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Technical recruiters will find Rey’s book, Secrets from a Body Broker: A Hiring Handbook for Managers, Recruiters, and Job Seekers, packed with valuable tips for personnel management. She starts by revealing two secrets – Secret #1 is “Discrimination is the cornerstone of each and every hiring decision. This is because hiring decisions are personal decisions made by people, and people will discriminate, even at the most subconscious of levels”. Secret #2, she tells us, is “A large percentage of managers who are in charge of hiring have little or no formal training in interviewing and hiring process”. The takeaway for technical recruiters is that hiring decisions may not be based purely on technical credentials.

A technical recruiter specializing in headhunting may see a technical candidates’ resume as an ideal match for an open IT job he or she is trying to place, but the hiring manager may feel differently. Whether the IT position is a remote job, requires an in-person interview, or a series of phone interviews, fit matters. A technical hiring manager wants not just the skill-set, but also someone he or she can respect and work well with. Even for a remote IT job, communication between a hiring manager and technical candidate via email may still play a key part in the project completion process. A hiring manager’s priorities will be affected by bias — as Rey notes in secret number 1, and discrimination for some small imperfection in a technical recruiter’s mind, such as sub-par communication skills may be crucial for a hiring manager’s comfort levels when working with a technical candidate. For this reason, a marginally less-qualified technical candidate may be selected over a standout from a skill perspective, because there is more to the big picture in a role than simply qualifications.

It may seem frustrating to an IT staffer that predicting the success of candidates that seem qualified can seem as chancey as betting, but at the end of the day, that’s the game of the technical staffing industry, and IT recruiters just have to keep their batting averages as high as possible.