Technical Talent are the most competitive and sought-after candidates in the job market right now. According to an Indeed survey, 86% of respondents said they find it difficult to find and hire technical talent; this is mostly due to a shortage of technical workers. Here are some tips to improve your ability to source and recruit these high-demand workers:
- Understand the Position and Jargon
One of the most important aspects of sourcing and recruiting tech talent is having an attractive job description. By understanding the position, you can create a job description that is more compelling and gives an accurate look at the responsibilities.
Also, from a sourcing perspective, if you understand jargon and the job description, you can find candidates better suited for the position. This will help you refine your search, limiting the number of candidates you reach out to and making the ones you do reach out to more likely to fit the job.
- Take Advantage of Tech Specific Resources
Kaggle is most well-known for hosting the annual Netflix competition but is more generally a great platform for identifying talent. This competitive coding is open to anyone to post, so if your company is looking for a specific skill set, you can post a related competition to find the right talent.
Like Kaggle, Stack Overflow is a public forum for collaborating on code and solving issues. Recruiters can use this to look for similar problems to their own company’s and find the people posting solutions.
Also, while not tech specific, you can use other forms of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You can use these platforms to create blogs or videos to attract tech talent to your company.
- Communicate Your Technology Well
One aspect of a company that drives recruiting tech talent is interesting technology. Like understanding jargon, this will help you to refine your candidate pool and attract the right candidates for the job.
Since these individuals work directly with a company’s technology, they have a lot of interest in the level and quality of technology they would be working with. Also, there is sometimes an aspect of self-interest regarding technology, such as their own beliefs about the best tech and how companies should use technology, so it is important to communicate your company’s tech philosophy.
- Expand Your Search Area
If you’re struggling to find talent locally, expanding your search location or opening the position to allow remote work. This will expand your talent pool and allow you to find a candidate that has a better fit for the position.
While this may not always be possible, it is a good option if available and if your position is particularly difficult to fill. Also, if the job is difficult to fill and is taking a lot of resources, Aegis HCCP offers candidate sourcing as a service and can supplement your internal recruiting teams’ efforts.
- Know Your Audience
The demographics of tech talent are unique to the overall job market. According to Stack Overflow’s Global Survey:
- Over 90% of tech talent is male
- About 75% of professional developers are younger than 35
- Almost 90% of developers said they have taught themselves a new language outside of their formal education
- 57% of developers have less than 5 years of professional coding experience.
- Frequent job changes are the norm with about half of developers have taken a new job within the past 2 years
Keeping this breakdown in mind you can better understand the job market to make realistic expectations for filling the role. Also, you can target your job description to the individuals that will be applying to it.
- Know How to Motivate Them
Overall, there are a few common trends that motivate tech talent to transitioning to a new position. These include new or interesting technology, competitive compensation and attractive work culture, and challenging projects or problems to work.
Technology was covered above but the other two components can be just as crucial for finding and attracting talent. For competitive compensation, a good understanding of standard pay in your area can ensure that you’re offering competitive compensation to your top candidates. This information is often hard to come by, but Aegis HCCP has internal data on compensation and can help your company inform their job offers. Also, you can attract talent by including benefits outside of a normal compensation package such as flexible work hours or company outings, which also help to showcase your company culture.
The last aspect targets the difficulty of the job. Given tech talent are often natural problem-solvers, they want to be challenged and forced to think creatively on the job. For ideas of how to showcase this aspect, posting a coding challenge to Kaggle or Stack Overflow can help to give candidates a better understanding of the problems facing your company and how to solve them.
- Get Involved in Local Tech Events
The last way to source and recruit tech talent is to attend or hold local tech events. This can be especially helpful if the position is lower level or your company is near a university. Many campuses will have job fairs and collaborations with companies to complete coursework.
One common type of event is a hackathon, where developers come together to solve complex and global problems. Some larger events include TechCrunch Disrupt, hackNY, Mhacks, and HackMIT. Many of these events happen at college campuses and at tech conferences.