Advanced IT Candidate Screening
Emergent Staffing offers an unmatched IT vetting process designed to identify top tech professionals who match your company's culture and goals. We don't just read resumes — we ensure that the candidates we recruit have the right skills and are a perfect fit for the role.
Step 1: Profile Screening
Just like search engine optimization (SEO) helps your target audience find your website, Emergent Staffing creates optimized job postings using your job requirements. These listings are specifically designed to target the top keyword searches that people use to find roles like yours. In other words, we make it easy for every job seeker that matches your requirements to find the job!
Our technical recruiters have worked with thousands of engineers and information technology professionals at various stages of the recruitment process. We maintain short lists of top IT talent for various roles within our vast candidate database. Before we post your job publicly, we reach out to our network for tech talent that matches the role and we can potentially deliver quality candidates to your desk in short order.
Next, job postings are advertised on the top job boards such as Indeed, LinkedIn, and technology-specific boards to attract a large pool of qualified potential candidates. If the job is fully remote, we advertise in up to 40 metropolitan areas that have concentrations of tech talent at your target salary. Our tried-and-true applicant tracking system uses cutting edge software to efficiently process hundreds of applicants for every position. The bigger the pool of IT candidates we start with, the more likely we’ll find the perfect one for your company.
The pool of IT applicants is screened based on their resume, job application and relevant work history. The few qualified applicants are moved through the process for further evaluation.
Step 2: Personality and Culture Fit
Nothing is more important to a workplace than the values and commitment of the people working together. For that reason, before we even see each candidate’s name or background, we use expertly designed tests to make sure their core values align to key traits for all tech roles: integrity, excellence, responsibility, adaptability, and more.
We then evaluate their personality and behavioral traits to match the needs of the specific role. For example, software engineers are expected to be efficient, business analysts forthright, and UI/UX designers need to be creative. This unbiased, scientific approach allows us to make sure successful applicants will have a positive impact on your workplace culture.
We've taken the time to understand your company so we can act as your representatives and present your organization’s strengths to candidates throughout the process. We understand that the candidate must fit the company and the company must fit the candidate.
Step 3: Skills Assessment
Pre-employment testing, including IT skills assessments and cognitive ability tests, has been shown to correlate to job success more than traditional pre-employment screening techniques like resume review, phone screens, unstructured interviews, and others. At Emergent Staffing, we create unique assessments for each role. These require IT candidates to pass specific cognitive tests such as problem solving, reasoning, attention to detail, role-specific knowledge tests, and algorithm coding challenges when applicable.
With anti-cheating techniques in place, we make sure the candidate is the one taking the tests. They’re not looking up answers on Google or in Chat GPT and they’re not plagiarizing the coding challenge. With results from these tests complete, we have a good idea which people will do well on the rest of our process. When combined with the other steps in our process, our confidence goes so high, we put our stamp of certification on candidates we deliver to your desk.
Thousands of candidates have taken our online assessments and only the top few percent move on to our most involved employment screening process steps.
Step 4: Specialized IT Recruiter Interview
Online assessments and challenges are a great way to determine if someone is capable of being a productive worker, but the human touch is still a critical step in the process.
Our recruiters are the first people that candidates talk to about the role and about your company. We make sure to represent your values, culture, and the strengths of your workplace to make sure it’s a fit for everyone involved.
It can be easy for a non-technical person to simply take what a, seemingly, tech expert says at face value. This can lead to poor hiring decisions because it’s easy for candidates to claim to know a certain technology without having to prove it. Our senior technical recruiters have years of experience interviewing people in IT roles. They can talk the talk and can quickly detect when someone is claiming to be knowledgeable when they're not.
Many technical people lack strong interpersonal skills. Your workplace and role specifications determine the communication skills and teamwork required for the job. Our recruiters watch out for this and other potential flags to make sure the IT candidates we deliver will thrive in your workplace.
Throughout the recruiting and vetting process, we build rapport and interest in the position. Our influential candidate relationships ultimately lead to acceptance of any offer made to your chosen candidate.
Step 5: Role-based challenge*
Demonstrating that a candidate can do the work required is a sure way to confirm whether they will succeed at a job. However, crafting a real-world-like challenge to test this out is easy feat. At Emergent, we’ve done the hard work to craft such challenges for numerous IT roles. Deeply vetted candidates spend hours of their own time completing challenges and submitting them to us for review.
Here are a few examples of the different challenges certain roles have to complete during the evalutation process:
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Software engineers:
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Follow a requirements document and develop a custom web application from scratch, covering numerous aspects of the full stack engineering process.
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Their solution is evaluated for meeting requirements, algorithm correctness, input validation, back-end code quality/structure, and front-end quality.
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They then present the solution to senior architects/engineers, defend their approach, answer questions about handling new requirements, and discuss cloud infrastructure for hosting.
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Database engineers:
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Complete a mini database/ETL/reporting project, write a stored procedure, and tune a poor performing query.
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Business analysts:
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Attend a fictitious client meeting and gather technical and functional requirements from our role-playing businessperson.
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QA engineers:
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Find defects in a purposely broken web application.
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UI/UX:
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Design a portion of a web application.
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There is nothing in the IT staffing industry quite like our role-based challenges to generate high confidence in the hiring process.
*Role-based challenges may require additional fees for direct hires. IT Contract Consultants with a Certified Emergent Talent certificate have previously passed our role-based challenge for the roles indicated on their certificate.
Step 6: Certified & Delivered
Many IT staffing agencies act like resume mills, simply throwing candidates over the wall and hoping that something will land. At Emergent Staffing, we only present highly qualified tech candidates who are certified by our deep vetting process and work with you along every step of the way with our full-service hiring process.
Our goal is to develop a long-term partnership with you in which you trust our team to consistently provide IT candidates who truly help your company succeed. We act as an extension of your team, making the entire process as seamless as possible so you can focus on your job.
Our work doesn’t stop when you choose a candidate. First, we make sure the offer gets signed and then we ensure that the new employee or consultant has everything needed for a great start. We’ll even assist with your onboarding process. Finally, with ongoing touch points, we make sure your consultant or employee is performing well and happy with their job.
