Everyone is tired of the shortage of personnel in the IT market: managers, recruiters, and job seekers themselves.

Why is it Difficult to find Good IT staff?

Firstly, because the number of offers on the labor market is increasing, and the activity of job seekers, on the contrary, is falling. For example, in April-May 2021, the number of published vacancies  increased by  39% compared to the same period last year. At the same time, the business is ready to fight for specialists, make counter-offers and increase wages: HR specialists note that salary forks are only growing.

Secondly, the situation is complicated by competition with international companies that offer salaries in foreign currency and no less decent working conditions. Find out more with Remotal. Here you can hire dedicated teams for front-end development, back-end development and so on.

Three Situations Every Company Should Be Aware Of

  1. The search for IT personnel (especially senior- and middle-level developers) is expensive.  There are not enough specialists – therefore, the prices for hunting are growing. If you look for candidates through recruitment agencies, then the business must give them up to 30% of the employee’s annual salary. This method of hiring is suitable only for large companies that have the financial resources for this.
  2. Not all HRs understand the specifics of hiring IT specialists.  The standard hiring scheme in this area no longer works: it often drives candidates into stress, and some programmers deliberately hide from recruiters or simply do not look for a new job on their own. Therefore, businesses should resort to passive hunting: search through candidate profile aggregators, LinkedIn, recommendations from friends and come up with new tools.
  3. IT recruiting is changing as the number of self-employed professionals grows.  Top developers are increasingly working for themselves: they have the opportunity to choose projects “to their liking”, gain valuable experience and develop a portfolio. Therefore, at the interview stage, HRs need to answer the candidate’s questions in detail, clearly identify his future functionality and the stack of technologies that he should know. You need to try to convince him that working with you is more profitable than freelancing.

Where and how to search for IT personnel in a short time

Here is a guide for companies looking for good programmers:

  1. Use digital services: automating HR processes  saves companies  more than $54,000 a year. There are many online solutions for recruitment on the market: an automated candidate funnel, online interview services, profile aggregators, and gamification.
  2. Use out-of-the-box solutions to find good programmers who are out of the hiring market.
  3. Use multiple channels to reach a wide audience. The most effective ones are recommendations, reposts in social networks of employees and targeted advertising. Career sites and communities in Telegram work the worst. The job description should be objective, interesting and with an indication of the salary range. The latter is necessary to attract the attention of highly paid professionals and not waste time if the salary cap does not suit them.

How to Select IT personnel: no Theory, only Practice

Companies should focus less on a candidate’s resume than on the specific set of skills needed for a given project. Often programmers with experience in corporations were engaged in routine work. Therefore, in terms of skills, they are bypassed by specialists who took diverse freelance orders.

In each case, you need to look at how the applicant’s knowledge in technology corresponds to the tasks that he has to solve. For example, if a developer does not know how to independently upload code to production and design an architecture, then a project from scratch will not suit him. Or if a specialist has to work with asynchrony, then simple experience in the framework will not be enough for him – he needs a developer who has already dealt with similar technologies.

The next point is to honestly formulate the requirements for candidates for vacancies. If they are too high or at the interview it suddenly turns out that the conditions do not match the description, the candidate will be disappointed and leave, and the company will only lose time. Good IT-specialists carefully choose an employer and receive several offers at once – so you need to understand their motivation and “highlight” the necessary information at the interview. The choice of interview format depends on the level of the candidate the company is looking for: if a project manager is needed, then it is worth conducting an interview via video link or offline in order to evaluate the non-verbal part of the communication and create a personal impression.

Companies should think about brand appeal to candidates, as well as what opportunities for personal and career growth they can give them. For example, you can offer the developer to independently select projects of interest to him from the prepared list – this is an effective way to win over a high-level specialist.

Finally, it is important to consider soft skills. IT people with strong communication skills who know how to work in a team can develop the hard skills that are missing. And qualified, but conflicting specialists in the long run can bring a lot of problems to the company.

Hiring in IT will continue to improve. Companies that have a pool of loyal developers and a strong HR brand will ultimately win.

Categorized in:

News