitment process. By filtering out unfit hires initially, recruiters are left with fewer candidates to interview, reducing hiring times.
Additionally, tech screening facilitates one-way interviewing techniques that support bulk testing, like asynchronous video interviews or skills assessment tests. Thus, employers can leverage a tech recruitment platform (like WeCP) to conduct bulk assessments, further minimizing the time to hire.
4. It improves candidate experiences
Delivering good candidate experiences is vital to improving your employer branding and attracting the best talent. A tech screening interview provides employers with various options to improve the candidate experience, including:
- Conducting remote screening so candidates can take the assessment from the comfort of their own homes.
- Using one-way interview formats to reduce stress and let applicants complete the assessment in their own time.
- Assuring candidates that they are evaluated on their objective, practical skills, rather than possibly biased metrics.
- Providing candidates with meaningful, quantitative feedback, including their test scores. Sharing feedback also helps organizations improve their employer branding and cultivate their talent pools.
5. Reduces unconscious biases
Conscious prejudices are relatively easy to spot, but unconscious biases like intuition bias (when recruiters prioritize gut feeling) and the halo effect are difficult to identify.
Since recruiters and hiring managers are only human, they’re prone to unconscious biases. Unfortunately, this means subtle biases can unknowingly affect the recruitment process, jeopardizing the quality of decision-making.
An objective tech screening process reduces unconscious hiring biases from the recruitment process by judging candidates on practical skills and performance metrics.
6. Closes the skills gap (internally)
The skills gap is an industry-wide problem that tech organizations struggle to tackle directly, at least at scale. Fortunately, companies can mitigate the gap within their organizations by leveraging skills-based tech screening methods and upskilling existing employees.
With skills-based screening, employers can ensure new hires are equipped for their new roles and have the potential to develop professionally.
7. Organizations stop losing top talent to their competition
Tech screening helps recruiters optimize their hiring processes, reducing the time to hire and enhancing candidate experiences. Thus, recruiters can use tech evaluations to increase their interview to offer conversion, and make offers quicker, thus securing top talent before your competition swoops in.
How to conduct a successful tech screening
While a tech screening interview offers many potential benefits, it’s essential to optimize your screening process to yield the best results. This entails:
Deciding on an interview format
Online tech screening can be leveraged in different ways; employers can conduct a verbal phone screening, a one-way asynchronous video interview, a skills assessment test, or even a pair programming exercise.
When deciding on an interview format, it’s important to consider your budget, resources, and the role’s requirements. For example, a phone screening may be sufficient for more minor roles, but you might need to conduct a skills assessment test for more advanced tech positions, like software development.
Take advice from your in-house team
When filling tech roles, it’s important for recruiters to consult team members. This is because your team understands the role’s technical requirements, the skills required for the position, and what cultural fit aligns with the team’s work culture. They can thus help you design assessments with relevant tech screening interview questions.
Additionally, when using one-way interview formats, consulting team members to evaluate candidates helps reduce biases and vet candidates more thoroughly. After consulting your team and designing the test, the next step is posting a job description.
Tailor the job description to the role
Relevant job descriptions help discourage ill-fit candidates from applying and attract top talent. By transparently detailing the role’s skill requirements, necessary experience, and workplace expectations, employers equip candidates with enough information to make an informed decision about applying.
Additionally, in the job description, it’s important to include details like whether candidates can opt for remote or hybrid work, and employee benefits to incentivize top applicants. These benefits could be monetary like performance bonuses, or professional development opportunities, and skills training.
Remember, when hiring tech talent, organizations are competing for the best applicants – so it’s important to give candidates compelling reasons to join yours.
Optimize candidate’s experiences
Deloitte conducted a survey that revealed a negative candidate experience caused 83% of applicants to change their minds about joining a company.
The message is clear – employers need to deliver optimal candidate experiences to secure better hires. But what does a good candidate experience entail?
We found that candidates appreciate a frictionless screening process, fair and valuable interviews, and feedback. While tech screening can facilitate frictionless evaluation, through designing one-way testing experiences, it’s important to remember that the recruiting process includes several stages.
Thus, each stage should be optimized for candidate experience. Interviews should evaluate candidates across fair metrics, so they feel the assessment is fair.
Similarly, if you’re conducting a structured interview or coding test, sharing feedback or scores helps candidates understand your decision-making and develop professionally.
One of the most effective ways to determine how to optimize your candidates’ experience is to engage with your talent pool. This helps employers directly understand applicants’ expectations, and thus improve employer branding.
Leverage the right technology
To conduct a successful technical screening interview, organizations can use technology to better facilitate assessment formats and improve candidate experiences.
For example, video interviewing software lets recruiters conduct technical screening interviews online, allowing applicants to take the assessment from home. Additionally, recruiters can leverage tech recruitment software to conduct bulk skills tests, vetting candidates while trimming your hiring times and costs.
Optimize your tech screening with We Create Problems (WeCP)
We Create Problems (WeCP) is a robust all-in-one tech recruitment solution that organizations and Fortune 100s use to effectively conduct technical screening.
WeCP offers a skills assessment platform with integrated video interviewing software, to facilitate multiple tech screening interview types. Additionally, our rich repository contains over 0.2 million questions, allowing employers to tailor tech screening tests to each tech role’s requirements.
Schedule a demo with us to optimize your tech talent acquisition – it’s what we do.
