If you ask any HR personnel what quality they look for most in a new employee, they may give you a thousand different answers. There will be overlap: no doubt they’ll talk about qualities like persistence, organizational abilities, vision, interpersonal skills, ambition, and more.
But not all businesses are the same, and each industry has its own needs and wants. Let’s take a closer look at how tech companies can identify the type of competency they need from prospective employees.
Job Description Software
Pinning down what your organization needs requires specific inputs — generalizations won’t do. Many companies use job description software to determine quickly what specific skills and behaviors prospective hires must embody to succeed in their position.
AI pulls up high-quality draft descriptions which HR personnel can use or augment as they see fit. Either way, the people who make hiring decisions will have invaluable support at their fingertips to ensure there’s correct alignment between the competencies job candidates possess and the ones needed for the position.
After a tech company hires you, the competencies that got them into the door will be the ongoing basis for their job evaluation, so there’s clarity for all parties moving forward, which helps each employee manage their career while organizations can structure their operations on solid ground.
Raw Skills
There are some specific abilities tech sector employees need to thrive. You can’t be a designer or a coder without having the domain knowledge associated with the position.
Some skills are a prerequisite rather than something extra to make you stand out on an application. However, you can achieve different levels of expertise within such required skills, and you can pad your resume by taking an extra course or learning some related but specialized knowledge.
The Humanities
Many workplaces value unorthodox thinking, and sometimes, as with any industry, tech employees develop patterns of knowledge that echo and replicate themselves among their peers. Ironically, by only learning what is required, there may be other systems of values or mental approaches from other subjects in the humanities which the tech sector doesn’t know it needs.
For example, there are times where racist or gender biases creep into algorithms because the designers weren’t of diverse background and didn’t immediately appreciate that there’s more to technology than just programming data points.
Understanding the world through a humanities lens helps people see the forest instead of the trees. Why develop this program instead of that one, or do it this way and not that? Sometimes collaboration across disciplines can help people see a common problem with fresh eyes, so it helps to have some non-traditional discipline knowledge to complement your basic skills.
The tech sector is an exciting and dynamic space that changes rapidly, and the future has never been more unwritten. Keep all of the above tips in mind, and you should build a toolkit that will be a tremendous asset in any tech company.