Is Tech recruitment simple? How to attract and retain top tech talent?

Tech recruitment is one of the most complex challenges for technology companies today. Hiring good talent is hard, especially if you need to combine a specific skill with a cultural fit. During the process, the recruiter must have the technical knowledge to understand the job and
find qualified candidates for the work.

Because of this complexity, developing excellent tech recruiters can become as difficult as finding engineers. Imagine that IT pros say they receive 32 job solicitations each week. On the other hand, tech recruiters need to fight every day to hire, retain, grow and lead the most epic team possible.

Besides that, technical experience and skills are only 50% of the requirement. Tech recruiters must be aware to match the company’s expectations of developing a strong culture based on new talents and the team. A high-performance team is a group of people strategically distributed in key skills that collaborate to achieve a common goal.

So, tech companies hiring is a process that must include strategies to find candidates with a cultural fit, otherwise, the results of the team and the development of the software can be harmed. Cultural fit is also important to attract and retain the best tech talents.

Forget the snooker or free food, which doesn’t make sense anymore after covid-19, we are talking about the collective behavior of everyone in the organization, direction, process, and the organization’s way of doing things.

Another thing is: if you don’t start giving tech talents a compelling reason to invest their careers in your company, everything can fail, according to a Linkedin survey.

The global average in why people left their jobs and joined a new one

Win the war of technology staffing hiring, depends on a high-performance tech recruiters team that finds qualified candidates for technical jobs, but also able to find out if they are aligned with the team culture.

What is a tech recruiter?

Tech Recruiter is the person who works with recruitment and selection for technology professionals. This is a heated market, so Tech Recruiter is highly skilled with strategies for better performance in its operations.

Usually, HR professionals are not trained for recruiting software engineers specifically and also they share their time with HR routines such as people management. So, as a specialist in recruitment and selection for technology professionals, the first requirement is to have good technical knowledge about specific skills, such as a UX Designer or a Front-end developer.

So, being successful in finding the right candidate means that it is critical to understand the technology involved in the roles and the nuances of these positions.

Tech Recruiter moves between the areas of the company, sometimes making interviews, to understand what is the reality of each one, what is the dynamics and process of work, what are the main challenges and what are the characteristics of the team. In order to find the best talent, the best new employees for the company.

The list of duties of a tech recruiter should include:

• Develop Recruiting Strategies
• Identify Recruiting Sources and Networks
• Create Job Descriptions and Specifications
• Interview and Assess Candidates
• Represent Company at Job Fairs and Campus Events

Just like engineers and developers, tech recruiters need to have a skill set to achieve the goal of successfully recruiting tech talent.

Some skills such as excellent written and verbal communication, negotiation, organization and analytical skills are very important for a technical Recruiter.

List of Core skills, Advanced skills, and Tools to become an IT or Technical Recruiter.

How do you do technical recruitment?

There are a lot of things involved in doing technical recruitment. Of course, each recruiting individual has his own methodology, but there are some points in common in the process of recruiting engineers and developers such as:

• Understanding the position before start sourcing: starting with a kick-off meeting and making notes for building your guide during the entire process. Basic questions are: Whether you need to hire, who you need to hire, how will the role be filled, which candidate types should you target.
• Preparing job briefings and Building a Communication plan: building a doc that enables you to deliver the right information to stakeholders, also preparing a well-written job briefing to attract the best candidates
• Searching for the best candidates: here the tech recruiter needs to go beyond the experience and search for candidates with code quality. Some common places to look for engineers and developers are Github, Reflik, Toptal, and Reddit r/TechJobs.
• Vetting and validating the CV information: to make sure that this candidate is ready to move on to the next phase of the process, it’s important to select only the best.
• Interviewing the best candidates: Remember to ask about previous employment or project, challenges, methodologies they use, and also ask specific questions that reveal how much they value strategic thinking.
• Running technical tests: Good coders get the job done. Great software engineers do it in a way that their work stays relevant even after it has become legacy code.

Employee, people, position, interview, Recruiting, industry, team, role, person, companies, Information, social

Technology, network, challenge, knowledge, connect, interest, mind, relationship, resource, software, benefit, applicant, description, event

Find more in Hire Remote: How to Build an Effective Tech Recruitment process

How difficult is it to find technical talent?

By 2021 there will be a shortage of 1.4 million software developers and only 400,000 software developer graduates in the USA. And there’s more: it’s projected that this gap will continue to grow for at least the next ten years.

Finding and luring roles required are in-demand such as Product Managers, UX/UI Designers, Mobile engineers, Web Engineers, QA Specialists, and Security engineers is getting harder each year. Take DevOps/SRE culture as an example: it is on the rise, and so is the demand for professionals familiar with this mindset.

That’s why 86 percent of hiring decision-makers find it challenging to find and hire Tech talent and 56 percent of respondents have hired tech talent despite the candidates not meeting the job description requirements.

If the tech recruiter doesn’t want to lower the level of hiring, it’ll be necessary to build a strong distributed engineering team and a non-negotiable strategy recruitment process. Otherwise, you’re not going to achieve the goal of developing the best products.

What are the best practices in tech recruitment?

A blind report found that virtually all (96 percent) of tech employees do not believe recruiters are the best at evaluating a potential candidate. The majority of respondents (66 percent) felt coworkers would be better at recruiting candidates.

To overcome these challenges, it’s highly recommended that Tech Recruiter and the company stay aligned about:

• What skills the role requires
• What are the recruiting tools and recruitment technology available to support and scale the process?
• Stay clear of selling points like “dynamic environment”, “interesting projects” or “nice colleagues
• Tech Recruiter doesn’t just sit there, but go hunt for your new Software Engineers
• Cultivate existing relationships and keep in touch with awesome candidates so you have a ready-to-go pipeline
• Guarantee non-tech skills in addition to technical ones (communication, decision-making, attention to detail, presentation, and negotiation skills, etc).
• Provide the opportunity for hands-on experience outside of the day-to-day

How do you recruit tech talent?

Racing down the track, without looking up (or, in fact, any direction), using a ‘go horse’ approach to hire a Software Engineer definitely is not going to work well.

If you are looking for Great Talents for your distributed IT team, but need to save time and costs, surely it will be better to get expert support. If your company is already our client and you want to learn more about how we build a recruitment strategy for each specific role, talk to your success manager.

Not a client yet? Talk to Ubiminds – we can help you custom curate your engineering team!

Scheila Farias Silveira

International Marketing Leader, specialized in tech. Proud to have built marketing and business generation structures for some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies on both sides of the Atlantic (UK, DACH, Iberia, LatAm, and NorthAm). Big fan of motherhood, world music, marketing, and backpacking. A little bit nerdy too!