Do You Speak Developish? How to Improve Technical Literacy

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To create vacancies that have a high engagement rate, understand developers perfectly and speak the same language with them, IT recruiters need technical savvy, an understanding of the IT business specifics, as well as the features of global and local IT markets.

There are recruiters with extensive experience but without knowledge of technology. Resume analysis turns into a thoughtless search for keywords, and communication with candidates confuses them due to questions on the technology stack.

Nickolay Kliestov has been teaching at the internal ITExpert school for Tech recruiters for more than five years and has been advising clients on recruiting and technical solutions for more than seven. We’ve shared the main recommendations that he gives to beginners and external recruiters for pumping technical knowledge, as well as resources for studying basics.

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The Main Reasons Your Next Recruiter Should Be Tech Savvy

We like to give this example: when moving to another country, the first step is to learn the language. The same is in IT recruiting—when a recruiter masters the technical base and the specifics of the IT business, he acquires the language of the industry. After that, the recruiter will:

• Understand the hiring manager‘s requirements: write a perfect job description, highlight the main required skills, and analyze the tasks of the project.
• Sourcing candidates: write precise search queries, and find relevant candidates on LinkedIn, GitHub, Kaggle, and other specialized platforms.
• Communicate with IT specialists: ask the right questions about hard skills, navigate the candidate’s experience, talk about the project’s technology stack, and more.
• Handle objections and sell vacancies: companies often have to recruit Senior-specialists or C-level candidates from other firms. The lack of understanding of why your job offer should be interesting dooms the whole idea of poaching or objection handling to failure.

The lack of technical knowledge of the recruiter means finding irrelevant candidates against the burning deadlines. In addition, there is a risk of spoiling the HR brand. The candidate can share his feedback on Glassdoor or another platform, in social networks, or take on “heavy artillery”—memes—after the interview.

Where to Start Learning the Tech Recruitment Basics

It would seem that technologies and development languages are such a vast area that to learn them, it is necessary to create a database with multi-level logic, internal relationships, alternative technologies, and exceptions.

People love to procrastinate on complex tasks. Here’s what every recruiter can do today to boost their knowledge:

1. Break IT terms into groups and start to learn their meaning. It is important, at least in general terms, to distinguish between Backend, Frontend, and Database technologies.
2. Start learning the types of products and companies in the IT sector. Pay attention to the development stages from MVP to launch, as well as roles in IT projects.
3. Learn positions and IT roles. Find out how QA Manual Engineer differs from QA Automation, and learn the specifics of the work of developers, designers, system administrators, analysts, and other specialists in IT companies.

Here is how you can analyze technologies and terms in IT recruiting by breaking them into groups:

• Language and part of the architecture: frontend and backend, programming languages (what exactly is the backend and what is frontend).
• Frameworks and Libraries: for example, Frontend Developers on React and Angular are completely different specialists.
• Testing tools: JMeter is used for Load tests and NUnit for Unit tests in C#.
• DevOps processes and tools: CI/CD process, containerization, and other specific tools.
• Trends in IT: Big Data, AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, and more.

Let’s analyze where a recruiter can get technical knowledge from and what authoritative sources a recruiter should use in his work. Spoiler: you don’t have to run for an MBA course.

News platforms

SHRM—professional American association of HR managers, which unites more than 300 thousand specialists. SHRM laid the standard of quality in HRM, which is supported by managers and leaders at the world level. Specialists with SHRM certification have all the skills and competencies for successful work in HR and recruiting. The company blog publishes expert articles for HR experts. You can find texts that will help fill the gap in knowledge of technical IT.

SocialTalent—an international learning platform used by employees at Ferrero, Cisco, Intel, Siemens, and more. Tech companies publish useful information about artificial intelligence, databases, and AR/VR in the blog section. You can find articles on practical recruitment: for example, on assessing candidates during interviews and trends in the sector.

YouTube & TED Talks

LinkedIn Talent Solutions—the official LinkedIn channel, where they publish expert opinions, cases of large companies, and fun videos about recruiting. For example, this video explains the unique recruiting culture at Netflix in three minutes. And the one below explains how it works in Atlassian.

The Fireship channel talks about various technologies. For example, you can learn about RabbitMQ in two minutes.

Separately, we would like to mention Ted Talks. At the first Ted conference in 1984, the newly released Macintosh, and an innovative CD from Sony, was presented, and artificial intelligence specialist Marvin Minsky explained the new model of the mind. Nowadays, you can filter videos on the platform by category and choose those about technology or HR/recruiting.

Why Companies Should Invest in Employee Training and Development Now

You should increase your expertise faster than your competitors for your business’s success. One of the ways to achieve this is the systematic training of employees, and increasing their expert level. Global companies have been creating their internal universities since the 1970s and 80s. The first institutions of this type were founded at Disney, Toyota, Motorola, and Nissan. When their business was growing rapidly, the new staff needed constant training.

ITExpert has also founded a small corporate “academy”. We boost the technical side, and the principles of communication there. In the early days, we give beginners a must-have-to-read: lecture notes, a handbook, and other resources.

On the technical side, we start training with the types of companies in IT, and programming languages, and smoothly delve into the details. The entire learning process is closely related to practice—this is a prerequisite for successful learning. The fact is that people lose 50% of the information received within the first hour, 70%—during the day, and 90%—within 7 days, if they do not consolidate the theory with practice. Deep technical training is also provided to every newcomer, regardless of the level and experience in recruiting.

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Technology Analysis for DevOps Engineer positions

We even hired Technical IT Recruiters who had nothing to do with IT, but with good English, basic knowledge, and a good understanding of technical terms. At the beginning of their career, they had to spend a lot of time on training, giving the best 200%. Now they are performing on a par with “solid middles”, closing complex vacancies, headhunting, and compiling exact boolean strings to search for the most relevant candidates.