In 2016, a troubling and unsettling statistic emerged from the trenches of the IT industry: A whopping 83{ed162fdde9fdc472551df9f31f04601345edf7e4eff6ea93114402690d8fa616} of mid-level or high-level employees would leave their current job if recruited by a company with a better reputation. As we enter into 2017, the question everyone is asking is this: How do I keep my best rising-star employees from jumping ship to another company? How do I attract good applicants to enrich my company, and use my brand to beat out the competition?

I am a firm believer that social media and online recruiting platforms are going to define the IT recruitment landscape in the coming years. Any worthy candidate in the industry is going to have a strong presence on social media, and these are the exact people you want to recruit. To attract the best talent, unless you are a huge multi-million dollar company already, you can’t just depend on your company’s branding and expect potential employees to come to you. You have to reach out and go where the tech-savvy talent is, and that’s online networking platforms.

Informal Branding on Social Media is more valuable than your company account

Every company needs to have a presence on social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the list goes on. However, you don’t just need to recruit through your company’s formal social media accounts. People on the job market trust their friends and company employees far more than they trust the abstract, large voice of the company itself. Amazingly, only about a third of recruiting companies ask their employees to post about the company on their personal social media accounts.

People on the outside trust word-of-mouth far more than official company memos. A great strategy is to get your employees to post their genuine thoughts and mention positions the company is looking to fill online to their friends and acquaintances. This way, your recruitment umbrella will stretch much further, and usually, encompass way more talented candidates than the random people who respond to official company “Now Hiring” memos. Your employees’ voices on social media is a key aspect of your company’s branding, and you need to use this megaphone to your best ability.

Recruitment on Formal Online Platforms

Personally, I think casual social media like Facebook and Twitter often attracts more talent than formal job search platforms, because you attract people who are connected to those whom you trust, and the platforms aren’t saturated with other job seekers and recruiters. When you enter a platform specifically for recruitment, you risk being overwhelmed by the competition, and you are also only seeing one specific side of a potential recruit’s personality: the side they present for recruitment. If you can see someone’s content on Facebook or Twitter, you see more of their true personality, and you can better analyze what they might bring to the company as well as what weaknesses they have.

Despite this, networks like Meetup, LinkedIn Talent, iCIMs, and Jobvite can be useful for recruiting. Mainly, you should be using them as a supplement to your recruitment tactics, not the biggest aspect.

Sources:

https://blog.beamery.com/recruiting-statistics-2016/

http://www.cio.com/article/2915834/careers-staffing/13-top-recruiting-software-platforms.html#slide6

It’s never the easiest thing to keep up with the pace of change, and in the ultra-fast world of Tech, it gets harder even still. You need the right men and women to do the job, but how do you go about finding them? Do you put an ad in the newspaper in this day and age? Of course not. 21st-century recruitment needs 21st-century solutions. A “Help Wanted” sign isn’t going to bring you the employees you need.

Good employees are like gold dust. I don’t mean those who are simply qualified to do the job; you know how to find them. Simply wait outside the colleges for them to finish. No, by good staff I mean those who are qualified and who have the right attitude, the right stuff. Those people who’ll go above and beyond the call of duty for your business. Henry Thoreau wrote: “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” Now, I’m not suggesting you hire someone who’ll work for free, but finding someone who can do the job and enjoy it at the same time is the Holy Grail of recruitment, as such staff is worth a fortune in the long run. 

But who are these people you want to hire? There’s a rapidly growing demand for IT professionals all across the region, and the skill-sets are becoming increasingly specialised. It can be difficult to tell your E-Commerce Analyst from your Keyword researcher. Finding out what skills you need to hire is as important as the who, and savvy recruiters are increasingly using technology to find the right people for the right job.

In the online environment, everyone has a digital footprint, and that footprint can be revealing about the sort of person they are. Social media has been a game-changing catalyst for recruitment, suddenly everyone has a public face and is easily accessible, we can get a feel of what our candidates are like. The internet knows our likes and dislikes, what football team we follow or what we last ate. But it also knows our skills and abilities.

Moving forward, these skills will be even more searchable than they are now. Talent search engines scour the web for the best and brightest available. The old days, of putting a job ad up and simply having to deal with who came to you are gone. Now, you can go to them, using the internet to track down the right people for the right job as the search engines sort them by their relevant skills and experience. You can proactively look for the right person.

This isn’t the only way, professional networks, the businesslike siblings of Facebook and Twitter, feature a whole host of talent crammed in one place. Sites such as LinkedIn or Meetup are full of highly qualified, professional and motivated individuals.

The old ways of recruiting don’t cut it these days. If you want to find the brightest and the best to work for you, then it’s a matter of going and looking for them. Before somebody else does.

The changing face of the workplace, with many companies working globally and remotely, means recruitment has become a far more diverse process than it used to be.

It’s also more important as hiring and retaining the right talent can make the difference between a company succeeding or not, so it is one of the key objectives of many chief executives.

Recruiters now face very different challenges from say, ten years ago, for example, trying to understand the motivations and needs of the so-called millennials is a major issue.

However, by far the biggest challenge across the globe is recruiting and retaining top IT talent. Being so in demand, IT candidates don’t need to promote themselves or actively look for a role, so they can be hard to find.

They are not the kind of people who would respond well to cold calling or head hunting either, which means recruiters need to find alternative ways to approach them in the first place.

A personality clash can also be part of the problem – while recruiters tend to be natural “people” people – by virtue of the kind of job they are doing – techies have a tendency to be more reserved. Also, many recruiters have no idea how to write an appropriate IT job spec, or what questions to ask in interviews because they don’t understand the subject.

It is all too common for highly skilled tech people to turn up for interviews and be asked to do the most menial IT problems as part of the process, which is not only insulting but highly likely to put them off the company for life.

This is where some of the new technology approaches to recruitment can help – funnily enough! It’s no good searching the normal job sites to find candidates for specialist tech jobs as they won’t be there.

But they are likely to be online chatting with other tech specialists on forums, in discussion groups, and on sites where they can share ideas and talk about solving technology problems, so venture into their natural habitat.

Using the candidate’s online footprint – looking at where they go and what forums they are active in, works well. If you are looking for a developer don’t search on a job site, join a developer discussion forum on LinkedIn.

There are many free candidate source websites out there, offering to search the whole of the web to see who is online and what they are doing, but this is casting far too wide a net.

However what might be worth trying is one of the new Talent Search platforms which have sprung up recently which enable you to hone your search, much more specifically creating more likelihood of success for a specialist role.

If you are trying to find the specialists who aren’t actively looking, and don’t want to be found, this kind of technology might help in honing a successful strategy to attract them anyway. Making use of the right technology could just be the key to find and keep the best techie for your company.