Is your workload piling up? Maybe you could do with the help of a contractor.

With the fluid nature of the IT industry – where technology and the demands of business, clients and users often change quickly – there can be great benefits to a having a flexible, on-demand workforce. While a skilled team of permanent staff are an essential part of the ‘long game’, contractors are an excellent option for any organisations seeking a quick injection of skill and knowledge to push through tight spots. Often used in digital agency environments as the perfect solution for fluctuating project-based work, contractors can also be a great addition to permanent teams in any industry.

Getting contractors on board can be one of the easiest ways to up-skill your current staff on new technology and help with the work load at the same time. By the nature of their work contractors usually come with a breadth of experience far greater than that of permanent employees, gained in a variety of industries, projects, teams and work environments. This provides experienced contractors with valuable perspective and the ability to draw on other successful or not so successful projects and methods. As a result, senior contractors can be a great source of practical, tested consulting advice.

Primarily utilised for targeted projects within their primary skillset rather than general BAU work, contractors often become fairly specialised in specific technologies and/or industries. With specialisation and varied project exposure, good contractors hit the ground running, making the necessary connections and gathering required information quickly. Training up existing team members can be a long process – a quick injection of this concentrated experience and knowledge from a contractor well-versed in your industry and chosen technology can significantly improve a team’s ability to deliver fast results. On the surface, contractors may appear to be costlier than permanent staff, but speed is the key: in most cases a quality contractor will be cheaper in the long run than an employee who may take much longer to do the same job, or worse, not do the job well.

We also find that many of the best senior IT professionals, including developers, designers, testers, business analysts and systems engineers, prefer to work on a contract basis. With excellent technical and interpersonal skills, the top level professionals are in high demand, and enjoy the variety of challenges and more control over their work / life balance. The result is that if you want the best person for the job, you may have to consider taking on a contractor.

Whether you’re a small company or large, the flexibility of contract staff is a huge benefit when needing to fill staff skill gaps for projects, wrangle new technologies, or cover unpredictable events such as a sudden increase in work load or covering absent staff. If a tentative project doesn’t fly or work dries up, the contractor is on short notice and can be released with minimal grief. Also, once in the door as a contractor, some may be willing to progress into permanent work if that suits both parties – a great alternative to the somewhat edgy 90-day trial period situation with fresh permanent employees.

If you’ve got work that needs to be done now, you needn’t wait for a permanent employee. We work regularly with a horde of tried and tested contractors, which enables fast placement of skilled professionals to cover your needs. Get in touch to discuss available contractor hourly rates.

It is important when vetting candidates to measure them all equally. It’s also very important to ensure any tests they undertake are fair and relevant. Tests should never be used to “catch” candidates out. If you start with the intention of assessing what they do know rather than what they don’t know you’ll be heading in the right direction.

The best way to do this is to identify the most important attributes you need from your new employee and then create an assessment exercise or test to measure each candidate’s capabilities. Currently there is a reliance on psychometric testing which tends to focus on more general characteristics to analyse behaviour. It’s more advantageous to assess each candidate’s ability to do certain IT tasks relevant to the role being recruited for.

When recruiting for support roles for example, clear communication skills are usually of paramount importance. This applies to both verbal and written skills: clear, concise and engaging verbal skills have to be backed by clear, concise and relevant responses to emails. It’s quite a simple exercise to vet candidates initially over the phone before making an appointment to interview in person. Having a checklist of desired attributes in front of you, to tick off as you go through the exercise, can help significantly.

I also recommend creating your own assessment test with real and typical questions that have been received within your helpdesk. Use the best responses your existing staff have provided as a reference and mark the candidate, out of ten (or a hundred), against the following:

• Engagement and interaction with you
• Clarity of speech and comprehension of the problem
• Relevance and accuracy of support advice offered
• Commitment to resolution and follow up
• How easy or comfortable was the whole experience

It is equally important to follow a spoken exchange with an email example. Send the candidate a typical fault via email and assess the response as follows;

• Quality of tone of the email
• Accuracy of candidate’s spelling, punctuation and grammar
• Relevance of the solution provided by the candidate
• Ease of use of the instructions provided to you
• Commitment to resolution and follow up

When it comes to assessing candidates for various other roles we would suggest the following:

Software development: create an open test that is relevant to the code the applicant will be required to create. It’s actually more important to assess how developers think through a problem.

Systems engineering and network roles: create a test relevant to the applications and Infrastructure the interviewee would be expected to maintain, install or troubleshoot.

Business Analysts: are best placed to show off their engagement, requirement gathering and documentation skills by completing a live assessment exercise and sending you back the completed document in their style.

Testers: can be given data to write a test script around.

Trainers: can provide a short presentation/ training session on either an application relevant to the role or a subject of their choice.

In these ways you are able to not only assess results but also gain an insight into how a candidate thinks and works. It can often uncover some interesting talents or issues.

Please note MTR do have tests for the most IT roles and our consultants will ask, when taking the job order, what the most important skills or attributes are and how you want candidates to be tested.