The IT industry has been growing fast and is still on the rise. The trend has been similar ever since the early dot-com days. The 2020 pandemic brought in the much-needed thrust towards digital transformation. However, it was followed by a funding chill for the startups. Furthermore, the situation went awry with a global economic slowdown, the great resignation phase, and IT layoffs in 2023. Yet, thanks to the rapid growth of artificial intelligence & blockchain, the global IT jobs market is still growing stronger. And IT will continue to be a major sector for employment creation and career advancements. In fact, the tech employment in the USA will surpass 6.7 million by 2033.
Without a doubt, the opportunity is quite huge for IT recruiters. However, it's not without challenges. Whether it’s about DE&I or the desperate need to hire top talents, there are some pressing recruitment challenges that recruiters in the IT domain are facing and will face, if not already. If you are a tech recruiter, this Skima AI insight is for you.
Read this Skima Insight to get acquainted with the top IT recruitment challenges and the potential solutions.
How Is IT Recruitment Different From Non-IT?
Through this blog, we will help you identify the IT recruitment challenges and will provide a few ways to tackle them. But before that, it's important to understand the nuances that separates IT recruitment from other counterparts.
IT recruitment is the process of identifying qualified candidates who have the technical expertise with the required technology stack.
IT recruitment differs from non-technical hiring in many ways; the key differentiator is the interview process itself.
Technicalities In The Job Descriptions
The job description for an IT role is more technical in nature, with a focus on aspects like proficiency required in a particular software, certain certifications, or an understanding of multiple programming languages. It is designed to attract a candidate with a niche project experience or domain expertise. In contrast, non-IT JDs steer more towards subject matter know-how, and qualities like interpersonal skills, communications, and management abilities, among other requirements.
Candidate Sourcing
While non-technical candidates can be readily found on mainstream job sites, quality IT candidates are more active in specific communities and IT job boards. Therefore, recruiters need to adapt their talent acquisition strategies, especially for sourcing tech professionals to make the process more effective and build better talent pools. Take a look at our niche job board insight wherein we have shared a few top sources for recruiting developers and a few other roles.
Skill Assessment
In non-technical roles competencies are assessed based solely on past experiences, performance & achievements in earlier jobs, theoretical know-how, skills training and certifications, etcetera. Basically, the majority of hiring decision-making is based on the on-paper strengths of the candidates and behavioural & situational interview questions. Only after hiring, you can calculate the quality of the hire. However, in IT recruitment, as a recruiter, you can also design skill-focused assessments wherein the IT professional has to demonstrate the skills they have or are expected to possess to deliver their duties.
For example, if you are hiring for an SEO marketing role, you can’t test much on the day of the interview, but you can rely on the past performances of the SEO professional and test their theoretical know-how. But if you are hiring for a lead Python engineer, you can not only rely on the resume information but can also design short programming tests wherein the developer is supposed to write the solutions that can be evaluated to score the expertise level.
The recruitment process to find an IT professional contains interview rounds that assess one’s skills and aptitude for executing core functions demanded by the technical job. Tests in programming languages, system administration, network management, and more, based on specific job roles, are common in the process. The common job roles you can spot in the IT sector include data analysts, cyber security experts, and UI/UX designers. Of course, cloud architects, DevOps professionals, and SRE specialists are in equal demand.
IT Recruitment Challenges and Solutions
Here are two studies with two interesting data. Where 77% of decision-makers in the IT domain circumvented talent hiring and retention as the biggest challenge, it’s predicted that by 2030 as many as 85 million open jobs will remain unfilled due to a global shortage of skilled workforce.
Today, recruiters in the IT sector are constantly being challenged to use innovative recruiting methods and apply multiple transformations to attract skilled IT talent. With the goals being common, the competition has grown neck and neck. This, in turn, is building new challenges for hiring managers and technical recruiters. Here are a few you must pay attention to.
1. Attracting The Right Talent
75% of global companies report difficulty finding top candidates for their job roles. While a common job posting practice averages 250 applications, only 4-5 of them are actually qualified to move to the interview process. The probability gets even thinner from there. So, attracting the right talents for an IT job is as difficult as it can get. The reason can be rooted in the job ad.
Solution
- Focus on building job ads that engage the audience while keeping it detailed.
- Too much information or just a blank slate with two lines of description and an email ID to reach out wouldn’t cut it as well.
- You must understand your target audience for a particular job role and work with the graphics and content department to design tailored job ads.
