Technology is fundamental to growth today. With an estimated 5.07 billion active internet users, 63.5% of the global population, it is a unifying factor that connects people and businesses. Organizations today are rapidly innovating to facilitate humanity’s race to increased technological advancement. But here’s the truth: Software Developers are foundational to this growth. The global developer population is estimated to hit 28.7 million by 2024, from 24.5 million in 2020. However, these big numbers fail to offer hope for companies because hiring skilled developers is exceptionally challenging.
Regardless of the talent surplus, the global developer shortage is predicted to hit an all-time high of 1.2 million by 2026. These stats speak at length about the current tech-hiring landscape, and the situation isn’t subsiding anytime soon. Understanding the challenges of hiring skilled developers in today’s market can help you combat the situation better.
Hence, this blog highlights the gaps in tech hiring processes to help you leverage the outsourcing hiring model and reduce your average time-to-hire.
2022 vs. The State-Of-Hiring
The demand for skilled developers is historically high. Yet, the recent great resignation has led to significant layoffs of millions of global employees. What does this gap imply? Here’s a list of stats on global developer shortage to give you a broader insight into the current stage of hiring:
- According to the US Labor Department forecast, the global shortage of developers might reach 85.2 million by 2030.
- Companies might lose $8.5 trillion in revenue due to a lack of adequate tech talent.
- The year 2020 recorded a shortage of 40 million skilled developers.
- The attrition stood at 4.5 million employees in November 2022 – just 3% of the September turnover rate.
- According to a McKinsey report, 87% of companies across the globe fear that skill-gap drives revenue losses.
- The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates creating 200,000 jobs each year until 2030.
6 Global Tech Hiring Challenges
1. Lack of Qualified Talent
Attracting, onboarding, and retaining qualified talent is the top concern for many HR professionals. 72% of responders in “The Global Leadership Monitor 2022” survey cited the same as a major challenge.
Companies are seeking highly qualified candidates with excellent soft skills, industry expertise, and educational qualifications. Although the market has abundant software talent, fewer developers are skilled enough to match today’s organizations’ requirements. Undoubtedly, there is enough tech talent in the market. Yet, finding a single skilled and qualified developer is taking weeks/months.
2. Talent Surplus
Talent surplus, sounds like a good thing, right? Surprisingly enough, the rate of skilled talent in the current scenario is shockingly low, adding to the existing woes of HR professionals. Sorting through hundreds of applications and an elaborate candidate filtering process does nothing but increase the hiring cycle length. The candidate screening process alone is time-consuming. Also, the odds of qualifying a candidate from an ocean of applications are abysmally low, given the market’s state of skilled talent.
3. Unreliable Candidates
The highly qualified or most in-demand candidates have their fair share of expectations and demands. However, these are the most desired candidates for even the top and well-reputed companies. These individuals are usually on an active lookout for lucrative opportunities in top companies. Fewer such candidates are reliable and choose to stay with existing companies.
Your potential candidates may reject your offer and pick better opportunities even after the onboarding process. In cases like these, companies have to look for new candidates and begin the recruitment process again. It hurts the company’s resources and time.
According to Social Psychologist Ron Friedman, 81% of applicants lie in their interviews. It is difficult to tell fake information apart from the original data. In these scenarios, companies end up recruiting unskilled employees. It further leads to a higher turnover rate and loss of efficiency.
4. Passive Talent
A significant portion of active talent is actually passive talent sitting on the fence to make a jump to better companies with better compensation. Passive talent constitutes 70% of the global workforce. After devoting a lot of time and effort in sourcing candidates, learning that the candidate is not actively seeking opportunities is painful. Also, these candidates likely shift companies again if they find a better opportunity. It adds a lot of pressure on organizations.
5. Poor Brand Recognition
Besides the lack of skilled talent, candidates prefer to join well-reputed organizations. It leaves small businesses and startups in a disadvantaged position. In addition to the already crowded job market, these companies struggle to find talented developers within their terms.
6. Outdated Recruitment Models
Gone are the days of sourcing candidates from walk-in interviews or referrals. A lot of companies are still practicing outdated recruitment models. It limits your capacity to discover better and more qualified opportunities. Similarly, using outdated screening processes also restricts companies’ capacity to select qualified developers.
8 Efficient Ways to Improve Your Average Time to Hire
1. Work on the Brand Image
Top candidates prefer to join top companies/brands. These top brands successfully attract talent by portraying a positive image, attractive work culture, and growth scenarios. Small businesses and startups, too, can leverage social media to promote their company culture through employee advocacy programs to attract top talent.
