Technical recruitment looks simple on paper. You find someone who can code, match them to a job description, and move them into interviews. But in practice, it’s one of the most challenging workflows in the talent space.
In 2024, 95% of tech leaders reported struggling to hire the right people. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects over 350,000 job openings annually in tech through 2033. If it were easy to find technical talent, those numbers wouldn’t exist.
In this blog, we'll take a deep dive into the technical recruitment process as it works in real hiring environments. We'll also disclose the principles that have helped us select the best fits for our large—and continuously growing—team.
What is a technical recruiter?
A technical recruiter is a person who hires suitable candidates for technical roles, such as software engineers, developers, DevOps, data professionals, and other positions that require a certain level of technical skill. It's usually preferred, but not always necessary, for technical recruiters to have a working understanding of the tech stack, job requirements, and the technical recruitment process to identify qualified applicants early.
In most cases, the recruiter's job is to manage the top of the funnel: source the best candidates, screen for fit, and move the right talent into the hands of the hiring team quickly.
Effective technical recruiting depends on recruiters who can create streamlined technical job descriptions, ask the right questions during screening, and work closely with hiring managers (if hiring managers are involved in the recruitment process) to keep the tech recruitment process focused and realistic.
How the technical recruitment process works (step-by-step)
Here’s a summary of how a technical recruiter will go through the technical hiring process, step by step. Please keep in mind that what we have here is a textbook outline. It's clean and simple, but, in reality, may be condensed or followed in a different order. But if you’re trying to maneuver technical recruitment efficiently, this is the baseline.
Step 1: Role scoping and intake
The technical recruiting process starts with defining what you’re actually hiring for. You pinpoint the tech stack, seniority level, and other technical requirements for filling in the role practice. Be careful not to make assumptions here.
After defining these requirements, you draft the kind of job description that pulls in the best tech talent. Generic descriptions attract applicants that are not yet sure of what they have to offer. You need a job description that speaks in real technical terms and reflects how the team works.
As a technical recruiter, you don't need to write the job description alone, but you do need to pull one together that filters correctly. For example, don’t say you’re looking for a “data engineer with strong machine learning skills” when what you actually need is an ML engineer who can productionize models.
Step 2: Sourcing
Sourcing is where recruiters start filling the top of the funnel. Some candidates will surely apply while others need to be found. This is where job boards, LinkedIn, outbound outreach, and referrals are incredibly useful, and you must use these avenues wisely.
For you to walk out of the tech talent recruitment scene with top technical talent, you must understand where your target candidates are, what they're looking for, and how to get their attention before someone else does.
That's not enough, though. You must also get things moving quickly. Workable reports that globally, the average time to fill tech roles is 68 days. In the U.S. and Canada, it's 56. That’s about two months, but if you spend too long on the sourcing process, you lose weeks before you even get to screening.
Step 3: Screening
Screening is the stage where you try to cut out weak leads before they waste everyone’s time. You'll review resumes and portfolios, maybe running a recruiter screen, and deciding who’s actually worth progressing with. Of course, you'll do some stack matching (you're recruiting tech talent, after all).
However, tech recruiting also requires you to understand the technical and non-technical aspects of the role well enough to spot people who look good on paper but can't deliver your actual expectations.
Recruiters who rely too heavily on templates or recruitment software without understanding what a real match looks like often struggle with this step. A strong recruiter can tell the difference between someone who’s worked in technical environments and someone who has just listed tools.
Step 4: Assessment
One of the best practices for recruiting tech candidates is giving a technical assessment. When you do set up an assessment, it should align with the job description. Common assessment styles include take-home assignments, system design conversations, or live coding sessions.
At this stage, you may lose a lot of candidates if the test is too long, too vague, or too disconnected from the role. In other words, if you're running bad assessments, you're reducing your chances of getting top talent.
Step 5: Team interviews
Next is the team interview. This is where the candidate meets the people they’ll work with. These interviews test communication skills, technical abilities, and collaborative fit.
Let's pause for a moment to put things into perspective. In the same Workable report we referred to above, it was revealed that the global average time-to-hire for tech roles is 33 days. In Asia, it’s 36. In the UK, 28. These timelines signal that if your interview process takes two weeks and three follow-ups, you're going to lose top tech talent before you finish collecting feedback.