2. Exhaustive Processes
72% of potential candidates explained that the smoothness of the interview process can define whether they want to join the company, or not. With that in mind, multiple rounds of interviews and tests that an IT candidate has to suffer through clearly make the process exhaustive and sometimes frustrating for the candidate and the hiring managers as well. This creates a negative candidate experience, resulting in applicants abandoning the hiring process. Prolonged processes can also lead to candidates taking up other job offers.
Solution
- Start by analyzing your current hiring process.
- Check for signs that are making it bovine and incompatible with modern job-seekers.
- Incorporate more engaging testing techniques like coding challenges, quizzes, and tests to make the process feel like a breeze for the applicants.
- Rather than long and multiple rounds of interviews, devise short and effective meetings that are to the point and structure.
3. The Passive Talent Pool Scenario
With an expanding shortage of skilled talent, product performance and innovation within the sector have taken a hit. Businesses are unable to perform optimally owing to their inability to fill senior-level or hard-to-fill vacancies with the right professionals. Recruiters here also fail because the top talent is rarely active, seeking an opportunity at these levels. For example: a StackOverflow survey highlighted that only 15% of developers are actively job hunting. Whereas senior IT professionals get an overwhelming number of job offers which makes it difficult for them to respond to all proposals.
Solution
- As a talent acquisition specialist, put particular focus on building your talent pool to battle the growing scarcity of qualified candidates in the IT industry.
- You can do so by being more competitive in your job offers and maintaining a constant stream of communication with selected passive talents.
- Read our insight on strategies to create and maintain a healthy pool of passive candidates.
4. Failing The DE&I Battle
People Management says 87% of teams with diverse members make better decisions. Further, for 63% of employees, diversity in the workplace is a high priority. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are not a tech bubble or fad, the ROI has been proven. Employers across the globe have realized this and are making their move toward enforcing DE&I recruitment strategies. However, whether it's unconscious bias or traditional practices, HR specialists are struggling in their DE&I battle.
Solution
- Infuse DE&I throughout your hiring process to avoid discrimination and promote diversity.
- Start by identifying underrepresented groups and niche communities.
- Also, use social media to showcase diversity at the workplace and exhibit company culture.
- Let candidates know your take on DEI.
- Next, standardize your screening and interview processes and use employee referrals to find diverse talents, faster.
5. Building An Attractive Brand
From a retail chain to staffing agency software, all depend on IT at some level. Just as easily your product can vanish in the mix of others in your category, so can your employer brand. In order to be a candidate's go-to option, you must turn your company into a brand that candidates would love. Unfortunately, there is very little HRs are doing to make this possible.
Solution
Building a better employer brand is a comprehensive process. Here, everything from positive candidate experiences to engaging job posts and community engagements plays pivotal roles.
6. Technologically Backward
The recruitment domain has seen a surge in technological advancements that have greatly aided in rendering hiring processes more efficient and decisive. From AI job description generation tools to AI chatbots that interact with your candidates to resume screening tools like Skima that can identify the right talents from your pool of candidates for any job role, quickly and effectively using AI and ML models, a lot is going on and you should be updated. Slacking behind is a competitive disadvantage that you can’t afford.
Solution
Decide on your recruitment technology stack and identify the steps in your hiring process that can be automated. Use a mix of recruiting tools including ATS, resume screening software, chatbots, candidate testing sites, and onboarding platforms to boost your recruitment productivity, multifold.
7. Flawed Recruiting Process
Apart from identifying the best and the brightest, recruiters have bigger burdens like reducing cost per hire (new hire can cost upwards of $38,000), decreasing turn-around rates (IT turnover rates are 13.2%), and delivering positive candidate experiences. With so many things to juggle, the recruitment process gets more complicated and flawed, especially when recruiters lack proper training and yet try to put all the pieces together. Some may excel at it, some may fall terribly short.
Solution
- Embrace the virtual recruiting process to save time, money, and an opportunity to build a diverse talent pool.
- Also, use employee referrals and cut short the hiring process to minimise the cost per hire.
End Note
The glaring differences between IT recruitment and generic recruitment go beyond what’s highlighted in this blog. But these aforementioned challenges are the core ones. IT recruiting is difficult. You must navigate your way through the varied challenges of recruiting in the tech domain to discover top talents. Once you do, don’t get tangled in lengthy hiring processes, hire them fast and hire right in the first place— because the quality of hire matters a lot.
A tool that can truly supercharge your IT recruiting game is Skima AI— an AI & ML-powered recruiting platform that helps you with job description generation, automated talent sourcing, automated resume screening with high accuracy, candidate engagement and communication automation, and overall hiring workflow automation. As already mentioned, it can be truly game-changing. Add it, today, to your recruiting stack. Try Skima AI today. It's free to get started.
All the best!
