If we have no Jr candidates we won’t have great Sr profiles
if (youhireJr === true )
{haveGreatSrQuality()}
“May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true.”
Bob Dylan.
As you already know, a great difficulty we Recruiters have is that for a candidate search in the IT area it is likely that there are fewer to no applications at all compared with the average job advertisement. Programmers, engineers, and IT systems experts are the most in-demand experts. They are also the most scarce workforce in the market, and this is why we believe that IT companies must bet on hiring Jr. profiles. They can train them within the company and work on their growth. With this approach, there are multiple benefits: Junior profiles are usually more proactive, willing to learn everything and it’s a great way to engage and improve the actual staff.
I believe in hiring Jr. profiles because in my career as Talent Acquisition Specialist I had the chance to bet on profiles and thus generate their first professional experience.
In this article I want to share Mariano’s story with you:
In my first year as an IT Recruiter, I had the opportunity to participate in a coding event held by Topcoder where I met a 17 years old boy who was very excited about the world of development and programming, and looking for his first job opportunity.
On the other hand, one of my main clients was a prestigious company in the fintech industry and I was working closely with the company’s CEO. At that time they were building a team of senior developers, looking only at profiles with more than five years of experience in the development world.
I thought about Mariano and asked him to do this client’s challenge in any programming language he knew. At that time, he had some knowledge of C++ thanks to high school. It took him about three weeks to finish it and once it was delivered, I asked him to make time to read the documentation and try to translate it all to Java. About three or four weeks later, he gave me the Challenge for review and I showed it to the technical leader who worked with me to review it and give me his feedback. He told me that his work was not worthy of being shown, but I decided to focus on the desire, time and effort that Mariano had dedicated to make it happen. I also dare to talk to the CEO of the fintech to tell him that I had a candidate that I co nsidered was worth to meet and I suggested that worst case scenario he was only going to waste 30 minutes of his life.
Mariano finally got an offer for a Junior position and started working at this Fintech. Six months after he joined, I asked for a follow-up meeting with the Human Resources Manager of the company to ask about his performance and surprisingly she told me : “from now on we want to incorporate similar profiles in terms of attitude, for our team”.
This story shows us the importance of giving Jr profiles the opportunity to demonstrate their potential within companies. Not only they have that strength and drive to perform and show what they can do, but they also offer the possibility whit more senior profiles to develop their leadership skills.
To conclude, I believe that our role as Recruiters should not only be to find the ideal candidates, but also to recommend to our clients the benefits of hiring more Junior profiles, guide the candidates throughout the recruitment process, and help them face the job interviews since they have probably not faced previous experiences like these before.
This kind of investment in candidate’s career helps workers to engage with the company and to work by its values. This is a very important objective for the future of tech companies.