That said, the interview process should be structured, consistent, and focused on understanding whether the candidate is a good fit for the role.
Step 6: Offer and negotiation
You’ve done the work, now you need to close the deal fast. Interestingly, this stage often drags because companies hesitate, want to benchmark more, or hope for a cheaper option to appear. Meanwhile, candidates move on because they expect fast, clear offers. If you stall, they'll most likely say no when you eventually make an offer.
Step 7: Onboarding handoff
The last step of the conventional recruitment process is the onboarding handoff. This is where the recruiter hands off to whoever owns onboarding. That might be HR, a team lead, or a founder.
Getting it right: Best practices for hiring the best tech talent
Here are the lessons we've learned since we began recruiting tech talent about a decade ago.
1. Don’t test skills you don’t understand
If you’re going to conduct a technical interview, you need to know what you’re testing and why. That means tech recruiters must collaborate with hiring managers or engineers to ensure the assessment targets relevant technical knowledge. If you're asking senior tech candidates about outdated paradigms or applying purist rules without context, you're wasting everyone's time.
2. Respect experience
The technical recruitment process should assess what a candidate has done, not just how they perform in 30 minutes of pressure. When hiring tech talent, especially for senior-level roles, skipping over a candidate’s project history, architectural decisions, or framework depth in favor of quick coding puzzles is a failure of judgment. Recruiters must balance signals from past experience and current performance to find the right technical match.
3. Stop treating every candidate like an entry-level applicant
There’s no shortage of companies who say they want to hire tech talent and then structure their process like they’re recruiting fresh graduates. This could be one of the reasons why, in 2024, 64% of IT recruiters were still saying that finding qualified candidates was their biggest challenge. If you want to recruit the best, your process can’t treat senior developers like they’re trying to land their first job.
4. Make your job descriptions filter the right way
The job description is a targeting tool. Don’t say you’re looking for a “backend engineer with DevOps experience and strong UI skills” when you actually need a cloud-focused backend developer. Mixing unrelated responsibilities confuses applicants and bloats the funnel. Tech recruiters must work with hiring teams to create job descriptions that reflect actual work, not wish lists disguised as roles.
5. Don’t ask for senior-level output on junior-level pay
You can’t attract technical talent if the offer insults their experience. In 2025, many job posts still list senior-level requirements under mid-level titles. The result is predictable: no traction, wasted outreach, and failed hires. If you want to hire the best tech talent, offer compensation that reflects the expectations. Don’t list ten critical responsibilities and then balk when the candidate’s salary range matches them.
6. Pick the right test format
Some candidates prefer take-homes while others like live sessions. Offering a realistic, scoped option that's aligned with the role is one of the best practices for tech recruiting. The most successful tests in technical hiring let candidates show how they think, not how fast they can type syntax from memory. A take-home that's clearly structured and tied to real-world tasks outperforms generic algorithm tests every time.
7. Timebox everything
If you want a fair technical assessment, timebox it. That includes take-home projects. Asking for more than 2 to 4 hours of work without pay is how you lose strong candidates. It also makes comparison impossible. Some will spend a full weekend, others will do the bare minimum. And don’t skip straight to a live Leetcode round afterward. That’s bait-and-switch.
8. Know when you’re testing and when you’re just filtering
In 2024, the average employer received 180 applicants for every hire, and the applicant-to-interview ratio was 3%. For you, this means that you'll likely get flooded with applications from a lot of candidates. You need to use screening tools to filter out those who appear to be most likely fit for the role. However, don’t confuse filtering with evaluation. Technical recruiting involves both. If your goal is to find the best, you need both clear filters and meaningful assessments. You can't do one or the other.
9. You don’t need to trick candidates to evaluate them
As some employers worry about take-homes being used to steal code, others over-index on obscure tests to avoid making a “bad hire.” Both methods reflect a failure of trust and they attract the wrong kind of talent. The best technical candidates don’t want to feel like they’re being tricked into doing free labor. They want a process that respects their time and evaluates them on substance.
