The modern world requires modern solutions and this fundamental truth has become true for employment processes too.
Besides classical requirements, the ideal employee must now possess a wide range of soft skills, be flexible and ready for multitasking, regularly upgrade their knowledge, follow rapidly changing trends and accept the challenges each company faces in the high-tech world.
Has it become easier to find the right people in the market in recent years?
I guess every HR specialist would say NO. The battle for talents is one of the most topical issues for employers.
Let’s see how the IT industry has evolved and how organizations can make the most of this.
Challenge 1. It’s Harder Than Ever to Hire
Employment in the ICT sector is projected to grow by a further 5% over the period 2018 to 2030.
Such a trend is being closely followed by another challenge for employers – the cost of the payroll, whose growth looks to be continuous.
Solution 1: Try Outsourcing
If it’s hard to find suitable candidates within your own country, why not look further afield? The procedure for outsourcing business processes is becoming ever simpler in the digital world, and now the cost is no longer a factor.
By hiring software engineers from the so-called tech hubs, companies get perceptible value from:
- Adjustment of the focus on core business activities
- Increased capacity as a service provider
- Enhancement of the quality of services
- Scaling up of the in-house IT department or adding a new technical arsenal
- Reduction of costs and time spent on recruiting and onboarding new employees.
Here we explained how to choose a company for IT outsourcing >>>
Challenge 2. Remote and Flexible Working is on the Rise
The common stereotype of employers is that remote work can’t be as productive as work performed in the office, and that it is not possible to keep the team engaged and united when it’s distributed between different office locations.
However, the global situation with #COVID-19 has demonstrated the importance of being flexible for companies.
What about employees?
Flexibility and work-life balance are appreciated by millennials even more than career growth and social packages and are sometimes even ranked ahead of salary, e.g. by working parents.
The new working generation considers a job as an opportunity for self-development and a tool for contributing to the greater good of society, which has little in common with sitting in the office for 8 hours.
It’s clear that the strict nine-to-five workday is outdated – and it won’t help employers attract or maintain today’s top talent.
Solution 2: Hire Remote and Dedicated Teams
Speaking frankly, there are many struggles that come with remote work and they differ from person to person.
For some people it’s hard to cope with distractions at home or to communicate with the team, so they feel isolated, while others struggle to keep motivated and organize their work processes effectively.
But the guys from the madewithlove team do not agree. They call themselves a first-remote company from Belgium and for years have successfully united professionals from 9 countries, though the total number of employees is only 25 people.
It has been proved that when working remotely employees feel less stress, their well-being and health indicators are improved, their carbon footprint reduces, and more free time appears.
So, if you have never practised remote work for your employees, try offering this attractive benefit on a partial basis and assess the results over a period of time.
Another type of flexible work is extension of your technical department with a dedicated team.
A great example of such a business model is Showpad, a sales enablement platform provider from Belgium, which has a few offices over the globe and enhances their staff with dedicated teams of software developers.
“It is especially important that you include those people in your company updates, engineering stand-ups and team communication. For example, every two weeks at Showpad we hold a general meeting with everyone from the company, including people from a distance”, emphasizes Louis Jonckheere.
Apart from organizing meetings and business communication, it’s extremely important to make remote employees feel they are an indivisible part of the team, as it directly affects employee performance and motivation.
In other words, you should invest more in employee engagement.
Put simply, the level to which an employee is engaged is the level to which they are invested in the work they do for a company. It’s how much they care.
According to Gallup, engaged employees take on average 2.7 sick days per year, while disengaged employees take 6.2.
How can you improve these stats?
Some employers choose various digital tools that help maintain employee engagement and simplify the process of onboarding new hires, while others put the emphasis on a dynamic corporate culture with virtual team building and challenges.
GitLab, for example, encourages remote team members to take virtual coffee breaks and even pairs them up for randomized video calls.
Our advice is to use the advantages of both these practices, and then your remote team will become a real dream team.
Challenge 3. Job Search Going Mobile
Mobile device usage is on the rise. And this fact has led to another one – people have started looking for jobs from their smartphones more often.
A few years ago it wasn’t convenient to visit job search websites from a mobile device as they were too large and would not adapt properly for a small screen. But now we can start our search by pronouncing “Ok, google” and get the first results in a split second.
Today there are thousands of mobile job search applications, which make our life easier and help us to find a new job in minutes. As job seekers rely more on their mobile devices, headhunters must adapt to the quickly changing labor market.
Solution 3: Be Mobile
Just google the phrase “a Tinder-like job search app” and realize how much the process of searching for a job has changed in 2020.
The interest in using mobile apps for job searches varies from industry to industry, and apps for blue-collar workers are the most popular as positions there require temporary or part-time availability from candidates and need to be closed asap.
Despite this, IT professionals also prefer smartphones to PCs in most of their daily digital activities, not just in the job search process but even when communicating with recruiters.
It’s less formal and much quicker to chat with a recruiter in WhatsApp or Telegram than to wait for hours or even days before he or she finds your CV, shows it to a manager, receives feedback and sends you an email invitation to the interview, which may easily be lost in the spam folder.
Don’t you agree?
We are even used to visiting LinkedIn from our mobile devices. HR specialists should consider this fact when creating long boring descriptions of a vacancy, which hardly anyone will read right to the end on a small screen.
So, analyze your audience’s interests to understand what messengers it uses, which channels of communication it most likely prefers, and which tools it uses while looking for a job. Then use them too.
Done? Now you can steer the ship in the ocean of talents!
CactusSoft is a nearshoring software development company, providing full-cycle services for the European market. Among our clients are world-famous brands such as DHL, Nokia, Huami, Showpad and Be-mobile.
The company has been regularly included in the listings of the best mobile developers in Europe. In 2017, CactusSoft merged with the Belgian software development company Litussoft, while its development center remained in Belarus, the tech hub of Eastern Europe. Write at info@cactussoft.biz if you want to hire software engineers for your project.
