The IT jobs market has gone through a bit of a correction over the last few years. The likes of Meta, Google and Microsoft continue to restructure their work force. This is releasing more and more jobseekers to the IT jobs market.  Does that mean there is an abundance of Software Engineers on the IT jobs market, sadly no. But should you fight to fill your roles like you might have done a few years ago? The likes of Meta have risen the cost of a lot of skills over the years. A lot of the companies we work with are still playing catch up. But, do the people who once occupied these high paying jobs really expect an SME to match their salary. Some do. But others don’t. Are there better ways then fighting for the talent? The IT jobs market remain a challenge to fill, no doubt about that. In this blog we will explore a few things you can do, to avoid fighting for your talent.

Let’s look at the company, product and general offering to assist in attracting talent from the IT job market.

One of the strongest items in your armoury will be your Brand. Let’s not kid ourselves. It will be easier for big brands to attract people, but if you’re not an IT Powerhouse like Amazon, Google or Facebook then you have to try promoting what it is that makes your company unique. A few tips:

  1. Engage leaders within your organisation to showcase what they do, get them on camera.
  2. How they do what they do, showcase the technology and how innovative it is
  3. What makes the company great?

Female IT worker

Next, look at the actual candidate journey. Look at ways to consider the candidate first. What’s in it for them?

Few tips to assist the candidate to fill your IT jobs.

  1. Consider Flexibility – On working from home absolutely, also consider the work is done, hours, is it important to have strict times or is it the outcomes?
  2. Innovation – everyone wants to learn and work with new things.
  3. Understanding expectations – Not just salary, but working expectations, let people know what’s expected of them in clear and goal orientated ways.

As the artillery moves in and competition from competitors intensifies. Let’s have a look at your skillset requirements, can you diversify skillsets and train those harder to find skills to ensure you get a committed employee but also one that will learn straight away. This will not always be possible, more saying where possible, explore it. Hiring for Attitude, cultural fit along with a strong cognitive ability with perhaps 50% of the skill requirements will rarely go wrong as long as the skills are trained well.

How can Recruitment and HR departments improve talent pools for this so called ware on Talent?

With so much jobs out there, workforce planning is critical, knowing your time to hire stat taking into account the talent shortage, life will be a little easier. However, building pipelines is where us Recruitment Wizards, Sourcing Ninjas and all those other crazy titles us Recruiters put on them comes into full force.

Here are 6 tips of pipelining talent for those IT jobs that remain tricky to fill:

  1. Identify what talent you need and when you need it.
  2. Identify where the talent is, can you attract them via social media, job adverts and digital marketing.
  3. Once you discover where the talent is, advertise roles, your career pages. Make some noise.
  4. Seek out those harder to find roles via direct messaging make contact and expand your network. This is an art, so don’t send mass messaging. Trust me, it doesn’t work. Take your time and find something interesting to speak about.
  5. Once you get some people into your pipeline, it’s important to keep in touch with them. Once they subscribe to your marketing material, again make it relevant so the pending candidate knows a little about you and what makes your business interesting. Gaining that interest is really important.
  6. Build a pipeline for each volume role you hire, in IT for example, a Talent pool for each of these, Java Developers, .Net Developers, Scala Developers, Network Engineers etc etc.

When the time is right, the role opens up you can then pro-actively go after the talent. Put in the work now, plan and the search will be easier. Its time consuming and there is a reason the best Recruiters are hard to find, this activity is there daily bread and butter.

Build a workforce of Believers and brand ambassadors. 

Yes, the war on talent can be fought on more than one footing, get everyone involved. Having your employees and leaders talking about the business, planting seeds with their personal networks can help attract a more passive candidate. Someone they might know and they can refer in are worth their weight in gold.

Central banks all over the world are predicting growth over the next 3 years, with growth comes jobs, with jobs that need to be filled comes a lack of skilled people to take those jobs. As a business you must adapt and prepare for this eventuality.  The last 2 years has taught us all a few things about resilience, new ways to work are becoming the norm. Everything needs to be considered in order to impress the next generation of skills that will take your business to the next level. It is a difficult but achievable task. You must always prepare. As an IT Recruiter based in Dublin but with a worldwide Network I know first-hand the difficulties that face the IT industry in years to come. If you are looking for a trusted Recruitment Partner, please get in touch.

GOt a new IT job

We must also take into account Diversity hiring into out IT teams, do click here to get into more details on hiring your IT jobs in a fair and Diverse way.  IT jobs are not easy to fill. Do reach out if you are struggling to fill your IT jobs in Dublin and Ireland.

My last blog around remote interviewing does give insights into the benefits, do click here to read more about filling your IT jobs remotely.