Grow Your IT Staffing Firm with Cloud Skills Validation

Cloud computing is the new normal and organizations that don’t understand how to properly design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure—whether it's a public or private cloud—are at a disadvantage.

If you're in the business of IT recruitment for staffing firms or in-house, it's essential to validate your job candidates' cloud skills so your clients and stakeholders can hire IT talent with the skills needed to leverage the benefits of cloud and keep their business moving forward.

When you accurately validate an IT candidate’s cloud skills, you will:

Reduce Churn and Improve Retention

Churn is a significant issue in the IT industry, and it can profoundly impact an organization’s bottom line. If you take the time to validate mission-critical skills, candidates will be more successful on the job and the likelihood they or your client will look for opportunities elsewhere is reduced.

Increase “Quality Hire” Rates

By administering assessments during the hiring process, you can weed out applicants with great resumes who don't actually have the skills you require—a problem that’s more common than you might expect. This can help you avoid costly mistakes down the road and increase your chances of making a quality hire.

Differentiate Your Hiring Firm in a Saturated Market

If you consistently deliver pools of high-performing cloud experts to your clients and stakeholders, they’re more likely to come to your firm first. A good quality hire rate gives you a significant leg up against the competition and could be the deciding factor when a client chooses between firms.

Cloud Skills Validation Methods

Here are several ways to undertake cloud skills validation to more confidently recommend IT candidates to your clients and stakeholders.

Technical Assessment and Validation

Challenge Labs are virtual environments that give candidates a way to demonstrate their skills and expertise in a real world setting. With this type of assessment, candidates show their skills and you don’t have to rely solely on their self-reported ability levels.

For example, suppose the role you are hiring for requires someone to know how to allocate Compute resources on Amazon Web Sources. In that case, you can have the candidate take a Challenge Lab on this very task to see if they can correctly configure an auto-scaling group and a load balancer when a CPU load reaches a certain level.

One global IT staffing firm uses Challenge Labs in their candidate qualification process. Before adding Challenge Labs to their assessment process, candidate assessments were mostly subjective and emphasized IT certifications. But the firm’s “quality hire” rate was flat and uncompetitive.

The firm started using Challenge Labs to find the most proficient Microsoft Azure Administrators by testing a range of required skills, from configuring APIs and using ARM templates to deploying VMs for multi-tier apps and implementing security services. The result: the “quality hire” was boosted to the highest it’s ever been, client churn was reduced, and the firm is adding more Challenge Labs to test across more roles and skills.

Certification Checks

Cloud certifications are table stakes in IT. Indeed, in our 2022 survey on the cloud skills shortage, 57 percent of IT hiring managers and recruiters say cloud certifications are very important for making hiring decisions. Certification exams require considerable training and experience to pass and are an indispensable way to qualify IT candidates.

Certification checks also have the advantage of being quick and easy. Many cloud platform providers who issue certifications, includingAmazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offer certification exams that can be used to validate a candidate's skills.

On the flip side, there are many qualified and capable IT candidates who have the right skills, but don’t have a certification, so including or excluding a candidate based on certification status alone can shrink your talent pool.

Portfolio Assessment

Portfolios allow employers to see actual examples of a candidate's work and provide insights that may not be apparent on a resume. They also offer the opportunity to get a sense of a candidate's problem-solving approach and overall working style. However, it is essential to note that a portfolio alone is not always indicative of a candidate's skills and should be used in conjunction with other assessment methods.

Be confident the IT candidates you recommend and hire have the right cloud skills for the job. Learn about Challenge Labs for skills validation or schedule a demo.