10. Choose evaluation methods that give you something to talk about
Good technical recruiting doesn’t end when someone submits an assignment. It ends when you’ve had a real discussion about their thinking, tradeoffs, and decisions. If your assessment doesn’t give you a reason to talk to the candidate, then it’s the wrong test. The goal is to hire the best, not to filter out everyone who doesn't remember how to implement merge sort on a whiteboard.
Why do candidates ghost at various stages of the tech recruitment process?
Recruiters talk about ghosting like it’s a one-sided problem, but in the tech industry, it’s more of a feedback loop. Most candidates ghost because something in the process told them it wasn’t worth continuing. Here are five reasons why applicants for technical positions usually drop off:
1. Tech recruiters have ghosted them several times
You think you’re dealing with a flaky candidate, but they’re dealing with several recruiters who said “we’ll be in touch” three weeks ago and never followed up.
Professionalism starts at your end. If your inbox is a graveyard of unanswered applicants, don’t be surprised when the best talent stops playing nice. This is especially the case in technical recruitment, where most candidates are used to doing hours of unpaid prep for roles they’ll never hear back about.
If recruiters want engagement, they need to stop running black-box pipelines with broken feedback loops.
2. The application process burned them before the interview even started
Only about 8% of candidates who start an application finish it. The other 92%? They're just tired of entering the same data twelve times: resume, then form, then cover letter, and then another form that asks for what’s already on the resume.
Throw in no response or a rejection that’s clearly automated, and the signal is clear: this process won't lead anywhere.
If you want to attract tech talent, stop making them jump through hoops before you’ve even looked at their name. Technical recruiting is about both sourcing and keeping good candidates from checking out halfway through your form.
3. The interviews told them everything they needed to know
Some tech people ghost because they see the red flags right away:
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You asked them the same question three times.
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The pay you advertised doesn’t match the offer.
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You ran a personality test that filters for submission, not skill.
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The interviewer was late, unprepared, or clearly had no idea what the role actually is.
That’s a signal, and some candidates (particularly when they have other options) don’t wait around to confirm it. If the technical aspects of the interview are questionable, the energy is off, or the compensation conversation is dodgy, good candidates will leave quietly.
4. Someone else moved faster and treated them better
As we stated above, the average time to hire in tech is 33 days. That’s generous. In practice, top candidates are gone in two weeks or faster. You don’t always know when you’ve lost them. While you’re still scheduling round three of the interviews, someone else has already made an offer.
The best candidates have choices, and they’re not going to wait for a decision that feels like an afterthought.
This is especially true for specialized positions that require urgency and decisiveness. Tech companies that can’t make decisions fast don’t get top tech talent.
5. The process doesn’t feel worth the effort
There’s a point where candidates stop trying to impress you, not because they’re unprofessional, but because the process taught them not to bother.
For example, let's say you asked for a live code test, then a take-home, then a technical interview, and then a system design challenge. Somewhere between round three and “we just need one more call,” they decide to skip it and they don’t notify you of their decision.
That’s not entitlement. That’s someone deciding the technical recruitment process doesn’t respect their time, their energy, or their technical knowledge.
To fix such issues, build a process that lets people show their ability without jumping through six layers of corporate indecision.
Frequently asked questions about technical recruiting
What’s the difference between HR and a technical recruiter?
While HR focuses on policies, onboarding, and employee management, a technical recruiter focuses on the process of finding engineers, developers, and other specialists for open tech roles. They navigate the tech recruiting process, cut through technical jargon, and assess whether someone has the candidate’s skills to move forward.
What’s the difference between a technical recruiter and a sourcer?
A sourcer finds potential candidates. A technical recruiter runs the process end-to-end: sourcing, screening, coordinating interviews, and closing offers. Sourcers widen the pool. Technical recruiters recruit top tech and drive results. Without both, it’s hard to find the best tech and move them through the funnel.
What’s the difference between a talent acquisition specialist and a technical recruiter?
Talent acquisition specialists often cover all departments. Meanwhile, a technical recruiter specializes in hiring technical talent. When hiring for specialized positions that require domain insight, you want someone who knows the space.
What’s the difference between technical and non-technical recruiters?
Technical recruiters have a good understanding of stacks, tooling, and role expectations. In addition to filtering resumes, they speak the tech language. On the other hand, non-technical recruiters work across marketing, operations, and sales. These are roles where the recruitment process doesn’t hinge on understanding tech language.
