The need for new staff can arise at random, which underscores the importance of having an established integration process in place. Imagine this: Your company has received an unexpected wave of new projects and opportunities, which is wonderful. However, now you’re prompted to call in temporary resources. You’ll need a couple of full teams and a few supplementary developers to augment three existing teams. It’s really your only option if you want to accept these unexpected but potentially lucrative projects.

How will you go about integrating these resources into your staff? You understand the importance of employee integration, particularly when it comes to maximizing productivity. If an individual doesn’t understand their role or if a new team member hasn’t found their place in the workflow, achieving even moderate productivity can be a challenge. Yet you’re on some tight deadlines. So precisely how do you finish on time and within budget? Do you need to make special considerations during the recruiting and hiring process? Or is this just a project management challenge?

One Solution: Employee Integration Teams

The best companies will have an employee integration team, spanning all departments and divisions. This team works to develop onboarding and integration protocol and resources for new talent. Integration can be quite complex in many cases, as new arrivals must get acquainted with the project and workflow. New staff are also challenged with finding their place within the team dynamic. It’s a task that can be difficult when joining one of the larger agile development teams (with a couple dozen people or more!)

Your employee integration team should work to ensure that you have a designated guide who can handle the introduction, integration and training process in each division and on each development team. This guide will be the new team member’s point person for questions and orientation, which leaves other team members free to proceed as planned.

This is one benefit of hiring an entire team of temporary onsite staff instead of individuals: You can avoid many of the more time-consuming aspects of the employee integration process. In many cases, this group of temporary developers already has what it takes to perform well together. Alternatively, they may all be adept at forming a strong team dynamic quickly. They simply need the project specs, and can get to work creating whatever it is that you need developed.

How to Integrate Temporary Staff into Your Company Quickly and Efficiently

There are a number of measures that your company can implement to ensure that all staff—temporary and permanent alike—go through a brief but highly effective integration process. Consider the following points when evaluating your company’s ability to accommodate new team members, particularly those who are onsite as temporary resources.

• Hire for cultural fit. Always. So many hiring managers ignore the issue of cultural fit, despite the mountains of anecdotal evidence surrounding its importance. Cultural fit refers to the individual’s ability to mesh with not only their team members but the company culture as a whole. If your company is very relaxed, liberal and collaborative, with no dress code, a pet-friendly office that frequently allows staff to work from home or the nearby coffee shop, then it can be a poor fit for someone who prefers a more traditional office environment. This person may find the relaxed environment rather distracting and the highly collaborative team dynamic could feel stifling. This may also occur if someone who’s accustomed to a very relaxed, cooperative development team relocates to work in a more rigid, independent environment. Cultural fit must be addressed during the recruiting and hiring process, as it’s far more challenging to make it work if you hire the wrong talent. You could find yourself attempting to place a round peg in a square hole.
• Ensure your managers maintain continuous, hands-on working style. If you only meet with management once a week, then temporary staff may need to wait days before they get some vital pieces of the puzzle. An environment with managers who interact with talent on a continual, as-needed basis will yield much faster, smoother integration.
• Make the project specs available to new team members and encourage them to ask questions. The new talent must have a full and complete understanding of the project specs, whether you’re architecting a massive enterprise software program or developing a relatively simple mobile app. In fact, the talent should already be familiar with those specifications, as savvy recruiters and hiring managers use specs as the basis for the job description. Therefore, the essentials should have been discussed—at least in a more general sense—during the recruiting and hiring phase. Once you’ve provided the talent with the specs, allow them sufficient time to absorb the information and be ready to address any questions that arise. A careful spec review is key, as it will prevent confusion and errors down the line. Give your developers time to ramp up to full speed, as rushing gives rise to mistakes.
• Make an effort to prepare your existing staff. It’s not uncommon for your internal team to feel a bit threatened by the introduction of new talent. You may receive a bit of “push back” as your in-house team feels as though the temporary staff are encroaching upon their territory. This is more apt to occur if your team is not prepared in advance, so make a concerted effort to explain why the decision was made to call in additional resources. It’s also helpful to discuss what to expect over the coming weeks.

