Recruiters, here’s some key advice to help you find the best tech talent
Finding, hiring and retaining tech talent is hard. In fact, almost 63% of CEOs say they are increasingly worried about finding talent with the right set of skills. Interestingly, 93% acknowledged the need to change their recruitment strategies.
With this in mind, we’ve put together six key recommendations to help recruitment teams get creative in their approach in a bid to find the right candidates for their businesses.
1. Maximise efficiency
Many recruiters typically publish job ads on employment sites on Fridays, but it’s time to consider altering this way of working.
According to research by tech recruitment firm Dice, only 10% of weekly searches happen over the weekend and only 15% of applicants submit applications on either Saturdays or Sundays.
In fact, more than 39% of job searches take place on a Monday and Tuesday, with almost 42% of these happening between 8am and 10am with a peak at 10am. In addition, more than 41% of applications are submitted on Monday and Tuesday and 40% of profile updates take place between those two days at the beginning of the week. Be efficient and adapt your way of working according to when candidates are much more likely to look for work.
2. Be proactive
If the research is anything to go by, the good news is that your Friday schedule should now be a lot more flexible – meaning you should have a lot more time to interact with the key stakeholders you’re working with to learn more about their hiring needs.
As a recruiter, you’ll need to think ahead and liaise with relevant people within the organisation to figure out their needs ahead of time. To spark this, be proactive and ask key managers about their upcoming projects in a bid to figure out whether the tech skills and expertise already exists in-house or whether it’s time for you to start scouring the market for prospective candidates.By being proactive, you’ll have much more time to research and hopefully find the best qualified professionals for the vacancy or vacancies you need to fill.
3. Be retrospective
As much as it is important to plan ahead, it’s also crucial to be retrospective and look back at what has worked for you in the past.
While it’s strongly recommended that all your communication with prospective candidates is customised, you also probably have a wide range of templates that you use to engage with new candidates.
If so, take a look at what’s worked well for you in the past and what wasn’t so successful. Once this is done, you’ll be able to see what you can continue using going forward but also change and potentially remove the roadblocks you’ve come across in the past.
4. Build out a content plan
Tech is a competitive market and if you’re a startup or scaleup, you’ll be competing against some of the most well-known and established companies in the world. For this reason, it’s important that you have a set of tools to hand that can be used to attract and impress prospective new hires from the ‘get-go’.
To do so, engage with your employer’s content and marketing teams to figure out what content is already available – think in terms of blog posts, videos, case studies or white papers.
Once you’ve identified the content, cater it to your audience and figure out what is interesting or appealing to specific cohorts. Corporate responsibility schemes, for example, are typically important to millennials.
5. Think outside the box
Don’t work in a silo – engage with all relevant departments within your organisation to ensure that there’s a unified content and marketing strategy, which you can leverage to attract candidates.
Work closely with those key stakeholders and examine your employers’ social media presence: is the company sharing anything interesting on Twitter or Instagram and how can you contribute to this?
Don’t forget to find out where ‘techies’ hang out online (according to research, 33% spend their time on Facebook, 22% on Twitter, 11% on Stack Overflow and 9% of Google+).
Target these people accordingly, structuring all communications based on what channel the output is being shared, but don’t forget to elaborate a multi-channel strategy for best results.
For reference, 82% of tech pros search for new job opportunities via social media, 95% of tech pros are open to being approached for jobs via social and 61% of tech pros follow organisations on social and professional media sites.
Pay attention to and own what is being shared online, though, as 79% of technology professionals said their research on a brand would influence their decision to apply for a role. Unsurprisingly, 94% said they research a company online before applying for a job and 69% would not take a job at a company with a poor reputation.
6. Get ready to mingle
And finally, network! Don’t sit at your desk all day. Get out there and meet people. Scour the landscape and figure out which events are happening when and where and engage with talent face-to-face.
Try and target smaller networking events or meetups where you can increase your chances of forging a meaningful interaction with someone and if you have budget to do so, consider hosting your own event and showcase why your company is one tech professionals should consider.