Posted originally on The "Working with Workbridge" Blog
Article written by Kyle Sluzar, Practice Manager of Workbridge Associates San Francisco
If you have been involved in technical hiring recently, you’ve probably noticed how hard and competitive it is to find the right candidate. You spend endless hours gathering and screening resumes, reaching out to people, scheduling interviews, conducting interviews, and trying to close candidates. Sometimes you think you’ve found the right candidate and then suddenly that person gets another offer, or gets a counter-offer, and it’s back to the drawing boards. This is rather time consuming as well as very frustrating. So, how does one avoid this? The answer is simple: Hire a contractor.
There used to be a fear that if you hire a contractor, he or she will be susceptible to leaving for a better opportunity, which in turn, won’t help build your desired workplace culture. This is false. Most of today’s companies are hiring contractors as a tool to build their business as well as their team. One might ask, “How do they do this?”
Well let’s start with the interview process. In the current market, when a company finds a candidate that interests them, they must show urgency to hire. Sometimes this causes less time spent between the candidate and the team. Thus, the candidate ends up not being a positive culture fit. If this ever becomes the case, the candidate should be hired as a contractor in order to see how well he or she works with the team. This makes it a low risk but high reward situation. I’ve worked with many managers who question doing this because they don’t want to close the requisite and lose out on the “perfect” candidate. Just because the contractor was hired, it doesn’t mean that one has to stop collecting resumes.
Now let’s discuss technical skill set. If a candidate falls short technically, they shouldn’t be completely ruled out! A lot of managers have recently become more open to hiring the candidate on as a contractor and putting them on a 2-week project. This is done so the manager can see what creative ideas the candidate can come up with. If the candidate ends up picking up the technology quickly, this should be a sign to bring them on full-time. I recently suggested this to a client that was questioning a candidate on their design style. Instead of ruling that person out completely, the client had them work with the team for a week. You can guess what happened next. It ended up being a perfect fit!
Hire junior! If you are ever questioning a candidate because they are too junior, but have the bandwidth to have someone mentor and train them, hire them as a contractor. The candidate will be extra motivated to work hard and learn the product and technology. Once that candidate gets up to speed, they should be hired full-time so they can naturally become committed to the mission.