Common IT Hiring Challenges and How to Avoid Them

Why isn’t your workforce as lean and dynamic as it could be? Why aren’t you attracting top talent? Why do you always seem to be struggling with a skills gap? The answers to these questions are unique to you, but you’re not alone in your recruiting struggles. Assembling a productive and efficient tech team that can excel today and carry you into tomorrow is a notoriously difficult process. See if any of these common challenges sound familiar, and learn how to avoid them as you build a workforce for the future.

Retaining Top Talent

Given the highly competitive marketplace for top IT talent, it can be hard to keep them within your fold. Make sure you understand their value and offer them the compensation, flexibility, and responsibility that they are looking for.

Recruiting Highly Skilled Applicants

The granularity and specificity of today’s in-demand tech skills makes it difficult to find applicants with the necessary software/hardware experience. One solution is to expand your recruitment efforts into higher education and encourage tech majors to pick up more of the skills you’re looking for.

Providing Competitive Compensation

Today’s tech professionals expect to be generously compensated for their skills, and top talent can command salaries well into the six figures. Many companies struggle to make inflating salaries fit into static or shrinking budgets. Consider offering alternative forms of compensation like extra vacation, flexible schedules, opportunities for travel, or tuition reimbursement.

Dealing with Burnout

Employee burnout is the bane of many tech recruiters. The first step to preventing it is to acknowledge that it’s a problem, and make retention more of a priority within your recruitment strategy. Management is another facet. Effective managers can keep their team productive and innovative while helping them avoid the factors that lead to burnout.

Offering Advancement Opportunities

No one wants to work for a company where they will languish at the same position for years. But there are only so many promotions to go around. Companies can alleviate the problem by being upfront with recruits, being willing to offer recommendations to employees that leave, and vetting all candidates with an eye on their management potential.

Reducing Cost-Per-Hire

The competition for talent and the difficulty of finding skilled workers mean that the IT recruitment process is often protracted and expensive. Employers can cut down on the cost-per-hire by outsourcing the most expensive parts of recruiting to a staffing firm. Ultimately, this strategy produces better candidates faster, and at a lower overall cost.

Need assistance solving these IT hiring challenges? Contact the team at CultureFit today.