Attracting and retaining skilled IT talent is a challenge due to high demand and low supply IT professionals. Companies need to recognize the value of personal connections, offer competitive wages, provide remote or hybrid work options, invest in their employees’ professional development and create a positive workplace culture to become an employer of choice for top-rated talent and position their organization for future success.
As technology expands into every realm of society, companies need employees who can spearhead their digital transformation. To attract the best and brightest IT talent today, you must bring a competitive edge to the market and become an employer of choice for skilled workers.
It’s no secret that skilled IT talent is difficult to find right now. Despite current economic uncertainties, the tech sector remains strong, with a job gains streak that’s lasted close to two years. In late 2022, the US tech unemployment rate fell to 2.1 percent—compared to an overall unemployment rate of 3.7 percent—indicating an unfading demand for IT skills.
In 2023, a looming economic recession could reduce corporate spending, but IT initiatives will continue to move forward, primarily centered around creating operational efficiencies and monetizing data. To be successful, companies will need the technology, software, hardware, infrastructure and talent to enable successful projects. Clearly, IT skills will remain in high demand and scarce supply—a constant refrain demonstrating that the IT talent war is relentless.
Based on nearly 25 years of experience in IT staffing, here are five things I recommend you do to attract, hire, and retain top talent.
1. Acknowledge the Power of Personal Connections
Technology now plays a major role in the process of recruiting candidates. With new applications of AI and machine learning to HR and staffing, many professionals wonder if recruiters are becoming obsolete. For example, Vendor Management Systems (VMS) offers a comprehensive way to manage contractor spend and external vendor management.
But while VMS and other digital tools are useful, they hinder successful recruitment when they become barriers to personal connections. Companies that depend too heavily on a VMS may fail to bring in the top talent they need—because there’s a breakdown in communication between candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers.
To avoid this pitfall, it’s important to acknowledge that personal connections still matter. Making a successful hire depends on finding a person who will fit in your company culture and deliver the project in the way you want. That kind of recruiting requires nuance—taking the time to talk with a candidate, understand their style of working, and their personality.
A recent industry report reveals the continued strength of human connections: even when VMS use is prevalent, the greatest fill rate (37.8 percent) came from direct client relationship, versus 12 percent from VMS/MSP contact. Hiring practices that promote communication and the power of personal connections between employer, employee markets, and the IT services experts that connect the two are more than 300% effective compared to practices that squelch a free-market service provision. IT service providers and the in-demand talent that drives project success will promptly identify clients that limit free-market functions of service provision—and take their efforts and talents elsewhere.
Technology tools can be helpful, but don’t let them act as a barrier between you and your potential vendors or hires. Instead, look for ways to facilitate clear communication.
2. Be Prepared to Offer Competitive Wages
Ongoing low unemployment rates in IT combined with the need for highly specialized skills has created a talent war. We’re seeing increased demand for IT professionals with experience in DevOps, SDLC project and product management, data sciences, data engineering, analytics, and software engineering—just to name a few.
When there’s high demand for workers and the supply is limited, companies must reevaluate their salary and contingent labor budgets. If you have a wage framework that commodifies certain skills and assigns pay rates based on years of experience, it might be time to rethink that stringent approach. Look at what your peer businesses are doing to attract talent and consider how you can compete with them. In a dynamic market, you’ll need to take a nimble approach to hiring if you want to attract the best. IT wages are driven by expertise, high demand, and market scarcity. Therefore, compensation evaluation cannot be based on past data or simply a function of finance. In a market driven by scarcity, the process of determining wages must be connected to the people involved in defining the skill gaps and shaping the objectives for hiring—including IT services experts who are well-versed in both the skilled labor (supply) side and project potential (demand) side of the equation.
3. Offer Remote or Hybrid Work Options
Before the pandemic, only about 6 percent of employed individuals in the US worked from home. By 2021, that number had tripled to nearly 18 percent overall. Within IT, those numbers are much higher, with 48 percent of tech workers saying they’re now fully remote and 85 percent either working fully remotely or follow a hybrid model.
More importantly, the majority of IT workers now favor remote work—3 in 5 say they’re not interested in returning to full-time in-person work. Even if you want your team to return to a pre-pandemic office environment, it’s important to realize many of them—and the top talent you want to hire—may feel differently.
While onsite collaboration and camaraderie is valuable, remote work can pay its own dividends. It opens the talent pool to a larger regional or national audience and gives you greater accessibility to top professionals. Bringing on workers from different geographical regions can give your team a diversity of perspectives that’s valuable for problem-solving. Offering remote or hybrid work options can also be a selling point for candidates.
4. Consider Hiring Contractors
Hiring a full-time employee can be a lengthy process, taking an average of 61 days for a high-demand tech role. Even when companies are willing to hire remote employees, finding the right person at the right time can be challenging—and sometimes your mission-critical project requires a faster turnaround.
By contrast, bringing talent in on a contract basis tends to be faster, less cluttered, and more economical. One of the primary advantages of hiring a contractor is how quickly you can bring them on board. The average time to fill a highly-skilled IT contract position is 24 days, meaning you can bring someone on in about a third of the time it would take to hire an employee.
Contractors tend to have highly specialized skills and are ready to jump right into your project, requiring less time and effort for ramp-up and training. They can also be let go when the project is completed, making this type of work arrangement a perfect solution when you have large, temporary projects in the pipeline.
Vacant roles lead to high costs, reflected in project delivery delays, diminished productivity levels, and other less salient costs. Taking measures to decrease the time to hire is essential to the overall health of an IT project.
5. Be Willing to Change Your Hiring Processes
If you’re struggling to locate, attract, and keep IT talent in your ranks, there might be issues with your hiring processes. We often see human resource departments prospecting for IT candidates without any knowledge of IT, making it difficult to identify individuals with the needed skills. To avoid this problem, involve your IT leaders in the hiring process and consider hiring an IT staffing agency for additional support.
We also see companies creating unintentional bottlenecks in the hiring process. For example, planning multiple interviews for each candidate, requiring sign-off from the entire c-suite on every hire, or simply taking a “wait for the perfect candidate” approach that ends in missed opportunities. If you bring on an IT staffing agency or consulting company, be open to criticism about any internal problems they observe. A willingness to adapt can empower you to compete in the market and attract skilled workers.
Winning the Talent War
Filling critical IT roles in today’s market can be challenging—but with the right approach, it’s very doable. Take time to speak with candidates and understand what they bring to the table. Keep in mind that IT professionals whose skills are in demand have options, and they’ll move on if the hiring process is too difficult.
To ease the process, consider bringing on an established IT staffing supplier that can evaluate your company culture and business objectives and help you find and attract the talent you need.
