What level of software knowledge do you need to be a great tech recruiter?

This is a re-post of a blog originally written by Makers Academy

Tech recruitment has never been harder, which might come as little surprise since ‘software engineer’ is officially the world’s most in-demand profession. In a candidate-driven market, recruiters are vying for the same people among fierce competition, which begs the question: how do you stand out as a recruiter, and what level of technical knowledge do you need?

After all, data shows that the biggest challenges faced by tech recruiters include cutting through the noise and standing out from the crowd to attract the right talent, which is a struggle for a quarter of recruiters.

Ruben co-built Makers a decade ago and helped it to become one of the top coding bootcamps in Europe. Having trained thousands of software engineers, he saw during his time as Chief Commercial Officer that there was a significant knowledge gap around the world of technology.

This started with his own internal partnership team looking to build relationships with employers to place those engineers. Then after having interacted with hundreds of in-house and agency-side tech recruiters, he saw that not enough recruiters knew how to speak fluently about the world they operated in: tech.

And so the idea for TechMap was born, a course designed by and for tech recruiters to understand more about technology. Helping recruiters to gain legitimacy, deepen their knowledge, and increase their ability to close roles, Tech Map is on a mission to help recruiters learn everything about tech, so techies truly enjoy interacting with tech recruiters.

We sat down with Ruben to learn more about the problem that TechMap is tackling, the solution they’re building, and what he’s learning through the process.

Just finished the Techmap course — such a fun way to understand the tech world. Highly recommended for anyone just starting in tech or for people like me who’ve been here for a while and would like to have more clarity. Mariam, Talent and People Ops at Intrro

The problem

Ruben reflects on what he saw in the early days of Makers: “As Evgeny, co-founder of Makers, wrote in a 2017 blog, Makers cared more about how the engineers would write software (e.g. XP, TDD, Agile etc.) and their Emotional Intelligence over whether they were specific experts in Ruby.”

Yet, most agency recruiters would cold-call Makers offering some “awesome Ruby engineers”, effectively missing the point.

“Equally, when the team at Makers interacted with in-house tech recruiters, they would often not want to talk to us because “we develop in Java, and you seem to be doing Ruby”,” Ruben says.

“This was disappointing because we knew our engineers could easily learn new languages, and since we’ve trained 3,000+ people and many have never touched Ruby afterwards, demonstrating that this was indeed not a real problem.”

Seeing those two things, it was clear to Ruben that this wasn’t due to a tech recruiter’s bad will. Rather, this demonstrated that they didn’t know enough to answer important questions like:

1. How easy is it to switch from backend engineering to DevOps engineer?
2. If I see a candidate with 5 years of experience in Java, how quickly could they move to a Scala role?
3. What is a DevSecOp engineer, and what kind of skills/competence do they need to have?
4. What is CI/CD, and why is it important?

In short: it became apparent that nobody cared to train tech recruiters in acquiring the necessary technical mental models and frameworks to connect better with the very people they were trying to recruit.

The solution

After having trained hundreds of tech recruiters all over the world for companies like Bloomberg, Samsung, Scede and Tumblr and with 88% of people giving it 5-star ratings on TrustPilot, TechMap has quickly become the best course on the market to help tech recruiters learn all about tech.

The course takes, on average, 12 hours and is all designed to be proactive learning with videos, questions and a community. All learners are also trained to do concept mapping, a very powerful note-taking tool that allows connecting the dots between all the concepts acquired throughout the course.

TechMap also provides 1–2–1 support and a community of learners to help everyone finish the course.

The process

Initially building TechMap to help the BD team at Generation.org (a nonprofit funded by BlackRock, McKinsey, Microsoft and Verizon), the idea grew to help improve IT literacy.

It was clear that not only Generation’s Business Development Team needed to improve their IT literacy, Ruben says.

“Someone kindly posted our website on DBR, a community of tech recruiters, and from there, it grew organically ever since,” he recalls. “People love the course and recommend it to their peers, with experienced recruiters like Irinka, AI Program Manager at Bloomberg telling us things like

‘I took this course as a recruiter, and I wish I had taken it at the beginning of my career.’”

One recruiter, Stephen Michetti Senior Tech Recruiter at Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com), who went through the “super enriching and stimulating” training, shared:

“The curriculum is also not dry, linear, and solitary. With some traditional training, you may find yourself in a very lonely echo chamber studying with … yourself. Here, the program weaves in social components that emulate in-person workshop/class dynamics that help you retain information + see different perspectives.”

If you’re wondering what level of software knowledge you need to be a great tech recruiter, TechMap is one of the most dynamic and interactive ways to find out.