Hiring managers seeking temporary staff for the first time should confer with others throughout the company to determine if the aforementioned measures are in place. And if those measures are not present, could they be implemented in relatively short order? This will ensure a prompt and smooth employee integration process for your temporary team members.

If you’re seeking an experienced IT staffing firm who can help you find the temporary talent that you need to succeed, turn to the experts at iTech. Our developers and other tech professionals know precisely how to get results in today’s hyper-competitive world. We invite you to contact us today to begin the process of finding IT staff.

The post What’s the Importance of Employee Integration for Temporary Staff? first appeared on iTech.

However, many projects demand an on-site presence. This is especially true of some of the most collaborative agile development projects, along with many IT projects involving on-site hardware and secure, on-site networks. For this reason, many companies turn to on-site staffing instead of remote resources. This means that most recruiting efforts are focused on a local level, thereby limiting your talent pool. One alternative lies in on-site staffing, which provides a benefit by sourcing temporary staff from all corners of the globe and sent to work at your company’s offices.

Finding the Best Person for the Job

On-site staffing solutions provide you with the best person for the job—not just the best local person. When compared to the larger hiring pool, your local talent may not be the ideal choice for your needs. You don’t want to find yourself forced to hire someone because they’re your only option. This can lead to poor results, a longer project timeframe and budget overruns.

Recruiting becomes exponentially more complex for large corporations and enterprises, because these companies need more than just one or two people; chances are that they need an entire team of developers. This makes it even less likely that you’ll truly find the ideal person for the job at a local level.

Getting the best person for the job can make a tremendous difference in the timeline or pace of your project, and in the overall quality of the work that’s performed. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to work with a company that provides you with the temporary on-site staff that you need to achieve the desired results.

A tech staffing services provider can conduct a broader search to find the ideal fit that can hit the ground running on day one. What’s more, there’s a fair chance that an incredible match is already available in the staffing firm’s ranks, provided you turn to a service provider that understands the intricacies of software development. This can greatly reduce the timeframe of the talent acquisition process as well as your project outcome.

The Benefits of Onsite Staffing Resources

Many companies—even some large multinational corporations—lack good access to talent. To make matters more complex, if you’re seeking talent to work on-site, you’ll need to ensure that these individuals meet various state and federal compliance requirements. This process can be quite complex and costly. As a result, many large enterprises veer away from hiring staff who might require measures such as visa sponsorship, thinking it too complex. This forces a more localized search that may not serve the companies’ best interests.

This is another area where it can be helpful to work with a tech staffing firm that recruits from a broader pool of talent. Again, the idea is to search out the best person for the job—regardless of location. Such staffing companies can even handle the visa sponsorship process if that’s what it takes to get the best talent. Our company, iTech, sponsors the talent, who are then temporarily dispatched to work on-site at the client’s company.

Finding the best person for the project is essential in today’s hyper-competitive techsphere. This is a significant advantage of working with a tech staffing firm such as iTech. iTech has the experience required to find skilled, proven talent. What’s more, companies are afforded far greater control over the project since it will be handled on-site. This allows businesses to leverage existing on-site talent and resources, translating into cost savings.

iTech serves companies and organizations throughout the United States with a goal of securing a firm understanding of the client’s development project’s specs, which are then used as the basis of your job description. From there, we’ll recruit, screen and vet candidates, providing our top picks for the project. Our goal is to reduce expenses while maximizing productivity. Contact iTech to learn more about our service offerings.

The post On-Site Staffing Solutions: Finding the Best Person for the Job first appeared on iTech.

This means you’re faced with lots of choices millions of developers, dozens of programming languages and countless developer specialties. And this says nothing of soft skills, which play a major role when building a development team. A brief examination of the numbers makes it abundantly clear that you need to carefully evaluate a developer’s skills in order to ensure you’ve found the right person for your project.

