9 Tech Hiring Challenges And How To Overcome Them

When recruiting IT professionals, there are several tech hiring challenges that many businesses face. Due to the nature and complexity of tech jobs, they often require niche skills and competencies, which can create trouble in the hiring process. Understanding how to overcome these difficulties will help you to improve your tech recruitment significantly.

Common tech hiring challenges:

Accessing great candidates

Finding skilled and capable professionals is often one of the main challenges in recruiting tech talent. It can be difficult to identify a professional with the unique mix of niche skills and experience you need. Furthermore, you will usually find the best candidates are quickly snapped up by other companies or are not in the market when you need them.

Specialist job boards can be of use to combat this issue. However, specialist job boards can be costly, especially for businesses only using them sporadically. One of the ways to tackle this is to use a recruitment agency and take advantage of their already established pools of talent and access to multiple specialist job boards. Instead of wading the waters of job boards unable to reach great professionals in a particular field, take advantage of a recruiter’s database and tools.

Additionally failing all else, a recruitment agency can also secure you contractors who can temporarily fill the skills gap in your business while you search for a great permanent team member. This would limit disruptions to business operations and keep projects in motion.

Creating a good employer brand

Failing to cultivate an attractive employer brand could be the reason behind your tech hiring challenges.

Your employer brand is much bigger than your reputation as a company to your customer base. Rather, it’s what you are like to work for. Professionals working in the same field talk. If your company is known for large-scale hiring and firing, or not responding to candidates during the interview process, or for mishandling redundancies, you might get a bad reputation in the market and make it less likely for individuals to choose to work with you, creating a tech hiring challenge in your business.

There are multiple ways to improve your employer brand, including:

• Promoting your company benefits on your website
• Showing employee appreciation on your socials
• Speaking openly about your company’s values and mission
• Checking that your company values and ethos are clear and well understood by all stakeholders, including HR and recruitment agencies
• Ensuring candidates have a good experience in the interviewing process, whether they get the job or not
• Asking to get feedback from candidates and new starters

Building an efficient recruitment process

It’s not unusual for businesses to have long recruitment processes, and a lack of awareness around how making candidates jump through hoop after hoop can create a serious tech hiring challenge. Having a lengthy recruitment process can cost your business money and will increase the risk of losing great candidates who never spend long on the market to your competitors.

Whilst, for many technical roles, it is reasonable to have multiple stages with assessments, any more than 2 or 3 is generally too many. They will only increase the chance of candidates dropping out.

For many businesses, agreeing on the stages of a recruitment process with stakeholders before advertising the role will help to limit unexpected additions late on in the game. Additionally, by clearly communicating the process to candidates, you will limit the number of dropouts.

Hiring fast

The longer a vacancy is left open, the more the recruitment process costs and the greater the effect on business operations. However, rushing to hire can lead to bad decisions and a new employee who doesn’t fit in the role or company.

One of the best ways to tackle this tech hiring challenge is to remove the pressure on your HR or management team to secure a new hire and use a recruitment agency instead. Their main focus will be on finding a great new hire for your company, which will limit disruptions to the day-to-day running of your business.

Recruiting without bias

A diverse workforce can improve business growth and success. According to Forbes Insights, companies with diverse management teams average 19% higher revenues, than those without. However, your current procedures and processes could be holding you back from accessing a diverse candidate pool.

Bias, particularly unconscious bias, are always present in recruitment processes, unless you actively look to reduce them. To overcome this issue, consider creating a diverse recruitment strategy, which might include doing things like by anonymising CVs, creating gender neutral job descriptions and more!

If you have no diverse recruiting strategy at present, utilising a recruitment agency could be smart. They can provide guidance on best practice due to their experience in the area.

Doing this will help get the best talent in front of you, regardless of background, and limit obstacles that might have previously stood in their way.

Assessing skills adequately

Depending on the size of your IT department and skillsets within it, adequately assessing a candidate’s skills could be one of your challenges in recruiting tech talent. Even if you have an internal talent team who are fantastic at recruiting new hires, they are unlikely to have the skills and knowledge to fully assess the technical capabilities of great IT professionals, which could end in you taking on a less suitable candidate.

Furthermore, by neglecting to undertake a skills assessment, you might end up with an employee who has exaggerated their competencies. This can lead to more issues later down the line as you decide how to manage the dreaded situation of a bad hire.

If you do not have access to a suitable skills assessments to give to candidates, or other employees with similar knowledge or skills to assess the candidates, you might like to consider approaching a specialist recruitment agency. They can handle the process for you and help you weed out any candidates who don’t have the skills you need.

Standing out from competitors

To overcome tech hiring challenges, you need to first be known by great professionals in the field. This can be tricky without an effective recruitment campaign.

A great recruitment campaign will align multiple areas of your business to create a coherent message. Whether that is through your marketing team promoting the role, the way HR talks to candidates or the collateral given to interested individuals. A consistent message will create a synergy across the process. This way your company values, ethos and mission statement are fully clear to all candidates. With 23% of workers saying they would accept a job offer on the basis of a business’s values, an effective recruitment campaign could limit your challenges in hiring tech talent.

Negotiating benefits and compensation

Tech professionals, particularly those with niche skillsets, are often in high demand and so have the upper hand in negotiations.

These conversations and negotiations can be tricky for businesses to manage, especially if additional compensation is out of their budget. This is often where a recruiter can come in handy and help find out what the candidate wants as part of a bigger package and see what the middle ground with an employer could be. This could be additional training, flexible working practices, etc. An agency can manage this, so you’re not left on your own and risk losing a talented new tech hire.

Although a recruiter would never lead you towards a candidate out of your budget in the first place and communicate with you if the skills you need your new hire to have will require a larger compensation package, negotiations can still crop up late in the process.

Mitigating a high turnover of staff

Tech has one of the highest turnover rates of any industry at 13.2%. This is often attributed to professionals looking to achieve better benefits elsewhere or greater career advancement by job hopping. However, individual businesses may find that they have an unusually high turnover rate in comparison to their competitors in the same sector.

Recruitment agencies can help you limit bad hires that can cause a high turnover and ensure the candidates that are being sent to your business are ones that would fit in well. Furthermore, their industry knowledge can advise you on the best compensation and benefits that will attract and retain your new hires.

If you are experiencing any tech hiring challenges and need support, please contact our team to understand how they can alleviate the obstacles your business is facing.