Building a tech culture to recruit talent

For recruiters, hiring tech profiles is often anything but easy. They often have to sell their company to make candidates want to join!

Yet some recruiters don't necessarily have technical knowledge and don't always know how to deliver the best message to tech candidates. Sometimes, this culture gap can even become a source of anxiety for recruiters.

Don't worry! In this article, we'll explain how to learn to recruit a tech profile. To become a tech recruiter, you need strategic knowledge — what we can call a "technical veneer" — to attract the best tech talent to a company.

The essentials

• Recruiters at all kinds of companies who interact with tech profiles, and especially those at consultancies, have an interest in understanding tech roles in order to source the best talent.
• Learning the tech culture means building a "technical veneer" so you can understand tech roles, technologies, and ways of working.
• This learning needs to be paired with a strong employer brand for tech profiles in order to enable the best hires.

Who should care about learning the tech culture?

In the broad sense, everyone! But specifically, anyone in charge of hiring for a company in any sector — whether an internal stakeholder or a recruiting firm. Recruiters at consultancies are particularly affected by this need to understand tech at least a little.

Why is this particularly important for consultancies?

Consultancies (formerly called SSII in France: Société de Services et d'Ingénierie en Informatique, if the acronym means nothing to you!) are companies that provide IT solutions to other companies.

They are essentially B2B (Business to Business) companies that respond to very specific challenges on technical topics.

Their teams are therefore made up of consultants and salespeople. The consultants can have highly skilled tech profiles.

Hiring the ideal tech candidate for the engagement

A typical consultancy engagement is technical assistance, also called staff augmentation. The consultancy embeds one of its consultants at the client company to perform a technical engagement.

Throughout the engagement, the consultancy has a best-efforts obligation to its client and commits to doing everything possible to deliver results within the allotted time.

So it's crucial to clearly understand the consultant's experience so it matches the kind of profile the client is looking for.

Why learn the tech culture as a recruiter?

The importance of learning the tech culture as a recruiter

If you still doubt the value of this famous "technical veneer" as a recruiter, here are a few reasons why it's absolutely essential to learn the tech culture if you want to become a tech recruiter:

1. Build credibility in interviews: job postings and role descriptions will be well written, and your messaging will fit the profile you're trying to hire. You're now equipped to convince candidates as effectively as possible!
2. Be able to talk with tech teams and work with them on their career plans and understand their needs. This will help you put in place strong working conditions and a better company culture for your tech candidates.
3. Understand each candidate's role description in detail (from Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to full-stack developer).
4. Track and manage a tech career
5. Save money: by knowing more about the profile you're hiring, you avoid getting it wrong with a candidate unsuited to the role. Less back-and-forth and less time wasted on a bad hire! On top of that, this will let you avoid outsourcing hiring to an external firm, which is often very expensive.

Everything you need to know to build a tech culture

You first need to know how to distinguish the different tech roles to be able to understand tech job descriptions. For example, you'll need solid notions of:

• The different families of tech roles: those who work on architecture, on development, on data, on specific topics like Artificial Intelligence, etc.
• IT project management and its various methodologies: Lean management, Agile, DevOps, etc.
• The day-to-day of a developer, a data scientist, a data architect, etc.
• The tech work environment: hours, communication channels, flexibility, etc.

If all of this seems too complex to learn on your own, don't worry — there are companies offering training programs tailored for recruiters to give them all the knowledge they need to build a real tech culture inside the company.

Bluecoders has notably created Bluecoders Academy, a one-of-a-kind program to demystify tech in your company, specifically tailored for recruiters.

Bluecoders offers different programs to meet every need:

• A tech bootcamp for recruiters to learn it all in 5 days
• Learning to run a hiring process
• Building an IT culture for recruiters
• Training on sourcing and engaging tech candidates
• And many other training modules.

How do you build a tech employer brand?

Why build a tech employer brand?

"Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room". This Jeff Bezos quote nicely illustrates the need to build an employer brand that speaks to and satisfies the tech profiles in your company or your future candidates.

Research shows that you have a better chance of attracting many candidates if you cultivate your employer brand. Furthermore, candidates at companies with a good reputation ask for smaller pay raises than at companies they've seen negative reviews about, according to a 2016 Harvard Business Review study. A bad reputation would therefore cost at least 10% per hire.

The steps to building a tech employer brand

The 3 steps to building a tech employer brand

To build a strong tech employer brand, here's a strategy outline you can put in place:

1. Upstream thinking:

• Study the company's current image with tech profiles, study the players that genuinely have a differentiating image with tech profiles.
• Designate a person responsible for executing the employer brand strategy inside the company.

2. Plan execution:

• Training and awareness for all teams on tech topics, and particularly for the company's recruiters with programs like Bluecoders'.
• Targeting tech candidates with dedicated postings.
• Strengthening your image at universities and tech-focused schools / training centers.
• Using tools to refine the hiring process and showcase the company's branding.
• A few elements can boost your employer image beyond just your website, such as listing the company on sites specialized for tech profiles like GitHub or Stack Overflow, creating HR videos featuring members of the tech teams, a strong presence on social media, etc.

3. Post-mortem study:

• Putting in place tools to measure the employer brand

Long-term work

So work on the employer brand is a long-term effort that, above all, encompasses every interaction people have with your company.

You therefore need to work on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction (remote work options, pleasant offices, free meals, competitive salary levels, etc.), and the quality of hiring processes (HR's image — once again, the recruiter's credibility and level of understanding are key).

How do you speak to tech profiles?

Building a tech culture to recruit talent

Once you've reached a certain level of tech knowledge (yes, that famous technical veneer!) and you've built a plan to work on your tech employer brand, all that's left is to dive into your tech hiring. Here are a few tips to recruit in the best way:

• Provide concrete information about the job: talk about missions, tools, and technologies the candidate would use.
• Step off the beaten path of LinkedIn and careers sites: candidates there are often heavily solicited, and more specialized sites exist for these profiles (GitHub, Stack Overflow, Twitter, etc.).
• Highlight career growth opportunities.
• Ask questions! You'll learn more and more about tech profiles and the challenges of various roles, and you'll only get better at your future hires.