The top development teams tend to have a broad collective skill set, with a high degree of redundancy or overlap among individual skill sets. While many focus on technical skills, it’s also important to place great emphasis on soft skills, such as leadership tendencies and strong collaborative capabilities.

If you’re a hiring manager or team leader who’s tasked with assembling the ideal development team, you must have an accurate and effective developer skill assessment strategy. So where do you begin?

Performing a Soft Skill Assessment

Assessing soft skills is a bit more subjective than the evaluation process for technical skills, which tend to be far more black and white. This makes soft skill evaluations a bit more challenging in some ways, especially when you consider that soft skills are difficult to evaluate.

Soft skill assessment should examine a number of areas, including the following:

• Team player skills in a large group and small group setting;
• Leadership and self-motivation capabilities;
• Comfort level when working independently;
• Organizational skills;
• Problem solving and analytical capabilities;
• Adaptability and flexibility;
• Conflict resolution skills; and
• Communication skills (online, over the phone and in person).

There’s no simple, straightforward test for soft skills and often, the most effective evaluations are performed over an extended period of time. For this reason, peer reviews and recommendations from former employers can offer lots of useful insight into an individual’s soft skills. Others may opt to simply ask the candidate about their strengths and weaknesses.

As a hiring manager or team leader, the objective is to ensure that your group has a diverse set of soft skill strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if you pair a group of strong leaders with under-developed conflict resolution skills, then you’re apt to see clashes. Team members should possess skill sets that are complementary of each other, with teammates counterbalancing each others’ strengths and weaknesses.

Performing a Developer Skill Assessment for Technical Capabilities

Evaluating an individual’s tech skills can be rather complex, as most hiring managers and recruiters have found that traditional programming tests are very limited in terms of their usefulness. And for developers who work as part of a large agile development team, work samples may be hard to come by. That’s because a single person may not be able to say they’re solely responsible for a particular element or aspect of the project.

So how do you perform a tech skill assessment for developers? Well, it can be beneficial to begin by asking the talent about their skills and proficiencies in various programming languages. This provides you with a good starting point. It can be beneficial to create a standardized form, with a list of skills and programming languages, with tick boxes that allow the individual to rank their skill level for each line item.

From there, it’s most effective to assign test projects which allow the candidate to demonstrate their skills in a tangible, easy-to-evaluate manner. It’s generally best to give all candidates the same project or assignment so as to make the evaluation process more uniform (and subsequently, a bit easier.)

Ideally, you should have a development team leader or other tech-savvy expert evaluating developers, as a typical recruiter or hiring manager will lack the insight required to perform an effective assessment. This is one area where you can benefit from working with an IT staffing firm such as iTech, since our team specializes in sourcing and placing developers and other tech talent with companies across the nation.

At iTech, we know how to assess talent. We can form a new team or supplement an existing team with individuals who are apt to be complementary. And you won’t need to divert valuable resources away from current projects (as is commonly required, since you need someone with programming expertise to effectively evaluate a developer.) We are available to provide consulting and staffing services for clients who are in search of the ideal team of developers. We make sure the team is well-suited to your unique project and its specs. And with our temporary staffing services, there’s no long-term commitment, which is ideal for companies that require help on a one-time or periodic basis. We invite you to contact iTech today to find IT staff for your next project.

The post The Importance of Developer Skill Assessment first appeared on iTech.

Your lead developers could address these issues by creating programming tests for interviews. However, you may still wonder: Are these coding tests really an effective approach to finding the right developer for your needs?

Is it Effective to Use Programming Tests for Interviews of Potential Hires?

Programming tests can offer some useful insight, but this is only the case when tests are realistic, practical and relevant.

This is a very common problem for our clients, explained iTech CEO Kishore Khandavalli. He added, Hiring managers frequently make the mistake of administering tests that are theoretical and ‘bookish’ in nature. That’s the wrong approach and it’s frustrating for the talent too. In my experience, the level talent do not want to take a written test, they want to have a dialogue or show you what they are capable of.

The very nature of these theoretical programming tests is just that theoretical. As such, they lack a firm rooting in the actual day-to-day work the individual would perform.

