CHOOSE THE RIGHT CANDIDATE IN IT SECTOR

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Introduction

Learn more about how to find the right IT specialist for your team. Following the trend and obvious necessity for digital transformation to live up to the ever-evolving pace of technology and economy, CIOs, CTOs, Product Owners and any other people responsible for delivering the transformation process smoothly and in time, face various challenges on this rocky path. It is getting increasingly laborious and they need a proper workforce, infrastructure, data, and tools to successfully manage it.

And if the complex strategy has been carefully developed and is ready to come up on stage, technology stacks and tools are finally chosen, the budget is approved, here comes the first biggest issue – staffing projects with the right talents to implement all the ambitious plans within time and money.

Ins and outs of the it market

To start out, what first should be borne in mind is that the IT sphere kind of stands apart from other industries and people who are employed there need a slightly different approach. Let’s see why.

First of all, the IT sector is the fastest growing industry in the world economy. According to the Mordor Intelligence recent report, the IT market size is expected to reach $13,818.98 billion in 2027 at a CAGR of almost 11%. Increasing spread of software-as-a-service and cloud-based offerings coupled with data security rise results in companies increasing their IT budgets, thus, boosting the demand for IT services in the industries.

However, with such incredible speed of industry growth, companies face another side of the coin - demand for the right IT talents. Even though the need for qualified candidates was always in demand, now, as the pandemic squeezed ten years of digital growth into two, it looks like every company is a tech business and craves tech people even more.

We suggest that the main reason for such shortage of talent is the speed of industry evolving - people simply can’t keep up with the pace. They still require specific learning and time to practise freshly acquired skills. But the good news is such people are out there swimming in the big tech sea! The question is how to fish them.

Before listing the ways which CIOs or CTOs can opt for in order to catch the right talents they need, let’s spread a few words on some of the peculiarities of IT specialists that may also adjust the way of searching talented people.

«Selling» issues

As the practice shows, a lot of tech specialists don’t know how to correctly prepare their CV relevant to the job description. If marketing, PR or any liberal arts people know how to work with words, IT guys do have struggles with them and, in most cases, don’t really know how to sell themselves on paper. That fact makes it crucial to be able to read between the lines while screening the CVs and finding the right candidates. Professional IT recruiters bear that fact in mind and don’t judge the candidates for the job only by the CV but rather check the candidate from a comprehensive perspective.

Another manner of living

Techies do have a different style of living and thinking. For instance, they are far away from being 9 to 5 workers. Most of them are not in favor of office jobs and prefer to work remotely. They are more likely to be reached in the evening or night times. It is also said that tech people are mostly introverted, thus, do not tend to have long chats or ask many questions and especially commute to the office for the interviews.

IT-special «environment»

IT specialists live in their own “environment” which means that traditional recruitment channels such as talent marketplaces, for instance, may not always be a good fit, as candidates rarely place their CVs there. They search for the jobs via their own specific channels, e.g. professional social networks, IT-specialized forums, their personal network, word-of-mouth, code repositories and so on.

Money is not the only value

What’s more, IT job seekers are interested not only in the material part of the work, but also in various perks the companies are ready to offer them for a job. Foremost, they take into consideration the project itself, the team which will be working on it and, of course, technology stack. Ability to work remotely, flexible working hours and access to toll professional resources are as well considered important for the candidates. Experienced IT recruiter is well aware what strings to pull to properly draft an offer that the candidate cannot but accept.

So, after you identified what tech candidates you need, you know how they “behave”, you even know where to search for them, here comes another question: should you use your own HR forces or should you partner with a recruitment agency?

While deciding whether you’d benefit from working with an agency, you should first have an answer to this question: how long can’t you close the position?

On average, it takes from 40 to 60 days to fill the tech roles in the company. If your searching process lasts longer, it implies that you may have faced one of these three major challenges of IT recruiting:

Company’s HR department is overloaded with tasks and simply lack the time for interviews and closing some of the positions;
Your in-house recruiters lack the expertise in IT recruitment;
The candidates you’re searching for are either rare or in high demand.

If the main cause is the capacity of your HR department, you may consider augmenting your in-house HR team. This option does solve the problem of HRs work overload, however, we suggest using this option either when you have a large number of open positions or you plan to scale your business in the near-future.

If there are two-three positions to fill, such option would be less effective than working with an IT recruitment company, because:

Money
Paying for the new in-house employees on the payroll in most cases turns out to be more expensive than closing the vacancies using the services of the agency. For instance, at GitMax we charge a percentage of the successful candidate’s annual salary at the average rate of 18% as our placement fee. Meanwhile, we do not charge preliminary payment and offer candidate replacement upon the request.
Time
Looking for a new employee means another open position at your company with a round of multiple questions and interviews, so the hiring phase can exceed for a few more weeks (if odds are on your side). You should also take into account the term period as well as the time for new employees finishing work on the previous site. All those factors result in prolonging the search of the needed candidates while an IT recruitment agency could’ve saved your time and resources.

Own forces: when it is beneficial

CIOs or CTOs should act and hire on their own via in-house assets if you are in the very beginning of your digital transformation journey and you just started to pack the team so not enough time has passed to judge whether it’s effective or not. It is absolutely possible that your HR team will do the job perfectly without outside help.

Another good point for using in-house forces is when you are not pressed for time to hire new tech people. If you have all the resources to spend a few months on the hire game and you are well aware that it will not affect your business processes, then you should go for it. Perhaps, you will find a few great candidates at ease so you will not have to pay a fee to the agency.

Our recommendations: if your team hasn’t dealt with IT recruitment before, if the positions you’ve opened are pretty specific or you need to hire IT specialists as soon as possible, you should consider partnering with the vendor straight after the position has been opened. It will allow your team to significantly save time (and time is money) and close the positions without consequences for your business.

Rounding up:

Independent recruitment conducted by in-house assets works best if:

You’ve just opened a few positions and there’s yet lack information to analyze the recruiting process itself and its outcome;

You own a team of experienced IT recruiters due to the specifics of the field and candidates;

You or your team is familiar with the skills set required for the new hires to check via interviews and you know how to find those candidates;

You are not bound by deadlines.

In case you have a feeling that your recruiting team lacks either expertise or time, or there are no results after a month (or even a few) of searching for the candidates, you should consider external help from the IT recruitment agency.

Cooperating with an IT recruitment agency deals with every challenge on the way to hire a great team of tech specialists for CTOs or CIOs. Profound expertise of IT recruiters as well as the possibility to involve several employees at the same time coupled with deep knowledge of the IT market guarantee rapid and efficient hiring from junior to extra senior or rare specialists.

Recruiters working in the IT staff agencies are skilled professionals who already have a vast database of the talented and promising candidates. Their expertise in discovering talent means that your company can await better (and even unique) applicants pre-screened and ready to interview. Not to mention the time within which they provide them for you. While not every suggested candidate from an agency will be a hundred percent match for your positions, the conversion rate should be higher.

To sum it up, besides using your own HR resources, partnering with recruiting or outstaffing agencies does not cater for everyone and every business need. However, there is often quite a profit for the companies from getting outside help with hiring the right people. Recruiting new employees is like any other skilled profession: you can do it yourself, but sometimes it helps to work with a professional.

There’s always a “contact us” button down below so feel free to click on it to get advice on your upcoming or ongoing projects or share any of your thoughts with us.

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