Posts tagged "interview process"

How to Calculate the ROI of Your Developer On-boarding Programs

November 29, 2018 Comments Off Roxana read

New employees are a great asset to any organization. When they come in to replace former staffers or even to occupy newly created positions, organizations would want them to hit the ground running.

However, this is not always the case even with experienced employees. Learning an organization takes time. Onboarding programs come in to bridge this gap to reduce the amount of time to acclimatize, become socialized and get productive at work.

Organizations invest in the onboarding programs with so that their new developers can bring more value than what was spent invested. At the very least, the onboarding program should be successful.

How can you calculate, therefore, the return on investment of the onboarding program?

Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation involves reaction, learning, behavior, and results. This model has been used over the years to evaluate the effectiveness of training.

After the onboarding program, a company may provide the new staffers with a questionnaire to collect information based on their reactions. The benefit of this evaluation is you obtain the employee’s first impression of the organization.

Employee turnover

If an organization’s employee turnover rate is high, it indicates that staffers are dissatisfied with the environment within which they work. With an onboarding program in place, you could orient staffers on the job at hand and get them to understand the processes in the organization. Here employees are also informed about the challenges and opportunities that may arise in the organization.

In the case of a significant reduction in employee turnover, an onboarding program is counted to have been successful.

Employee sourcing

Likewise, referrals help organizations to reduce the cost of advertising and sourcing for candidates who are the best fit for existing positions. Ordinarily, happy employees are more willing to invite their friends over into that particular company.

So, when a firm finds itself in a situation where a large number of interviewees attribute their knowledge of the position to your employees, then onboarding was successful.

Feedback sessions

Immediately after the onboarding program, developers could be asked a few questions on a scale of 1-10 to provide feedback on whether they are satisfied with what the company has to offer, its terms and environment. This is critical as it can capture what employees feel and perceive your organization.

Stay interviews

During these sessions, developers are asked questions why they choose to stay with the organization. It is useful in picking out the specific aspects of company strengths. Firms can, therefore, emphasize these positive aspects to ensure members of staff remain productive.

Exit Interviews

While the stay interviews address why employees choose to remain loyal to the organization, the exit interviews focus on why an employee decided to exit the job. Here, the company could ask if ever the onboarding program was effective or otherwise.

For detailed insights, you could employ the use of each one of these approaches. Employee surveys can be used to determine how effective developers find these onboarding programs are. Also, employee turnover is a quick way to establish whether your company got its fair return on investment (ROI) in the onboarding program.

Employer

Companies using Gamification for Recruiting IT Talent

November 8, 2018 Comments Off Roxana read

Recent years have witnessed huge advancement in Information Technology and with this rise is the corresponding increase in the demand for IT experts. In a bid to get more talents for hire, companies now use gaming to attract, develop and motivate candidates, increase their own prominence and create workplace reward and recognition.

The use of gamification in recruiting is the application of typical elements of game playing to contribute to workforce development, by introducing fun, creativity, competition, and rewards into areas where they didn’t earlier exist. Understanding its diversity and effectiveness, a number of companies now use gamification to recruit experts in the field of Information Technology. Contained in this article are some of these companies that have taken advantage of the assistance gamification renders in recruiting IT talent.

Google

Google, a very innovative and creative InfoTech based company is definitely one to be on this list. For over a decade now, the company has been organizing a Google Code Jam software-writing competition to attract fresh and new talent. Monetary prizes up to $50,000 can be won as a big motivation to potential employees. However, the main aim of Google is to attract potential hires who have the appropriate skills that meet up with the company’s requirement.

Umbel

This big-data startup created a gaming challenge called Umbelmania. Via this platform, amateur and professional coders code their movements to earn points in the first-person fighter-style game. Competing head-to-head, gamers accumulate points to progress in the interviewing process with the company. Through this, coders are able to measure their coding abilities in relation to that of other contestants, improve on them, and know how suited they are for the job at the Startup.

AXA Group

Through a tool called Knack, this global insurance brand has implemented gamification in its hiring process. This tool builds various types of assessment games to identify the abilities, struggles and personality traits of candidates that might not be obvious in an interview or on a resume. Among the games that serve this intended purpose are, Wasabi Waiter and Balloon Brigade. These games collect several megabytes of data on potential hires to measure against successful employees already within the company.

Domino’s Pizza

Through an interactive software called Domino’s Pizza Mogul, this company is able to build a brand awareness with a particular appeal to young people in search of exciting jobs in a fun and innovative work environment. This game allows users to personally create and name Pizza ideas and Toppings and then market it. The users also earn monetary rewards for every Pizza sold.

Formapost

This French postal service was constantly faced with the challenge of retaining new hires. They were losing a quarter of their new recruits and this was costing a lot in their recruiting and hiring budgets. In a bit to resolve this challenge, they wielded the tool of gamification.

Having launched a gaming platform called Jeu Facteur Academy, they are now able to walk candidates through a routine day as a postal carrier and get them familiar with the job. By using this platform to prepare potential employees for the job, they were able to cut down the dropout rates from 25% to 8%.