Many companies are now using a more informal, spontaneous and very effective approach to developer testing: you simply ask the candidate to sit down at a computer and observe as they start coding. Remember, you must ensure the programming test is relevant to the type of work that they’ll be asked to perform in the event that the individual is hired.

What Can You Learn From Administering a Coding Test During the Hiring Process?

A hiring manager can gain insight into a number of different areas when a sit down and code approach is utilized. This includes the opportunity to:

• Assess the candidate’s speed (or lack thereof);
• View the candidate’s coding process;
• Evaluate the quality of the code; and
• Determine the strategy that underlies the coding.

Timeframe matters when administering programming tests in interviews. In cases where an in-office interview is not possible (or desirable), you can use a screen-sharing app to view the candidate’s coding work in real time. It’s also possible for the candidate to record their actions using a screen recording tool like Screencast-O-Matic. In addition to offering insight into the amount of time it took the candidate to write the code, you’ll also have an opportunity to view their process.

The question of when to administer the programming test is also relevant. There are no hard and fast rules concerning precisely when you ought to ask a candidate to demonstrate their skills. For a typical programmer, testing during the interview process tends to make sense. But in cases where you’re seeking unique or highly sophisticated coding abilities, it may be most effective to administer a test as part of the pre-interview process. This allows you to screen out any individuals who lack the skills required to get the job done, resulting in a faster, more efficient recruiting process.

Notably, you’ll need to involve a development team leader in this process. That’s because a fair amount of technical expertise is required in order to effectively evaluate a person’s technical capabilities and talents. Of course, programming skills are just part of the staffing equation. It’s also vital that you’re hiring talent for the right soft skills and cultural fit.

The hiring experts at iTech are available to assist in all of these efforts, whether you’re seeking to hire a team of developers to close a staffing gap or need a few IT professionals to join your team for an urgent project. With offices in Dallas, TX, Edison, NJ and Burlington, VT, among other locations, we specialize in providing temporary onsite developer and IT staffing for large companies throughout the U.S. We invite you to contact iTech today to learn more about how we can guide you through the IT staffing process.

The post Should You Give Programming Tests for Interviews When Hiring a Developer? first appeared on iTech.

Even for those who last more than a few weeks, the stats are still discouraging. It’s estimated that one in three individuals will leave a new job shortly before or around the six-month mark. A 66% long-term retention rate is far from the ideal, regardless of the position or industry. A failed hire is more than just frustrating. It’s costly, yet many hiring managers fail to accurately quantify the expense. In fact, the real cost of hiring a developer is hard to pin down, especially when you consider that it varies dramatically on a case-by-case basis. But no matter how you cut it, the cost can be significant in terms of time and resources. But precisely how and why is the hiring process so involved and costly? And how can you avoid bad hires? We all know about the costs of hiring a recruiter and listing the position, but there are many other factors at play.

The Cost of Evaluating Your Needs

Many companies struggle to articulate their own needs and requirements for a new position. Time-pressed managers often skip the process of developing comprehensive job specs, which are then used to develop a detailed list of job requirements. And too often, the resulting job description is purely focused on technical skills, with little attention to the non-technical and soft skills that can ultimately make or break a project. These factors frequently combine to result in a recruiting effort that goes awry. This leads to a bad hire where the individual doesn’t mesh with your company or their skill set fails to meet your needs.

In order to properly evaluate and identify your precise staffing requirements for a specific position and project, you’ll need to consult with members of your team. A tech team leader can provide you with the insight and information that you need to craft an effective job description and project specs. This is a crucial step, as you may discover the hard way when you attempt to “recycle” and then modify existing specs and job descriptions. You may use the old specs and description as a starting point, then make adjustments to suit. But this rarely works. More often, you end up with an inaccurate view of your needs, which in turn, results in skewed hiring decisions that can carry a hefty price tag.

