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Tag Archives: IT staffing firms

A New Way To Prep for IT Job Interviews

If you’re preparing for interviews for IT jobs, you’ve probably practiced answering questions with a friend or family member.  This is a good start, but there’s another way to practice for your interviews so that you impress your interviewer (and your IT recruiters and IT staffing companies!).  Try switching roles for a bit and play the interviewer. 

How do you do this?  Your technical recruiters and IT staffing agencies can give you a basic idea of what questions your interviewer will ask.  It’s also worth it to think about you’d want to know if you were hiring for this position.  As you practice from the interviewer role, you’ll force yourself to think about what kind of experience, skills, and personality traits your interviewer (and your IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing firms) want you to highlight.  You can think about what the ideal candidate would sound like.  Take that perspective with you to the interview—even if you don’t get the job, you’re bound to leave a lasting impression on your interviewers (and make your IT recruiting companies eager to continue to work with you!).

 

 

 

Write Powerful IT Job Interview Thank You Notes

Most IT professionals have some practice writing thank you notes for interviews after IT jobs.  Whether you sent them along yourself or your IT recruiters and IT staffing companies send them to your interviewers, you’re likely to have written a few thank you notes.  Not everyone knows how to write a really strong, effective thank you note though.  IT recruiting firms and technical recruiters can all attest to the vast number of generic thank you notes they’ve handed back to hiring managers.  Here’s a tip on how to really make your thank you notes impressive and leave a lasting impression on your interviewers (as well as the IT staffing agencies and IT recruiting firms you’re working with).

As you write your thank you note, make reference to a couple of specific duties of the job and explain why you’re prepared to excel at them.  Your interviewer will really appreciate seeing that you not only grasp the job generally, but you also have thought about the specific responsibilities of it.  This will make them take you more seriously as they consider candidates.  Even if you don’t get the job, you’re likely to get great feedback from the interviewer that will make your IT staffing firms and IT recruiting agencies eager to submit you for more IT jobs.

 

Highlight This Quality in Your Next IT Job Interview

In interviews for IT jobs, it’s obvious that you need to demonstrate your skills and accomplishments with technical tools.  If a job requires Java, you won’t impress your interviewer or IT recruiters and IT staffing firms if you can’t speak to your comfort with Java.  But there is one skill that is very important to demonstrate in interviews and phone calls with IT staffing companies and IT recruiting agencies: empathy.

Technical recruiters and IT recruiting firms love to work with IT professionals who are well versed in a lot of technologies, but these people are hard to place if they don’t have empathy.  Why?  Because empathy is a quality that make somebody easy to work with.  In a field like IT, being easy to work with is of the utmost importance.  IT staffing agencies need people who are great at customer service, working with teams, and taking feedback on their coding, troubleshooting, etc.  So in your next conversation with IT recruiting companies or in IT job interviews, try to demonstrate that you’ve got empathy—for your teammates, clients, customers, and superiors.  (But make sure you demonstrate it—not just say you are empathetic!  This won’t play well.) It may just win you the job!

 

 

Is Your Tech Resume Turning Off IT Recruiters and Hiring Managers?

The kind of resumes IT recruiters, IT staffing agencies, and, most importantly, hiring managers, love are efficient.  Resumes that show thoroughly but quickly that an IT professional has the experience and skills to succeed in IT jobs are the ones that IT staffing companies and technical recruiters all love to show hiring managers. IT recruiting firms and IT staffing firms don’t always want IT professionals to stick to the 1 page rule for resumes – even though it’s the norm in most other industries.  However, it is important that IT professionals really cut down their resume to only relevant and recent job experience and skills.

What does this mean?  The best resumes will not stretch beyond a page (or more!) to include experience from more than 15 years ago or experience that just isn’t really relevant to IT jobs.  When you stretch your resume out to, say, 7 pages to include experience from your earliest jobs, you may actually be turning off IT recruiting agencies.  Instead of being thorough by including extra experience, you’re actually making it harder for IT staffing firms to decide if you’re a good fit for a job.  They may well pass over your resume for one that is faster and easier to read.  The same is true if you’ve included jobs, hobbies, or other information on your resume that isn’t immediately and obviously relevant to the IT jobs you want to be considered for.  Especially if your resume exceeds a page, including this extra information may irritate IT recruiting companies rather than strengthen your candidacy.

 

 

How To List Gaps for Personal Reasons on Your IT Resumes

If the resume you give to IT staffing firms and IT recruiters has gaps between IT jobs for time you’ve taken with your family, you need to be careful how you document it.  Some IT professionals are given poor advice on how to list gaps in time and they wind up with resumes that technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies are not interested in.  How can you avoid turning off hiring managers and IT recruiting firms? Try to list this gap as briefly and professionally as possible.  Hiring managers and IT staffing agencies don’t want to see personal details. The best way to describe a gap is with brief, standardized professional phrasing.  For instance, giving the dates of your absence and calling it a ‘leave of absence’ is professional but still makes it clear you were not unemployed and unable to find work during a gap in time.  Some people will go overboard and try to list skills or responsibilities they took on during this time.  Don’t do this—you didn’t have a boss that you were accountable to, so these things can’t really be measured.  It also can come across as desperate to potential employers. If you’ve tried listing the gap a few ways, but are still unsatisfied with your ideas, ask the IT staffing companies you’re working with and trust to help you do it.  They will appreciate your effort to make your resume as appealing as possible to potential employers.