Considering these companies, it is obvious that gamification is a reliable tool that you can use to achieve your company’s recruitment goals, attract people with the right skills set and increase your chances of keeping them for a long time.

Employer

How will Artificial Intelligence Impact the Future of Recruiting

November 6, 2018 Comments Off Roxana read

The field of Artificial Intelligence is a fast-evolving one, gaining influence in many spheres of human existence. It is the intelligence demonstrated by machines which have over time, proved its accuracy and dependability. This intelligence includes; decision making, visual and vocal recognition, and translation, – among other things. One aspect that is being influenced by Artificial Intelligence is that of recruiting people for jobs.

The reason behind the incorporation of A.I. into this field is not far-fetched, as it helps to reduce the workload of employees by making the mundane tasks of hiring and recruiting easier. It is expected to be a faster and more efficient alternative for companies to employ as a part of their Human Resource (HR) efforts. Contained in this article are some expected impacts of Artificial Intelligence in the future of recruiting.

Improved Efficiency and Experience

By optimizing AI, companies will be able to scan resumes, schedule interviews, and send routine emails, ultimately improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Also, via AI, candidate experience will be improved by making it more personalized and sincere and enabling the formation of real relationships between candidates and companies.

Faster and Smarter Hiring Process

As we all know, computers are built to perform tasks faster and more accurately. With the ability of bots to scan and identify the top resumes in a batch of applicants, the process of scheduling will be automated and predictive analytics will be able to capture quantitative and qualitative data to ensure a suitable and appropriate match.

Ability to predict employee success

AI is able to establish the past achievements of successful employees and search for candidates with similar backgrounds to those of such workers. This way, it can predict the success rate of potential incoming employees.

Minimization of Biases in Hiring

By developing algorithms that are fair and ethical for use in the hiring process, biases such as; gender, age, and race can be well minimized.

Interview Automation

By capitalizing on the automation AI offers via its facial recognition tool that can record and determine emotion from facial expressions, companies will be able to handle screening processes without the physical presence of humans.

Ease and Speed of scheduling meetings with candidates

With the availability of AI software that can automate appointment setting by performing simple tasks such as; looking at your calendar, asking a few basic questions and offering viable options to the candidate, recruiters will be able to quickly and easily schedule meetings with them.

Clarification of Expectations

AI is built with an objective algorithm which will give very clear and precise expectation. By using it, time and resources will be saved and one can be quite assured of accuracy. We must, however, keep in mind that AI only simplifies the process, leaving the completion and verification to we humans.

Inability to identify the most suitable person for the job

Understanding that Artificial Intelligence at its best, works based on computer programs written by humans, we should realize that it cannot identify the best person fit for a job.

Human behavior varies across different individuals, and AI might be making logical decisions where intuitions by humans are required.

Employer

How Your Business Can Assess IT Candidate Skills

October 23, 2018 Comments Off Roxana read

In seeking jobs, many potential employees put out information about their qualifications that can be quite exaggerated. This act is likewise performed by those seeking jobs in IT companies. It is therefore imperative that IT companies master the art of hiring people and adequately assessing their skills in order to get the very best of candidates.

For any new recruit to fit into your IT corporation and be productive, they need to possess soft skills. While resumes may sound impressive, assessing a job seeker for soft skills plays a key role in promoting effectiveness in an IT company’s hiring process. This fact is well captured in a statement made by John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology, Menlo Park, California; “Companies want computer programmers who can go to meetings, gather information and talk about what clients want to accomplish. Written and verbal skills are at a premium.”

The challenges of hiring the best suitable candidates grow exponentially for small and medium-size companies that don’t have on-staff IT experts to help assess candidates’ skill sets. Fortunately, workarounds exist to help even the most IT challenged companies to find the right hybrid professionals. Below are some helpful suggestions on how to assess the skills of potential employees in your IT company.

Decide what is most important in your Resume search

When looking for hybrid professionals (i.e. those conversant in both business and technology) to hire, you’re likely going to have to focus in one direction or another. It is therefore very important that you decide which is more important in your open position – the MBA or the tech knowledge – and then pick carefully as you search resumes to attract top talent. This helps you to be clear enough on choosing the perfect candidate to fit in the position.

Be very specific during the interview process

Once you’ve narrowed your list of potential employees, your next aim is to get as much detailed information about their experience as you can. Ask detailed interview questions about prior positions, focusing on how they split their time between technical and business tasks.

Check for presentation, communication, and social skills

It is important that you look out for the ability of your job candidates to effectively make presentations, communicate and properly interact with other members of staff in the company.

Trust, but Verify IT skills

Be sure to have a tech person on your staff to do a technical evaluation of the IT skills of your potential employees. If you don’t have the staff to vet job candidates, you can employ the services of Testing companies like Brainbench, ReviewNet Services, and eSkill Corporation.

Hire someone who is experienced

Choose a candidate who has a proven performance record of accomplishing the task you need done and be careful enough not to be too hasty in order not to hire incompetent candidates.

By taking note of the above-given suggestions and putting them to practice, IT companies can be certain of being able to rightly and effectively assess the skills of candidates seeking employment from them and getting the very best of those candidates.