Tech Recruiting in a Constrained Market: What You Need to Know
Updated: Feb 27, 2022
According to the latest Conference Board Annual Survey, recruiting talent continues to be a top concern for CEOs; it is also a top concern for the entire executive suite. The state of today's workforce has shifted, and companies are struggling to find the right people with the right skills. It is more important than ever to find the best talent for your company and ensure that your talented tech employees are not being lured away by competitors offering higher salaries and other perks. HR leaders must leverage all resources to create a roadmap for successful technical recruiting to keep top talent on board. This article will show you how to engage a technical recruiter to increase your hiring success!
Enter technical hiring
Technical hiring is the art of hiring skilled employees to fill technical jobs and requires technical recruiter skills. Tech recruiting can take any number of forms. Each option has its advantages and cons depending on the available money, consistent need in the hiring process, and the required volume of workers to hire. Employers have a business relationship with technical recruiters similar to a client-supplier relationship. To hire successfully, both parties should align around a common goal that identifies priorities and expectations.
In order to hire technical talent, recruiters must have a unique set of skills. Technical recruiters should be able to understand a manager's needs. They recognize that successful recruiting requires considerable knowledge as a specialist in recruitment to attract potential candidates for technical positions. To effectively screen candidates, the technical recruiter must know the industry you're hiring for and understand the terminology.
What you should know about technical recruiting
Technical recruiting is a specific type of recruitment focusing on finding and hiring people with technical skills. Technical recruiters typically have more knowledge about the work than someone unfamiliar with technology, software engineering, or software development. The role of a technical recruiter in technical recruiting has been around for some time and continues to evolve as new technologies emerge in the marketplace. It’s a specialized field requiring knowledge and experience in recruiting for technical roles.
A technical recruiters job involves helping organizations save money while expanding your business with their expertise. In this way, you help avoid misalignment of talent when scaling your workforce and identifying where employees will be most effective. By partnering with Recruiters who specialize in niche recruiting services to source tech talent, Tech Recruiters become an extension of your business by acting as recruitment brand ambassadors.
What is a technical recruiter?
The need for technical recruiters is a growing demand. A technical recruiter's job is to help organizations find candidates who are a good fit for the company culture. They will source suitable recruits, screen interviews and extend offers to candidates for tech jobs.
Unlike some recruiters, a technical recruiter or recruiting firm with specialized recruiting capabilities will have at least two years of tech background and an understanding of the technical jargon to source and assess tech workers adequately. HR duties vary tremendously depending on the size and specialty of an organization and the resources available to manage the project. These duties include writing the job descriptions to attract the talent you need, technical interviews, and the use of soft and hard skills tests to ensure sound hiring decisions and high-quality hires.
A results-oriented technical recruiter’s duties expand beyond sourcing to include sharing the employer branding and telling the compelling and honest narrative of your business. An excellent technical recruiter can write enticing job descriptions and implement a recruitment marketing strategy that targets tech candidates with specialized skills for highly sought-after roles, such as software engineers and software developers.
In addition to having technical knowledge, technical recruiters are skilled at recruiting strategies such as conducting technical interviews and using soft and technical skills assessments as part of the hiring process. In this way they make sure they hire the right talent for supporting the company's existing and future business goals.
Technical recruiters can assess candidates' other skills, such as creativity and risk-taking, by asking the correct questions and imagining hypothetical situations. As well, the applicant tracking system further streamlines and automates the hiring process. A recruiting technology that uses data and analytics from assessments will provide the client company with valuable insight into candidates' personalities. Plus, recruiters can use analytics to improve recruitment outcomes by recommending best-fit candidates.
Overall, technical recruiters have strong negotiation skills and a lot of responsibility for finding potential employees. It's a critical role because it can impact an organization's growth or decline in productivity and a subsequent increase or decrease in revenue.
What is a constrained market?
What makes the constrained market unique is that companies often know they have limited opportunities to hire. Opportunities might come from their size, a company’s industry/sector, its location, or a combination of these and more. In a constrained market from a jobseeker’s viewpoint, it’s not a question of whether there are job openings, but which of those jobs are available based on their core skills, and how quickly can they get hired.
The demand for technical skills has never been higher, but supply of suitable jobs is projected to grow at a rate of just 3%. A small margin of growth means many HR professionals are struggling to find qualified candidates. If you have an opening in your organization that needs filling today, this blog post will provide some practical tips on hiring more quickly and with less risk.
From the employer’s perspective, operating in a constrained market means they often struggle to fill positions because they do not have a desirable employment package. There is also a smaller pool of skilled individuals who possess the necessary core skills. The location also plays a significant role in determining the opportunities some people are willing to accept and the communities they choose to live in.
What drives a passive job seeker to become active?
A fascinating study conducted on LinkedIn indicates that although self-identified "passive" job seekers are different from "active" job seekers, it's not the way we might expect. For passive job seekers, more money is the top factor that encourages them to move. For active candidates, the leading factors are better work and career opportunities. Active job seekers are more likely to report they are passionate about their work, concerned about improving their skills, and relatively satisfied with their current jobs. Their motivation to move is ambition, not higher wages.
Active job seekers do not report moving for money because their motivation stems from ambition rather than higher wages. High levels of both self-reported ambition and dissatisfaction are also found among more passive job seekers, indicating an opportunity cost associated with actively pursuing a new role. Many of the passive job seekers indicated moving might also limit various family opportunities.
By focusing on targeting top talent, employers have an opportunity to be intentional about every part of the recruitment process to create a winning strategy that will attract the best talent. Successful organizations should consider the following insights to help develop a successful recruitment strategy in a constrained labor market:
Create career paths with opportunities for growth, further career advancement, and better job opportunities in the future.
Introduce easy lifestyle benefits that promote a healthy work-life balance, including flexible work options for remote.
Introduce competitive compensation plans to attract and retain top talent.
These insights lead us to believe that employers will need to think differently about attracting tech talent. Certainly, employers can keep wages competitive, interview candidates, use analytics, and assess candidates to uncover applicants with suitable skills.
How can you recruit in a constrained market?
Three things provide recruiters with more leverage to help them get the best talent:
Use data to make smart decisions.
Go beyond the resume with a focus on skills and improving the candidate experience.
Use technology to automate recruiting and leverage social media and networks to attract top talent.
Most employers do not have the means to “search for the good candidates” in a constrained talent market. While there are millions of job seekers, there is only so much time and money to go around. You must choose the people who will deliver the best results. Creating an effective search strategy means you must better understand the data to determine the best source.