Be More Open With Your IT Recruiters Than Your Interviewers

If you haven’t worked much with IT recruiters and IT staffing firms, it’s easy to get confused about how to interact with them.  Should you treat technical recruiters and IT staffing agencies with the same deference and professionalism as a hiring manager?  More? Less?

The good news is that IT recruiting firms and IT staffing companies are actually more of your allies in your search for IT jobs.   Unlike hiring managers and interviewers, you can be a lot more unfiltered and open with your IT recruiting agencies.  Your IT recruiters want to know what kind of job you want, what kind of coworkers or corporate culture you need to succeed, how much you’re willing to commute, etc.  If they know exactly what you want—and what you don’t want—they can help you find a job you’ll like and do well in.  Good IT staffing firms don’t want to place you in IT jobs that you hate or can’t succeed in.  This will only damage their relationships with employers.  So be professional with your IT recruiters, but be slightly more open, too.  The more they know about what you want, the better!

Be Stronger in Your IT Job Interviews

On your resume and in interviews for IT jobs, you’ll have to sell yourself to hiring managers, IT recruiters, and IT staffing companies.  There are certain qualities and phrases that hiring managers, IT recruiting firms and technical recruiters all agree are desirable.  However, you need to demonstrate to interviewers and IT staffing firms that you have these qualities, not just say you have them.  Here’s how to do this.

Firstly, stay away from just using adjectives.  Calling yourself “dedicated”, “motivated”, or “diligent” for example, won’t do you much good.  An interviewer can’t go on your own assessment of yourself.  What will work is if you can tell stories that show that other people see you as having the kinds of qualities that make a strong, effective team member.  For instance, talking about the time you spent hours de-bugging code until it was perfect will make a big impact on an interviewer and the IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing agencies you’re working with.  Simply saying that you’re “detail-oriented” and “tenacious” will not impress your interviewers.  Try thinking about this as you prep for your next IT job interview.  It will probably make all the difference.

Don’t Say This Phrase in IT Job Interviews

IT recruiters and IT staffing companies will tell you a lot about what you should be saying in interviews for IT jobs.  However, it’s best if you don’t need your technical recruiters and IT recruiting firms to tell you what you shouldn’t be saying.  Here’s one phrase that you need to banish from your interviewing vocabulary: “hard-working”

If you already spend time selling yourself to hiring managers, IT recruiting firms, and IT staffing firms as “hard-working,” you’re not alone.  It seems like a good quality for success in any job—especially IT jobs that require perseverance to solve tough problems.  However, the problem is that this phrase is overused to the point of being meaningless.

It won’t impress your interviewers or the IT recruiting companies you’re represented by if you say that you’re hard-working because so many other candidates say this about themselves.  It’s better to use the time you would have spent talking about this to speak to some other asset.  Maybe you have experience using a few rare technologies or programming languages.  Maybe you have great customer service skills and can tell a few stories about satisfied end users.  These kinds of things will strengthen your candidacy much more than calling yourself “hard-working.”

 

Questions NOT to ask in IT Job Interviews

Any IT recruiters and IT staffing firms will tell you it’s imperative to ask questions in the interview.  Not asking any questions makes it seem like you’re disinterested in the IT jobs you’re being interviewed for– or worse, you’re willing to just take any job.  IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing companies can easily place IT professionals who ask smart questions that reveal that they know what they want and how to contribute to an employer.

It’s important to your success in job interviews to avoid asking questions that make you and your technical recruiters and IT recruiting firms look bad.  Here are 2 kinds of questions to avoid.  Firstly, some questions will make you look more like a clock-watcher who wants to give minimum effort.  Secondly, you also want to avoid asking questions about benefits and compensation.  The focus of the interview for you should be the job, its duties, the company, and the company culture.  Your IT staffing agencies and IT recruiting companies will help you with negotiation compensation.  Harping on these topics will hurt your chances, if not entirely kill them, of getting the job.

Don’t Make These 2 Mistakes in Your IT Job Interviews

Before IT job interviews, you probably spend plenty of time prepping—both on your own and with our IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies.  After doing all that work, you don’t want to blow it and embarrass yourself and/or your technical recruiters and IT staffing firms.  Here are two pitfalls you can easily avoid in your interviews.

  1. Be concise, but don’t be so brief it can be interpreted as rude.  It’s particularly easy in interviews for IT jobs to give long-winded answers.  Technologies and processes and projects can be complicated to explain.  However, you want to try to reign in your answers to a shorter, more manageable format.  Watch your interviewer’s body language to see if you’re taking too long to answer their question.  Be mindful of how technical they are and how much technical detail they may want.  On the other hand, avoid giving answers so short they’re incomplete or could come across as rude.  One way to avoid either is to ask a clarifying question. Your IT recruiting firms and IT staffing companies will be pleased if you can do this well—it will make sure you give exactly the kind of answer your interviewer wants and it will show that your communications skills are good.
  2. Make sure to really illustrate your worth.  IT recruiting companies will tell you that this tip is actually true for your resume, too.  Naming your skill-set or your basic duties at previous jobs isn’t nearly as effective as giving concrete examples of your achievements.  What value have you added to your previous employers?  What have you done to help your previous teams reach their goals or complete projects?  This is what hiring managers want to hear.  Make it easy for them to see why you’re well worth a salary at their company.