The Cost of Screening, Vetting and Interviewing

Screening and vetting potential candidates can be a very time-consuming process. It’s not uncommon to encounter scenarios where you invest an inordinate amount of time attempting to evaluate applicants. We’ve seen managers interview over half a dozen candidates over a period of three weeks for each position. That’s costly, since you’re investing time, money and resources, pulling team leaders off current projects to help aid in the hiring process, and/or even delaying the start of a project because you just haven’t found the right person.

Once you’ve identified the individuals who show promise, you’re tasked with verifying their credentials and experience, in addition to evaluating any work samples that they provide. Then you must identify those who are worth a closer look, whether it’s an interview, a test project or another evaluation tool. Many managers also forget to consider the candidate’s personal plans, such as planned vacations, resulting in nasty unexpected surprises down the line.

Oh, and if you lack lots of high-level tech experience, you may need to call upon your tech team yet again to help with these evaluations. It’s virtually impossible for a layman to know which questions to ask or what to look for when examining an individual’s experience, skills and tests/work samples. The more time your tech team spends assisting with the staffing process, the less time they can spend doing what they do best — tech work. This results in productivity dips and an adverse impact on your bottom line. This can be detrimental in some cases, particularly if you’re seeking to call in additional resources because you can’t handle the current workload.

Once a new hire arrives, many companies simply toss them into the pool with little or no onboarding. The result is that they often swim in the wrong direction…or drown.

The Cost of Hiring the Wrong Talent

Hiring the wrong person (or people) for the job can be very costly, particularly in cases where you have a critical need for new team members and subsequently invest a lot of money to fast track the process.

Often, it’s not an individual’s skills (or lack thereof) that make for a bad hire. It’s often the person’s ability to work with your existing tech team. Soft skills and cultural fit matter, so if your new team members aren’t used to the dynamics and culture, then they may struggle to succeed in your company. In short, there is such as thing as a “bad fit.”

You’ll see losses in many areas, including reduced productivity, onboarding-related expenditures for the new team member(s). You essentially waste all of the time and money invested in the recruiting process since it didn’t lead you to the right person (or people) for the job. The cost of hiring the wrong candidate can be even higher in situations where you pay for relocation or additional training.

The bottom line is this: If you invest the time, effort and resources up-front, you can avoid incurring greater cost due to complications down the line. We offer staffing services for clients seeking to bring in a temporary on-site team to assist with a project. This approach gives you a team of tech staffing experts to oversee the recruiting process, so your company’s team members can focus on doing what you do best. What’s more, there’s no long-term commitment. The team remains on-site to work with your in-house talent, and once the project is complete, they return to iTech. So you pay only for the resources you actually use.

The cost of recruiting and hiring a software developer or other tech talent on a temporary basis can be exorbitant when done in the traditional way. You’ll see costs that are comparable to those that are associated with hiring a permanent team member. You’ll need to develop your specs and job description, advertise the position, screen and interview candidates, and oversee the onboarding process. This process essentially remains the same whether you’re hiring a part-time employee, a full-time staffer, a temporary team member or permanent staff. When you turn to a tech and IT staffing service provider, you will see a greater value for your dollar, combined with better quality talent, because you’ll be more apt to connect with the right person for the job. Contact iTech today to discuss your staffing needs and let us help you find the right talent, while improving your bottom line.

The post The Real Costs of Hiring a Software Developer first appeared on iTech.

For a hiring manager, few things are more frustrating than this realization. Your talent was qualified, skilled, and he/she passed your tests with flying colors. So what gives? It’s possible you failed to consider the applicant’s abilities as a team player. And you must consider more than just their plays-well-with-others skills; you must evaluate their ability to work on teams of varying sizes.

Why Do Team Player Abilities Matter in the IT Industry?

An individual’s ability to collaborate and interact with others can have a dramatic impact on their productivity, the quality of their work and, ultimately, their level of job satisfaction. Solitary vs. team dynamics affect many elements in the work environment, such as:

• The amount, form and frequency of communication;
• The degree of collaboration;
• The scope of each person’s job;
• The frequency and importance of deadlines;
• The manner in which projects are planned; and
• The amount of oversight from fellow staff.

