Recruiting talent in the IT industry

By Michael Deane, Small Business Consultant, www.queedle.com

October 28 2019 - The IT sector thrives on talent above all else. With a team of motivated experts on your side, you can accomplish practically any business goal. The real challenge is about finding and recruiting these individuals before your rivals do. And make no mistake, attracting top IT talent to your company is not easy.

One of the difficulties stems from an overabundance of employment opportunities for IT workers. Thanks to platforms such as Upwork, Fiverr, and other online job marketplaces, it is now easier than ever to land a job in IT, especially if you're proficient with modern web technologies.

Part of the problem also lies in the fact that recruits are better informed overall thanks to an abundance of information online. Websites such as Glassdoor and kununu can help individuals find out a lot about their prospective employers, which will factor in their decision on where to apply.

Then there is the issue of changing workplace culture. To put it simply, working in a cubicle in an office building from 9 till 5 is no longer the standard thanks to the abundance of remote work available. Employees also have different expectations in terms of professional development, bonuses, contract length, and other basic elements of employment.

If you're planning on starting a recruitment drive in the near future, you are doubtlessly aware of these issues. And if you wish to solve them, you need to be aware of the current trends in IT recruitment. And we're here to help you with just that.

1. Development Opportunities

Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, especially in the IT sector. What this means is that what counts as a useful work-related skill changes a lot over time. As a result, IT workers are always on the lookout for opportunities to acquire new skills. And if you fail to provide such opportunities, you will miss out on a lot of promising candidates.

The best way to go about this is to adopt a training and development strategy that is focused on long-term skill acquisition and professional growth.

2. Recruitment Marketing

In the past few years, companies began noticing similarities between attracting talent and attracting customers. In both instances, the goal is to convince a target audience to take you up on your offer. Marketing plays an integral role in convincing customers to buy, so it stands to reason that it could also be used to convince talent to sign up. And thus, recruitment marketing was born.

The idea behind recruitment marketing is fairly straightforward. It is all about learning as much as you can about your ideal candidates and reaching out to them with an appropriate message.

3. AI-assisted Recruitment

Another feature of modern recruiting is that it is no longer an endeavour that only involves human agents. More and more companies are expanding their HR departments with software-based assistants. These AI-powered systems exist to help recruiters with a variety of tasks such as sourcing, screening, and scheduling.

Another way AI is being used in recruiting is for powering specialized chatbots. These chatbots can conduct basic interviews on their own, and forward the results to your HR staff, eliminating a lot of tedious busywork from the recruitment process.

4. Remote Work

IT work has a major advantage over other types of work owing to the fact that it can be done remotely. Whether you're a web designer, a programmer, or a cyber-security expert, there is little need for you to be present on-site for work. However, many companies are still reluctant to take remote workers on board. This kind of attitude is no longer tenable if you want to recruit top experts in the field. Your local IT labour market simply can't match a global one in terms of talent. So the choice is to embrace remote work or to be content with less than ideal candidates.

5. Project-based Hiring

Long-term employment is on the decline in IT. In its place there is a new paradigm, one defined by projects of fixed length. The advantage of this approach is that you know beforehand how much staff and resources are needed to achieve a particular business goal.

Hiring IT talent on a project-by-project basis will allow you to filter out the most promising candidates based on their ability to tackle concrete challenges. It also allows you to keep costs down by maintaining staff only for the duration of a given project.

6. Soft Skills

Technical expertise is an important criterion for determining the quality of an IT worker, but it is not the only one. Today, there is a growing demand for candidates with non-technical skills. These so-called 'soft skills' include emotional intelligence, stress resistance, lateral thinking, and communication proficiency.

The reason why such skills are in high demand is that they make for employees that can handle work in a dynamic environment, both alone and in teams. Additionally, these skills are difficult to acquire through training, so the only way to gain access to them is by finding candidates that already have them.

The Future of Recruiting

The IT sector is currently in a very interesting spot. On one hand, there is an abundance of talented workers spread across the entire globe, which means you can fill your ranks with top industry talent. On the other hand, finding these individuals and convincing them to join your company is more difficult than it used to be thanks to the wealth of opportunities for finding work in IT.

In order to find the right people for the job, you need to develop a forward-thinking recruitment strategy, one that takes into account the intricacies of the modern IT labour market.

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