Navigating the Tech Talent Shortage: Strategies for Hiring Success

Navigating the Tech Talent Shortage

The tech industry is thriving. Top talents are in great demand: they don’t even need to check the job boards because they receive lucrative offers while still working for their previous employers.

HR managers often realize that conventional IT recruitment strategies fail to deliver the expected results — and they need to look for alternatives. Read this article to find out how to hunt top-notch professionals in the highly competitive market!


Stick to a Holistic Approach

Stick to a Holistic Approach

Gone are the days when employers focused their efforts only on searching for candidates. Today, companies also need to think of what they can offer to top talents to retain them.

Before you start placing job ads, try to impartially evaluate the attractiveness of your workplace:

  • How flexible are your working conditions? Can your employees work remotely?
  • If they need to visit your office at least from time to time, how cozy is this place? Modern IT people love spaces with unique designs where they can not only work but also socialize.
  • What are your company’s values? Which goals do you strive to achieve, apart from making a profit?

If you can offer something genuinely nice and valuable for top-performing professionals, feel free to start hunting them. Otherwise, consider changing your offer or target your efforts at less demanding specialists.


Resort to Non-Traditional Channels for Spreading the Word About Your Openings

In the past, it was enough to post your job ads on the most popular job boards. Today, top professionals might never visit such boards. But they tend to use LinkedIn and read profile IT media, so why not try to catch them there?

Besides, you can try to hire through GitHub as well as with the help of hackathons and other creative solutions.


Establish Strong Social Media Presence

IT talents can afford to be selective. Before they contact a company for the first time, they want to understand what’s so special about it. They will check your official website and reviews that people leave about you on third-party platforms. Plus, they will visit your social media profiles.

For an IT company, it’s especially important to have a LinkedIn presence. All the information in the profile should be up-to-date. Make sure the photos are of the highest quality. When people send messages to you, try to reply to them promptly. Regularly post fresh content to prove that you’re an industry expert: comment on the industry news or share your work experiences and the results of research that you conduct.


Ask Tech Specialists to Be Present at the Interviews

During an interview, your HR managers will try to evaluate the soft and hard skills of each candidate. Unfortunately, most HR specialists aren’t too tech-savvy. They can give a test or a task for each candidate to complete and then compare the answers with the right ones. Plus, they may ask a pre-defined set of questions to each candidate.

Meanwhile, a tech professional can ask additional questions, including non-standard ones. They can better detect the strong and weak sides of each applicant. The candidates will see that your business employs skilled tech experts.

However, you shouldn’t ask your tech gurus to conduct the interviews instead of your HR specialists. The latter tend to have better communication skills. Besides, tech wizards don’t know how to assess people’s soft skills and can’t evaluate whether a person will be a good fit for the company.


Be Quick

Top talents get many job offers. If you make them wait long for your decision, someone else might hire them quicker than you. Ideally, try to schedule the interviews with all the candidates in one day and inform them about the result in the evening.


Partner with Educational Institutions

This recommendation might be not too relevant for startups — but established businesses can benefit from it. Here are a few examples of what you can do:

  • Offer internships and apprenticeships
  • Take part in job shadowing programs and career fairs
  • Provide scholarships and sponsoring programs

These measures will boost the young talents' awareness of your existence. They will start to trust you more.


Offer Your Staff Something More Than Just a Salary

A competitive salary is highly important. Professionals also appreciate health and retirement benefits. However, opinion polls show that IT specialists tend to value life-work balance more than money. They enjoy flexibility. Let them work from their homes at least a couple of days per week. Set deadlines for tasks — but don’t make people stay glued to their computers during conventional business hours.

Some programmers love to write code early in the morning or late at night — and they will be grateful if you allow them to do so.


Promote Diversity and Inclusion

Hire candidates from diverse backgrounds. Ensure that all your team members have equal opportunities. If specialists from underrepresented groups need additional training, provide it to them.


Outline Clear Career Paths

Outline Clear Career Paths

All your team members should understand their growth opportunities. Inform them about their development potential, based on their current role. Tell them which skills they need to acquire to make career progress and explain how you can help them with this.

When a person understands what they can achieve within your organization over time, they will be less likely to leave and you won’t have to invest a lot of effort into recruiting new staffers.


Don’t Ask Your Top Engineers to Switch to Management

If a person wants to try their hands on a new role, give them a chance. But you shouldn’t convert all your senior engineers into managers simply because of their impressive experience. People deliver the best results if they focus on their favorite tasks.

If an engineer doesn’t jump at the opportunity to get a pay rise by switching to a managerial position, just let it be.


Empower Your Teams

A strong tech team is small, has a clear mission and can act without tight supervision. Of course, businesses need managers to coordinate the activities within their teams and the interaction between different teams.

Yet managers shouldn’t interfere too much with the tech tasks. Supervisors should detect bottlenecks before they appear and prevent them. Plus, they should respond to the questions, complaints and queries that the tech team provides. But teams should be autonomous in their day-to-day work.

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