Don’t start without it!
A tailor-made mailbox
A well-configured mailbox is a must-have in recruitment. Google or Microsoft systems offer solutions to ensure that we don’t let emails and files slip away and that the whole inbox is organised according to our needs.
The most popular mailboxes in the IT recruitment world are Outlook and Gmail. However, in order to reach their full potential, we need to configure them, preferably according to our needs. Implementing division into appropriate folders and automatic sorting of emails is a good idea. For example, we could divide them according to the stage of the recruitment process, specific positions typical of the IT industry, the companies we recruit for or other tools we use on a daily basis (ATS systems, social media or sites for publishing offers). It is useful to distinguish between emails and folders for internal and external topics, i.e. contact with candidates or clients, for example.
Every IT recruiter knows that the key is not to get lost in meetings and interviews
A calendar is an essential tool used by IT recruiters. It’s best to use one that syncs instantly with your email inbox (Google, Outlook), so we have everything in one place and chaos doesn’t creep into our daily work.
The organisation and prioritisation of tasks is an essential part of the job especially in a multi-stage selection process. After the successful sourcing of candidates, more and more screening meetings with potential candidates start to appear, with overlapping recruitment for different IT companies, for different positions. In order not to get lost in all this, we need to work out our way of working and prioritising.
Project boards, shared knowledge sets and a private ‘command centre’
We have many tools on the market to help organise not only our work, but also the work of our recruitment teams or company-wide processes. We can come across tools for work such as Trello, Jira or Notion. We can use many of them on our own, for example, if we do not have a predefined tool in our organisation. Mostly these are systems that have multiple functions and can be a 3-in-1 solution. Trello is a typical tool for creating kanban boards, thanks to which we can coordinate tasks. In contrast, Notion, which we use in our IT recruitment agency, is a tool that offers a range of possibilities, from shared project boards and calendars, to the creation of company Wikipedias and news, to options for creating private notes and your own knowledge base on recruitment processes or specific IT jobs. The package from Microsoft works similarly, with separate applications like MS Planner, Teams etc.
Notes are at a premium!
IT recruitment is based on interviews with candidates, and meetings with the client and Hiring Managers, during which we establish the details of the recruitment and the positions for which we will be looking for suitable candidates.
We need to ensure that our meeting notes are secure and easy to find. Everyone has managed to lose their Word document at some point, and we all know that sometimes they just disappear by themselves….
In addition to comprehensive solutions, such as Notion in which we can easily create folders with notes, there are several applications that work well as a database for our information.
OneNote is an application from Microsoft that, in addition to the desktop version, has an interesting browser plug-in option that can convert text from a page into a note. Within the app itself, we can set up folders, sort notes, and when creating notes we are assured that they won’t get lost and will save automatically. Many additional text editing options allow for a great deal of flexibility in form (tables, images, etc.). Another programme that works similarly is the famous Evernote, which has a free version and a paid version with more features available. Another example is Google Keep, which, in the form of a board of cards, allows us to label and collect notes ad hoc.
Everyone makes mistakes!
In the job of an IT recruiter, knowledge of English is very important, but everyone makes mistakes and has failed more than one dictation in primary school. One of a recruiter’s jobs is to be in constant contact with candidates or recruiters on the client side, so we want our text to be correct and professional.
Another element often found in IT recruitment in which English language skills come in handy is the writing of job adverts. The text of the advert is the showcase of the entire recruitment, the first information that the candidate sees. Therefore, we want to convey the details of the offer as accurately as possible, and to achieve this we need to be sure that the text is correct and attractive.
To ensure that the text we write in English is of better quality, it is helpful to install the Grammarly plug-in. It corrects our grammatical errors and typos and makes the text more pleasing to the eye. There is a free version available, which works as a little green cloud that follows every word we write on the computer. Of course, there are also paid versions. Depending on the sophistication of the texts we write, it is worth considering buying the premium version, it contains more interesting and useful features such as stylistics.
Search, boolean, and other plug-ins …
Especially for novice recruiters, plug-ins that support one of the main tasks of an IT recruiter can be useful.
What does an IT recruiter do? We wrote about this in an earlier post, but the short answer is: Search! That is, searching for the right candidates. In today’s world, whether your workplace is a top IT recruitment agency or an in-house recruiting department at a top tech company, most of us search.
Preparing the right boolean is only part of the search, but once you start looking through candidate profiles it’s easy to see that there are a lot of names and abbreviations, and sometimes names appear that you’ve never seen before. Uncle google is one of the tools through which we can easily look up what is what and thus expand our technical knowledge. However, in order to improve the search for key words in candidates’ profiles and to be sure of technical or IT world-related names, it is worth installing two plugins.
The first of these is Highlight This!
When we hover over an abbreviation or word whose meaning we don’t know, a pop-up with a definition will appear for us. This can be helpful during technically advanced recruitment and for people who are developing their IT knowledge and learning about technologies and terminologies (such people are encouraged to take a look at the post with 5 definitions for the novice IT recruiter!)
He who asks does not wander!
A final tip from my side is to get into the habit of checking.
When we don’t know something, the easiest way is to put the issue on google or youtube. We can come across clever people, helpful applications and broaden our knowledge in IT. There are many workshops or know-how videos in the online world that help us to understand complex IT technologies and positions, or recruitment tricks. New applications and plug-ins appear on the market every now and then, so it is worth refreshing our knowledge and downloads from time to time.
All the tools mentioned above can help us improve and make our work a little easier on a daily basis, so it is worth delving into their possibilities. I hope there is something here for everyone and I encourage you to take a look at our other articles in which we present the world of IT recruitment even more broadly and to check out our social media!