Top Strategies for Sourcing IT Talents

Top Strategies for Sourcing IT Talents

Top Strategies for Sourcing IT Talents 405 281 EBnavi

Tech skills gap

The number of IT-related jobs (front-end, back-end, full-stack, UX, Big Data, RPA) is growing faster than the number of people educated and experienced enough who are able to fill it. Besides that, the most wanted talents today are not only equipped with hard tech skills, but additionally those with business skills and soft skills.

No matter if you’re a start-up or a big company, before starting sourcing, it is necessary to have your EVP (Employer Value Proposition) established. This will make recruitment easier for you as a recruiter, and your brand more understood and consistent to your potential candidates.

What do they value most? 

Culture

On a competitive talent market the culture matters a lot. It distinguishes you from other companies. The great culture spreads and gets people talking about it. It is mentioned as second most important factor attracting tech talents (45% of respondents, according to Hired study). 

Especially Millenials and younger generations of employees are way more conscious, environmentally and socially responsible in their daily lives. The same they are going to expect from their employer. Communicate your core values clearly, so your candidates and employees can identify them and decide if it’s for them. Culture and core values are the substantial elements of your EVP. 

Work-life balance

Flexible working hours, remote work possibility, extra holidays for parents, early Fridays, health & well-being and many other initiatives that only your creativity can limit. The Employer Branding Institute research shows that happy employees are more engaged and productive, and moreover they stay longer with the company.

Exciting job

Have you ever thought why Tesla & Elon Musk are mentioned among the most desired employers? The purpose, impact and science attracts the geeks. It is a part of human nature to seek for interesting tasks. It is especially important in case of tech specialists – they can juggle with job offers. They are ones to choose their employer. Make them excited about the technology you develop and they will come to check. 

Moreover, the second main reason for tech employees to leave their job (besides remuneration that comes first, obviously) is the new challenges or problems to solve (64% of surveyed developers, source: Hired.com)

IT employees quit when offered a more interesting challenge or a problem to solve.

Learning & Development 

Recent Totaljobs research revealed that two out of three UK workers have quit a job due to a lack of available learning and development opportunities. Your tech employees are aware their field is changing rapidly, and their knowledge is getting outdated if not improved on a daily basis. You absolutely need to support learning opportunities for them. 

Strong Employer Brand

Employer Brand is a very broad topic that actually includes all the elements mentioned above and even more. According to EBnavi study, there is over 250 processes in the organisation that influence it.

In short, if you want to attract the skillful IT people easier, the strong employer brand can benefit it essentially. Do you think brands like Microsoft or Google have issues with finding best programmers? Neither do we.

No matter what your business domain is – try to communicate the technological and innovative aspects of it in one of the first places, so your potential employees will start recognizing you as a challenging place for them!

Most effective channels to use

Agencies & Headhunting

The power of choosing the people who specialise in headhunting and sourcing the specific groups is their knowledge of IT candidate personas, consumed channels and speaking the right language. There is plenty of IT dedicated recruitment agencies to choose from on the market today. 

Social Media & Job boards

Using the general job boards and job-related social media platforms is became quite obvious in employer branding today. Of course you need to be there, but… 20% of developers doesn’t even have a LinkedIn account. The case with developers who are the most wanted on the market today, they don’t even commit time to update their profiles. They are also the way to reach only the actively seeking candidates. What about the passive ones? 

Job boards dedicated to IT

StackOverflow 

Stack Overflow is definitely a number one. Besides job offers, they became the biggest platform for IT Q&A, public or private discussions on the specific problems, which for an average human being are like… written in a foreign language 😉 

Just Join IT & Bulldog Job

The power of these targeted platforms is not only precision in reaching the right groups and a particular skillset, but also opportunity to publish thematic content, participating or creating events for IT folks. Here we can introduce you some start-up based solutions from our Polish playground, we are sure there’s many in your country, too – Just Join IT & Bulldog Job are growing on popularity on a local market as they are extremely friendly.

Content is King

IT folks are passionate about what they do. They’re enjoying problem solving within their domain, and oftentimes digging for solutions to their problems online and getting involved into discussions and forums – if you want to make them find you – write about what interests them. This will also strengthen your expert position.

Quality company blogs, e-books, video content, with the well used SEO and key words will lead the experts you need to your landing page or a career page. Use the power of content marketing to convert your prospect candidates

Thematic meetups, conferences and trainings  

Make your brand easy to find. How to do it? Participation of your employees in IT related meetups will be treated as a reward, an appreciation of their work. They will also promote your brand there, explain to potential candidates what the work in your company looks like, what projects they run and problems they face. 

Some great ideas?

Geek Girl Carrots is an outstanding initiative, founded in Poland, aiming to encourage women to start their IT career. They are open for partnership with businesses, coorganising for instance matchmaking events together with companies who need tech talents. They are founded in Poland, but available in many European countries, and even further. 

AWS Summit – Amazon Web Services are widely used as a framework for multiple platforms, and Amazon itself is treated among developers as an expert and an inspiration. Participation will not only allow your employees grow professionally and implement the knowledge within your projects, but also promote your brand & expertise outside. 

Besides the Amazon, there is a growing number of events committed to IT knowledge exchange, there is an interesting list in here.

We recommend you to search for the local ones and establish your employer brand and expert position as locally as possible.

Referral network 

This is not a rocket science example that programmers know other programmers. Each of your tech employees is very likely to know someone with valuable skills, with whom they would be eager to work. Make sure you, as an employer, create a user friendly and simple way to enable that. Establish a clear process for referrals, choose the platform that will encourage employees to use it, and through communication activities create a culture of referrals in your organisation.

Don’t forget to incentivise referrals, too! A cool idea is also involving gamification

Are you facing challenges in IT talent recruitment? EBnavi can help you to establish a solid employer brand, based on data and attract Tech Talents successfully.

Reach us via hello@ebnavi.com to learn more! 

author: Martyna Karpiuk, Product Specialist at EBnavi

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