Recruitment Tips: Assessing IT Candidates with Business Skills

Expertise and experience are important when recruiting professionals for an open IT job position. Most open job positions are straightforward: programmers are expected to be expert coders and as long as they do that, then it’s all good. Nowadays, there is a need - especially with small businesses - for jobs that require “hybrid” skill sets that not only involve technical expertise, but also some business skills.

Businesses can achieve higher efficiency if they have a representative that can attend meetings, understand exactly what the client wants to accomplish, and is able to visualize and interpret them in a technical way for them to work on it.

Finding such candidates needs some thorough assessment, and as a recruiter, you should expect high competition. One of the best ways to do this is having an IT expert to help you assess the required technical skill sets while you look at the candidate’s business skills. However, there are still some ways that can help you out if you don’t have that option. Here’s some of them:

Screening Applicants: Clarify the Qualifications

Having a clear job description is crucial in looking for candidates. Hiring someone with a business background will not likely have the technical knowledge. Those from the IT background will have the technical skills and would have picked up business-related skills as they work on projects.

Decide on which aspect would be more important for the position you need - then when you have a pool of applicants, assess them for the following qualifications:

1. Does their skill set match that of the open position? Can they handle both the technical and business side of things?
2. How’s their seniority and experience in the industry?
3. Do they have the right tools for both IT and business aspects of the job?
4. Have they done the same things you need them to do in this job before?
5. How much is their asking salary?

Interview: Be Specific

When you’ve narrowed down all the potential candidates, be specific with the details when you ask about their experience - and how they manage their time between technical and business tasks. Of course, you can always reference their answers with their previous supervisors. Here are some specific items you can ask for:

1. Their main role in their previous project
2. Technical aptitude
3. Business sense
4. The role that the employee is most suited to and struggle with

Verify the IT Skills

When it comes to verifying the business skills of a candidate, many companies have someone who can accurately do so. Not all companies have recruiters who can gauge the technical skills of IT candidates. Because of this, there’s a risk of suggesting that you have no IT knowledge to recognize the skill levels of the candidates.

The best workaround to this is to have a tech person from your company in the recruitment process - particularly in the screening and interview. But if you don’t have one, and you don’t want to borrow or hire IT experts just for the recruitment, then you can always choose a candidate based on the tasks that you need to be done and check if they have already accomplished it.

Find candidates on an IT job portal

In any case, it’s very important to find the right candidates for your open job position. Ictjob.ph is the Philippines’ first and only IT job portal. This is where tech professionals can update their profiles to include their skills and expertise. Recruiters can gain access to the most curated IT database in the Philippines and make their companies visible to professionals. This is the perfect place for you to find your tech professional with business skills and get your company known to jobseekers as well. Register as a recruiter now!