2. Improve the Screening Process
The screening process is as crucial for candidates as it is for companies. Hence, the onus is on the companies to improve every step of the screening process. It doesn’t just improve the interview or screening experience for the candidates but removes a lot of burden off recruiters.
Leveraging all social media and digital recruiting sites, outsourcing recruitment, creating a pipeline of qualified applicants, and an elaborate pre-vetting process are a few ways to improve the overall process.
Keeping communication about compensation plans transparent can go a long way in improving employee loyalty and decreasing churn in the long run. Companies can tap into the potential of digital tools that aid HR efforts to manage the recruitment life cycle.
3. Changing Times Demand a Change in Mindset
It is high time organizations lower their expectations regarding candidates’ academic achievements. Focusing entirely on degrees and scores defeats the sole purpose of hiring talented developers. Self-taught developers or people looking for a job shift might be qualified enough to take up today’s tech challenges.
By emphasizing too many academic affiliations, you are missing out on the potential of these qualified individuals. To address this gap, recruiters should focus on technical and analytical skills.
Innovative recruitment drives like coding contests/hackathons can help you expand your reach. Elaborate job descriptions with the rightful emphasis on the required skill set can go a long way in sourcing suitable candidates for your position.
4. Outsourcing
Studies indicate that Recruitment Process Outsourcing can reduce time-per-hire by 55% and cost-per-hire by 20%. Recruitment Process Outsourcing is outsourcing a part of HR activities to external service providers. These external service providers oversee sourcing, prospecting, interviewing, and suggesting suitable candidates to the organization. It saves organizations time and effort, allowing HR teams to focus on other essential things.
5. Transparent Communication
Handling candidate objections is a different and tiring task because candidates tend to drop off at the last minute for better offers. Keeping your communication open and transparent during the compensation negotiation process goes a long way in attracting the right talent. It drastically increases your retention rate.
6. Adapting to Change
You need to be adaptable in the face of challenging times. The pandemic year, 2020, has taught organizations to run effectively in a fully-remote capacity. Adopting a remote recruitment strategy or hiring remote developers, thus, isn’t a challenge anymore. Practices like sourcing candidates outside your region or conducting online assessment tests further improve your recruitment process.
7. Pre-vetting
Carefully crafted pre-vetting processes can help you reduce the volume of applications. It improves the efficiency of your recruitment process and reduces cost-per-hire as well as time-per-hire. For example, all the developers at Workfall are rigorously vetted and sourced from different parts of the world. Minor changes in your approaches like these can guarantee quality hires and the hiring process.
8. Leverage Technology
Modern digital tools can make your hiring process simpler, better, and more efficient than manual recruitment. The manual hiring processes are time-consuming and tiresome. The typical hiring cycle length is high, draining the company’s resources to fill a single vacancy. Tools like Applicant Tracking Software, automated job boards, pre-made assessments, interviewing software, etc., can automate and simplify more than 60% of your job.
Besides saving you a significant amount of time and resources, it makes your job easier. In today’s crowded job marketplace, over 98% of companies use at least one software tool in their recruitment process. The figure is expected to grow as new tools; new solutions continue to emerge in this space. These tools enable you to hire brighter than before with less effort in a hassle-free way.
Conclusion
All the above-mentioned statistics reflect the current state of the tech-hiring landscape. But we often fail to understand that it is a multi-dimensional issue. For example, difficulty finding talent also means poor job desirability.
The shift in the mindset of employees fuelled by the Corona-induced pandemic started influencing candidates’ job choices. According to a survey, 82% of employees voted in favor of working from home. Similarly, companies, too, started seeking remote talent for greater reach and better candidates.
Outsourcing recruitment and hiring remote talent has, thus, become a norm these days. IT personnel constitutes 60% of the outsourced workforce. As we advance, the increasing talent shortage makes it increasingly difficult for companies to find skilled talent. The growing popularity of talent clouds, outsourcing methods, and elaborate pre-vetting processes of these agencies have proven to supply skill-deprived companies with world-class talent.
How Does Workfall Help You Hire Skilled Developers in 24 Hours?
We at Workfall believe that your company is only as efficient as your company’s workforce. And we aim to help companies like yours drastically decrease your average time to hire, enabling you to spend more time on what matters the most.
As navigating the market challenges in selecting a qualified candidate becomes challenging, expert assistance like Workfall makes your sail through rough seas easier.
Workfall is a talent cloud of developers for companies actively sourcing expert coders. We help you attract and onboard experienced developers within 24 hours on your own terms.
Contrary to the lengthy hiring process at your company, you get to onboard a candidate who meets your requirements within a few simple steps.
Start addressing the skill shortage at your company with Workfall.