A person who thrives in a collaborative, social, small team setting may drown while working with a large team. In this environment, there is less oversight and a greater emphasis on deadlines, communication, initiative and compromise. In the IT industry, rapid project pace combines with complex team dynamics to create a truly unique, multi-faceted work environment. Adapting to a new workplace is challenging enough; you want to be sure you select talent that’s apt to succeed.

What Are the Implications of Working Alone vs. Working With a Team?

It’s common knowledge that the dynamics of solitary work differ dramatically from what you might see in a team setting, but many hiring managers fail to realize that the size of a team has a dramatic impact on the overall workings. An individual’s comfort level (or lack thereof) is a primary determinant of whether they ultimately succeed.

Solitary Workers in the IT Industry

Solitary work is ideal for the motivated, self-starter who is highly focused and self-manages well. Interpersonal skills and team player abilities are less critical for solitary workers, who also tend to perform a far broader range of tasks on a project. A lone wolf may handle multiple aspects of an IT project personally, resulting in fewer hand offs and fewer deadlines, which can be ideal for someone who tends to struggle with tight timelines. Solitary workers often have the ability to focus on specific elements of a project and the entire project as a whole.

The Dynamics of Small IT Teams

Small teams tend to require social people with very strong team player skills and an ability to create and follow the detailed action plans that are utilized in the IT industry. Interpersonal communication is key to success in a small team setting, as is the ability to debate and compromise constructively. Role versatility is vital too. Natural leaders may need to surrender control to a fellow team member in some situations, while natural followers should feel comfortable stepping up to the plate on occasion.

Workers who do well in small team arrangements can take an assignment and run with it, working effectively under the pressure of tight deadlines. They can focus on completing a very specific task promptly so the project can be passed along to the next person in line. They’re also open to constructive criticism and feedback. Many team players also tend to be competitive, which can be a good thing since the mere presence of teammates can drive professional growth.

Large Teams in the IT Industry

Large team players share many attributes with solitary workers and also with those who thrive in a small team setting. A large team demands extremely detailed action plans and well-defined roles to ensure that everyone works in a productive, harmonious manner. Each person has a narrow, precise task, and deadlines tend to be critical. With so many moving parts, a single delay can be amplified dramatically down the line. Skills like effective time management and an ability to remain hyper-focused are critical to success. These environments also tend to be very fast-paced, with work and information traveling from person to person rapidly on a frequent basis.

In many situations, the individual will be working alone for long periods. Therefore, the large team player needs to be a self-starter who can stay motivated and on-point. You can’t have a person who’s prone to distractions from phone calls, text messages, online distractions or even non-critical work-related tasks. In this setting, you don’t have time to wait for someone to give you direction either. You need to feel confident in taking initiative, while always keeping your teammates in mind.

HR professionals must possess an accurate understanding of the attributes and skills that are required to work in isolation, on a small team, or in a large team work environment. Then, it’s a matter of evaluating your own company’s work environment to identify which type of person you ought to be seeking. Only then can you find talent who has what it takes to succeed and thrive on a long term basis.

Turning to IT Staffing as a Solution to The Hiring Challenge

If the prospect of evaluating these additional qualities feels daunting, you might consider another option. Every HR director realizes there are lots of alternatives to permanent employees. One alternative that’s gaining traction is called insourcing, a practice that entails temporarily embedding a team within your organization to complete a particular project. This option allows you to avoid the hassle of evaluating, vetting, interviewing, and trialing permanent employees who may or may not be a good long term fit. In fact, long term for the IT sector is considered just a couple years, according to this study. So even those who prove to be a good fit may depart in fairly short order, leaving the HR department back at square one.

At iTech, we offer IT staffing solutions such as insourcing, providing assistance to companies and organizations across many industries. We provide a competitive edge, as we’ll select talent with the skills, experience, and team player style to suit your unique work environment. What’s more, our talent has already refined their own team dynamics. This means our staff is far more productive than a freshly-assembled team. Contact us today to learn more about our IT staffing solutions.

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