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.
