Hi, this is Tom Hermstad with HD Technologies. This is the hiring internal I.T. series. And this is the second part in the series, and it’s about technical expertise and competency as it relates to hiring the engineer.
Then on the Headhunters, it’s they’re trying to get candidates to you as quickly as humanly possible, and they do not have the resources to vet the techs in the proper way. They give a test and they judge tech technical competency based upon a written test or an actual test on the computer. And this does not cut it when you’re trying to judge a person’s capability to solve and handle a technical department.
So what do you do?
What we do is we provide that technical expertise so that you know, that that tech you hire can for sure do the job. It’s then up to you to do what you know, which is does this person that we helped you find have the right cultural fit? It’s the perfect melding of technical competency on our side and the ability to be able to with a system, be able to judge whether or not that person can for sure do the job. And then you have the ability to look at the personality. I will say that in the culture for agency technologies, we really look for quality individuals that are communicators as well as technologists. And so in the hires that we’ve done, they rarely fail on the culture side when they come through, and they relatively never fail when it comes to technical competency.
So using this approach, you can completely eliminate the chance that in three months you’re going to be looking for that position again. We, like I said, use a very systematic approach to the hiring process. And one of the interviews we do is an actual test, and we do it in a very unique way. We have people in the room, technical people who are approximating the computer and a user. Then we throw out a question or a challenge to the person, to the candidate, and they have to ask and give commands to the computer as well as talk to the individual, the user to try and solve the problem. You can you can do a lot of things with this. You can judge technical competency, of course, but you deal with how does the person act under stress?
How do they communicate? Do they talk to the user and make them feel comfortable that there’s going to be a solution quickly to their problem? There’s a whole host of things that we can get by doing the testing this way.
So in summation, you focus on what you know, which is, is this person a correct fit culturally for the company? And we help, you know, that this person is going to be technically competent to do the job.
