Like with any business process, hiring new talent should be streamlined and efficient. In a scaling business, you may not have yet had the chance to perfect these processes, but it can be a work in progress. Ultimately, employers need a recruitment process that runs like a well-oiled machine. There are so many different elements that work together to create a successful hire; from your employer brand to the candidate experience, it needs to be a coherent and smooth process. However, in an increasingly competitive tech talent market, these processes need to be amplified to ensure you not only succeed but have a competitive advantage.
Currently, startups, scale-ups and tech giants are all competing for the same individuals. But also, businesses that never before needed developers, data scientists and solutions architects are now pulling out all the stops to attract them. When candidates hold power, your recruitment machine needs to not only match up to the competition but surpass them in as many ways as possible.
Some elements may not be a current part of your recruitment process that can help streamline the recruitment machine and generate the best results, giving you a competitive advantage.
Here are five tips for supercharging your tech recruitment machine and setting your hiring strategy apart from the competition.
1. Research and Insight
The best recruitment strategies are built on intelligence. To attract the best tech candidates, you need to have an informed direction for your recruitment efforts based on accurate data and knowledge. Knowing where the candidates are located to finding online spaces to reach these demographics is just some of the initial research you should carry out to ensure that your recruitment strategy is effective. Your recruitment should be informed and intelligent if you wish to find the best candidates quickly and for the lowest budget. From focus groups with current employees to inform employer brand strategies and find messaging that resonates with tech talent to searching for university towns across the world with appropriate graduates, there is a lot of market research you can engage with to ensure your strategies are most effective.
In a particularly hectic talent market, the best recruiters should act like detectives. They take the time to seek out the best candidates through competitor analysis, industry research and taking deep dives into candidate pools to find talented people. They then may need to reach out to these individuals directly. All of this research will fuel your talent acquisition efforts and ensure you’re targeting and engaging with the right individuals.
2. Focus on Storytelling
It’s one thing to advertise a job, but you need to tell a story to truly attract the best tech talent. Candidates today don’t just want a job but to know how the role will align with business goals and how they can progress. It’s not purely about selling a job but about selling a career and longevity within a company. Whether it’s in your employer brand communications on social media or in conversations with candidates, storytelling and capturing their imagination are becoming more crucial.
It’s easier for employees to see the impact their work makes in a scaling business. Use this to attract candidates by showing how vital their contribution is, positioning opportunities at your business as a chance to make a real impact. Tell the story of your brand as well as your existing employees. This will help you build a narrative around candidates and help them see their place with you, imagining a future.
3. Seek Human Connections
Often, the urgency to fill a role overshadows the recruitment process, and candidate experience falls second. In an era dominated by AI, many companies choose to automate as many aspects of the recruitment process as possible in favour of speed. But, to get a real feel for the company and your employer brand, the candidate experience must be human-centric.
We’ve all been working from home for a long time and craving face to face contact, the same rule applies to tech talent.
Tech candidates want a streamlined candidate experience but also want to speak to human beings. An automated process or email cannot give you the same feel for a company as a conversation can. In the world of work and promoting an employer brand, technology can’t replace the human experience. Candidates want to know how they’ll feel working somewhere, what the atmosphere is like, and who they will be working with. They’ll have questions that need to be answered, and only real people in real-time will be able to give an accurate response.
To connect with tech candidates, you need to find recruiters who are willing to have conversations and form human connections. This could mean focusing on small details like the candidates’ weekend plans or details from their previous employment, including what they enjoyed or what they’re looking for next. Showing you remember and engaging with candidates can make them feel at ease and give an impression of what you’ll be like to work for. These recruitment experts need to be trusted and therefore transparent, which is why sometimes it’s best to source external recruitment experts. These outsourced recruiters will provide unbiased opinions that candidates are more likely to believe.
4. Perfect the Candidate Journey
In tech recruitment, the candidate journey seems almost even more vital than in other industries. It’s often the case that tech candidates know the processes involved in building these online experiences and can judge a business’s technological capabilities based on them. If you want to come across as a go-to employer for tech candidates, then you need to make a good impression from the beginning of their job search.
Of course, you may not be able to compete with the candidate experience that the likes of Apple, Google or other tech giants provide, but you can ensure it’s as seamless as possible. Around 60% of job seekers have quit an application in the middle due to its length or complexity, and when demand for tech talent is so high, your business cannot afford to lose any applicants in the early stages.
Perfecting the candidate journey and experience will help future recruitment efforts hugely. You can base these decisions on research by talking to new hires and finding ways to improve. Remember, it should be easy to follow and a simple process, with aspects of the candidate journey like second stage interviews or skills tests communicated clearly from the very beginning.
5. Outsource your recruitment
Sometimes, the best way to supercharge your recruitment machine is to leave it to the experts. Outsourcing your recruitment process isn’t a sign of weakness or defeat; in fact, it’s often the opposite. As a scaling business, you have a lot to focus on. Whether you need to develop your product further, expand into new markets, or continue searching for funding, there are many aspects to think about. This means your senior team may not have time to recruit people too. Without dedicating the time and effort to finding the right candidate, you run the risk of hiring the first people that apply for the sake of urgency, and these people may not necessarily be the best fit for you.
Accepting you may not have the time or expertise to dedicate to finding the best tech talent isn’t admitting failure. Instead, it’s a strategic business decision. You know your senior team’s expertise is better elsewhere and that RPO providers can offer a solution that will bring you quality candidates. Utilising their knowledge as you scale will help you find people who will enhance your culture and help your business scale effectively. A good RPO provider will understand your company from its mission to the people within it so that they can find tech talent who will be an excellent fit, have the skills you need to succeed and hopefully stay with you for the long term.
Talent Works are an RPO agency offering a more flexible approach to outsourcing which can be a perfect solution for scaling tech businesses. Our recruitment resource can be scaled back to suit demand, with companies able to mix our employer branding, sourcing and digital attraction capabilities in a way that suits them. Our partners can adjust their strategies at any time, switching our focus to best help them with talent acquisition challenges, this could mean helping with hiring demand or supporting the development of long-term, tech recruitment strategies.
We have experience helping both tech companies in the growth stage and more established names to attract the best talent to improve their digital capabilities. If you’d like to start a conversation about how our team can help you, contact us.
