IT Recruitment: The High Cost of a Bad IT Hire

by Riia O’Donnell

 Recruiting for any open position is a race to find the best candidate within your budget in the shortest amount of time. When recruiting for an IT candidate, the stakes can be much higher. Having a vacancy in the IT Department can be devastating to productivity. The choices are allowing work to go undone or piling additional work on the rest of the department. In either scenario, critical work can fall by the wayside or be done incorrectly. The emphasis for hiring IT professionals is to hire quickly and minimize downtime.

IT Hiring Problem: The Lesser of Two Evils

In some cases, however, a bad hire can be worse than leaving a position vacant. For IT professionals, a bad hire can become a long-term problem: a mountain of redoing work done incorrectly, an opening for cyber attack, or if the employee is disgruntled, a host of security issues that could last a lifetime.

Looking through file folders to find a mistake may be a colossal time drain: looking through tens of thousands of lines of code could be an exercise in futility.  Hearing from a customer that a sales representative was rude is an easy fix. A glitch that might not reveal itself for months could be catastrophic.

From copy/pasting code from the internet under a time crunch (opening your employer to intellectual property lawsuits) to poor testing and error checks, there are dozens of ways for IT pros to make mistakes. There are even hundreds of websites discussing common and costly errors.

Whether they’re not taking the time to audit and verify code on launch, or rushing to get things out the door on a Friday night, the results of bad IT hire could be long-ranging and significant. Coupled with the real possibility that an error could set your company brand into a tailspin, the need to hire IT professionals who know what they’re doing from day 1 couldn’t be greater.

Hire IT Professionals With Confidence

How can you be sure to hire right when you’re hiring an IT pro? In an industry where there are many more ways than one to achieve the same result, the emphasis has to be on practical skills rather than intangible experience. Whether an employee has 10 months or 10 years experience, the need to find inherent talent and technical aptitude is often more important than a nicely padded resume. Looking only at the list of past employers, you may be missing whether the candidate had another person looking over their shoulder non-stop, or if they were the go-to person to verify things were done right.

The best way to make the best hire is pre-recruitment testing from Rankdone. Our budget-friendly tests are created and verified by top talent in the field. Or, if you have special needs, you can create your own test. When resumes reach your desk, you’re not only assured they know what they’re doing: we rank them in order of proficiency. Avoid costly and potentially long-term mistakes when you hire for IT. Contact Rankdone today.