The lack of workers in Quebec is pushing many IT businesses to recruit new employees on a running basis. To make the most productive use of time when hiring new employees, it is important to follow a simple and effective process. To help you to organize yourself, here are several steps to effectively hire someone in IT.
Identify your needs
The first step of the recruitment process is to clearly identify what your IT business needs. This then allows you to identify the specific characteristics and roles of the position to be filled. You must ensure that you recruit good IT candidates for your business.
To complete this step, you need to ask yourself several key questions:
What tasks does this job entail?
Is it a highly skilled or entry-level job?
What are the working conditions like?
Which team will this post be linked to?
Write and publish job offer
Once the business’ needs have been identified, you will be able to create an IT job advert. In order to attract your candidates and have an effective recruitment process, the advert must be as detailed as possible, especially concerning the following:
Job description
Required skills and competencies
Years of experience
Minimum school grades and IT certifications
Working conditions
Salary level
Once written up, the job offer must be published. With this, you need to be effective and precise. It’s pointless to publish an advert on platforms unrelated to IT. Instead, target networks familiar with the IT industry so you are seen by the ideal type of candidates.
Before commencing this step, you should already have what you are going to include in the job advert and the place where you want to publish it in mind. Note that you could also post the ad on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook), job search websites (Indeed, Emploi-Québec) and even school websites.
Select candidates
As soon as your job offer is online, you can expect to receive an avalanche of applications. Letters, emails, phone calls and other private messages will come flooding in and your days may go by quickly if you don’t already have a selection strategy in place.
Start by gathering all applications into one, unique place. Print out the CVs and cover letters and sort them into the order of who applied first. Come up with a deadline for people to stop applying for the job. Putting any late applications to one side will give you an extra pool of candidates to consider if you don’t find the ideal person in the first wave of applications.
After this, you should carefully analyze each candidate’s application. Put in place certain criteria, related to the desired job, to filter out those candidates who don’t fit the position. This could include creativity, spelling, education, and experience, etc.
Additional tests
At this point, you can send out tests to candidates, who haven’t yet been filtered out, in order to gain more information about them. There could be a test to analyze their IT skills, language skills and personality, etc.
In the IT sector, it is recommended to include a practical test to check the knowledge level of your candidates. Set aside a day or a half day and give them a task that is typical of the position they are applying for. This will give you a good idea of their capabilities.
It’s advisable to only keep a handful of candidates when going onto the next stage: the interview(s).
Interview candidates
Now is the time to get to know the candidates beyond just letters and CVs. You can choose between several types of interviews, which can either complement or replace each other. It all depends on your needs for the position.
Start with a phone interview. This lets you speak with the candidate and determine how interested they are in the position, as well as giving you the chance to ask them some basic questions. Before ending this first meeting, make an appointment with the candidate for an official interview. Confirm this meeting by sending a summary email.
You should then invite the candidate to your office for a physical interview. Let them briefly present themselves and ask them questions about their training, experience, qualities, ambitions and motivations. Plan a time for questions and prepare the best answers in advance to remove your candidate’s doubts.
This type of interview can also be carried out remotely by video call if there are any health or geographic obstacles. Certain rules still apply such as communicating via a Zoom or Google Meet call as opposed to a more informal platform.
Make an offer
Have you chosen your ideal candidate and want to make them an offer? When making this offer, make sure to mention the following details:
Working conditions (at the office or remote work)
Internal training
Job type
Salary
Annual leave
Insurance
Social benefits
It is possible that the candidate you’ve chosen has offers from multiple businesses to consider. You should therefore be offering at least the average salary for the type of job to be in the running. You will have to convince them that you are the right business for them. The power is in their hands so expect them to want to negotiate a few terms.
Confirm your choice
Have you agreed on the contact terms and conditions? Are you sure of your choice? This is the time to proceed with the contract and have both parties sign the documents. Don’t hesitate to call a recruitment agency to avoid poor hiring.
From then on, all you have to do is prepare for the arrival of the new employee, and send them a copy of the integration process and prerequisites.
For effective IT recruitment, choose Fed IT
A recruitment process can be tedious for a company that does not necessarily have the time and means to devote to it fully. Using an IT recruitment agency is a good alternative to expand your team.
To optimize your IT recruitment process, you can trust our Fed IT recruiters to take care of all your hiring.
