Today’s world of work is almost unrecognizable compared with the one from the start of the pandemic. Sure, we’ve all found a way to soldier on and keep projects moving from the comfort of our home offices, achieving some small sense of regularity, but have you ever considered the implications of the work-from-home boom? Consider this:
This massive shift has had a considerable ripple effect on the logistics of tech jobs. For starters, the candidate pool has opened up to include talent from across the globe. For example, people living in Des Moines used to make considerably less than someone in San Francisco. But now, with location meaning less and less to employers, technologists in Iowa are beginning to earn more and more. The process of IT job offers has been disrupted, too. Recruiters hoping to secure the finest talent in the space should embrace this change and understand how the rhythms of tech recruiting have changed.
Condensed Timelines
The convenience of remote work brings an added layer of urgency to the hiring process. Capable tech professionals from coast to coast now have their pick of great jobs. As a hiring manager, being inflexible in this fast-evolving environment is not good. The days of long, methodical interview processes are long gone. That take-home coding test you used to assign to prospective employees? It’s no good. Few worthy candidates with multiple offers on deck will devote an entire weekend to completing a complex exercise, no matter how valid.
At BridgeView, we coach our clients in a way that eases them into the new world of tech hiring. The current shelf-life for a prospective candidate is less than two weeks, so hiring managers would do well to remove as many redundant or tedious steps from their interview process as possible. Even cutting a four-step process down to two can make a difference. If you receive a resume, don’t sit on the review process. Please give it a close look, make a decision, and move on.
The LinkedIn Shortcut
The tech hiring boom has turned average Java developers or data analysts into hot commodities. IT pros who put their resume out into the world are now getting double or triple the interest they once garnered a few short years ago. In this brave, new job-finder’s market, it helps to know exactly where and how to look for talent so you don’t get left in the dust.
Many capable candidates are forgoing classic job sites like Monster.com or CareerBuilder. They simply indicate on their LinkedIn profile that they’re open to work—without even glancing at a job posting. The expectation—and often the reality—is that recruiters will come to them. Remember this as you embark on an expedition to build up your IT roster.
In addition to indicating openness to jobs, active and passive candidates alike are getting plenty of attention by deftly managing keywords on their profile pages. But not in the way you might expect. Rather than adding the right buzzwords like REACT, C#, Angular, or other ancillary terms, crafty IT professionals are taking keywords out of their profiles to avoid getting pitched on jobs that aren’t a fit. They may even remove the period from their email addresses and spell out “dot” to confound the bots. The IT hiring boom has created unwanted extra work for IT professionals, and they’ve responded in kind to isolate only the offers that resonate with their wants and needs.
It’s About Money (Except When it Isn’t)
With myriad iterations of the same role on the table, it’s up to hiring managers to differentiate by selling a job’s desirability upfront. This doesn’t necessarily mean promising sky-high pay or rattling off a list of cutting-edge tech opportunities. Sometimes, it comes down to selling a company’s culture. What does your organization stand for? Are you going to call employees back into the office in a misguided attempt to return to the good old post-COVID days? Have you given any thought to what motivates employees in a work-from-home environment? Be ready to answer tough questions like these when handling rapid-fire IT interviews.
That’s not to say money doesn’t matter. And as a hiring manager, you can actually save some by hiring someone you think you can train instead of someone with seniority. If you choose correctly, it could turn out to be a great investment. If you choose to hire someone with more experience, be prepared to offer financial incentives once reserved for director-level employees and above, such as equity in the company.
Take Care of Yourself
It’s not all about the candidate, where you can find them, and what you can offer them. You sometimes have to watch out for yourself in this unprecedented hiring boom. Some candidates aren’t guided by a moral compass while fielding multiple offers. They may attempt to blindly capitalize on the market, accepting multiple offers and blowing off the bad ones. Some industrious folks go as far as taking two jobs at once to see which one suits them. We at BridgeView try to stem this tide by coaching our candidates to take just the interviews they think they’ll really love. We advise against racing to the offer stage to try and negotiate or back out.
We’ve entered a new dimension of tech hiring. The rules of engagement have changed—likely permanently—but if you can find a hiring solutions partner with your back and read the terrain, you can put yourself in a prime position to secure the IT talent you need.
The brave, new world of tech hiring should feel like an adventure. Ready to start exploring? Let BridgeView be your guide.
