If your company needs to hire IT professionals often, perhaps your HR team is facing a tough time these days like many others. Since the Great Resignation and the changed expectations of employees, HR professionals have become busier than ever as they operate in an extremely competitive environment to acquire IT talent. Apart from filling up positions left vacant due to quitting, many are also hiring to expand their business after playing it safe during the pandemic.
While helping companies meet their international recruitment needs, we found the following three as their top pain points. If you too are troubled by them, read on as we share some ways you can resolve these problems and hire the best IT talents to take your company to the next level.
Pain Point #1: Not Finding Enough Candidates Qualified for the Role
This can happen when you look for a rare IT skill-set or don’t get the desired volume of applicants.
Not sure what the solution is?
Build a talent pool.
You can create a list or database of candidates who previously applied for roles but weren’t the right fit or the ones who showed an interest in working for your company. You could even add candidates you find when searching various sources, or create a dedicated “career” page on your company website where candidates can apply for any future, relevant roles, thus adding themselves to your talent pool.
By creating a talent pool of past applicants, you get a source of interested candidates to approach. Though setting up a talent pool at the beginning may take some time, building and managing it will ensure you have a database of interested candidates readily available. This, in turn, will reduce the time to fill and help save money as you would no longer need a paid job ad.
Pain Point #2: Continue Missing Out on the Best Talent
Top IT talent is hired at lightning-fast speed. If your company is consistently missing out on the top talent, perhaps the problem lies with your long time to hire. If you make your candidates jump through a lot of hoops to get job offers, you need to review the process and reduce your time to hire.
But what if you feel you can’t speed up your hiring process due to specific and necessary tasks or timelines that can’t budge? We suggest you make some small changes.
To begin with, you should remove any unnecessary hiring steps. Limiting interviews to three is another step to focus upon because anything more than three could be overkill.
According to a LinkedIn study, the median time to hire in IT is 49 days. You can encourage your HR team to make quick decisions to decrease the time to hire. You may even consider implementing metrics or KPIs to keep all parties accountable. Using tech solutions to reduce the time to hire by automating certain recruitment processes like reference checking could also help.
Pain Point #3: Candidates Getting Speedier Counteroffers
In today’s extremely competitive market, candidates getting counteroffers are commonplace. The talented candidates you want to hire could receive a counteroffer from your competitors or from their current employers trying to stop them from leaving.
In either case, these candidates are likely to decline your job offer. This can be exasperating, especially since you have invested a lot of time and effort (and sometimes, even money) to secure the right candidate.
To reduce the opportunity for counteroffers, you can do the following:
- Talk to the candidates as much as possible: Throughout the hiring process, you should talk to your shortlisted candidates a lot to understand their career journey, career development and training desires, and factors that motivate them to quit. Such information will let you evaluate their commitment to finding a new role.
- Be open and upfront with your communication: You should discuss the possibility of counteroffers early on in the recruitment process. This will help you guess if the candidates are surely moving on or would be happy to stay with their present employers. You can also get an idea if they are examining other job opportunities. This way, you can plan to fill your vacant positions better.
- Understand the candidates’ motivation: You should assess what has motivated the candidates to look for a new role. Is it money? Or growth opportunities? Or a challenging role? By understanding their motivations for moving on, you can tackle the counteroffers your candidates get better by gently reminding them what made them seek a new opportunity in the first place.
- Reduce the time to hire: With a speedy and efficient recruitment process, you can secure the best IT talent fast and even decrease the opportunity for a counteroffer. This way, you can reduce the chances of looking for a candidate all over again just because your shortlisted candidate has decided to accept someone else’s offer or counteroffer.
Final Words
Finding the right talent, missing out on the best due to a long time to hire, and counteroffers seem to be the most persistent issues for HR professionals looking to hire IT talent.
If your company is also battling these challenges, the above suggestions can help.
In case they don’t work, you can always call us to find top tech talent for your open positions.
What other challenges do you face when acquiring IT talent?
This article was written by InHunt World