Talent Management Fundamentals: Maybe you should know this

Yes, the IT industry is more vigorous than ever, and yes, the outlook for this industry to thrive in the years coming is undeniable. As a result, a talent management program is more important than ever for businesses to attract, attain and develop talents.

While it has come to the universal recognition that the “lifeblood” of this whole sector lies upon the IT talents – the ones that can bring simple code lines into complex systems, the statistics predict quite a “gloomy” future regarding the HR field. By 2026, the US market will see a shortage of 1.2M talents, and it is becoming more and more difficult to fill any IT positions.

1. What Your Future Employees Want Most

The world has witnessed a soaring number of job openings with more than 7 million positions to be filled. Yet, enterprises are still struggling to find high-profile candidates for their operations. Plus, qualified candidates now reap the advantages of being favored, hence the enterprises wanting to recruit them have to reconsider how they attract, retain and manage their talents.

It is undeniable that the competition in HR is growing day by day, with the enterprises boost their recruitment campaigns with skyrocketing costs. Besides marketing and branding to bring the most likable image to the candidates, these high-profile talents are seeking:

Flexibility in their work
Value over Volume
Team diversity

Flexible options

According to a study regarding the Future of Talent Management, 88% of the knowledge workers say that they would prioritize flexibility in terms of working hours and location when it comes to finding a new job. Soon, IT candidates expect that the recruiters would go for a wider range of searches, even cross-region or cross-border.

Working remote is one of the priorities

In contrast to the past, IT workers now have a diverse choice of where they can work, either remotely or onsite. They also put an emphasis on how they can balance out their work life and personal interests. You can also understand this as they are willing to move out of the suburban areas if they can work remotely.

In order to stay close to your most potential candidates, enterprises are advised to build the foundation near them or create the opportunity for them to work remotely. With the advance of technology, online communication is not a challenge anymore.

Value over Volume

As the workforce for the IT industry is getting younger and younger, their perspective towards how their productivity is measured. The traditional metrics often focus on the volume of the work they can deliver, and this is now deemed the outdated way of productivity measurement. Instead, today’s employees want to be assessed based on the overall value that they can bring to the enterprises, rather than the same old qualified outputs.

With this “philosophy” implemented in their jobs, they will have more space and trust to do their best. Of course, from the employers’ point of view, they want to go the traditional way to ensure the outputs for the whole system.

For forward-thinking companies that want to have a new approach for talent management, creating a workplace of people-centric experiences will give the employees the freedom to discover and strengthen their creativity.

Team diversity

The importance of a company’s culture is gaining its reputation in recent years, and one of the key features is team diversity. According to the survey, 86% of IT employees and 66% of Hr directors indicated that a diverse workforce would be even more critical. This diversity can help the team cope with the ever-demanding requirements of skills and roles.

The diversity we want to mention here is the diversity of background and technical knowledge. A team of members from different backgrounds can work together to create the best values for their company.

2. Facts and Figures about IT recruitment you don’t want to miss

We compiled multiple surveys to deliver you an overview of what’s happening in the IT recruitment sector. These surveys involve HR professionals and IT talents. We highlighted the most outstanding features for you to have the overall picture regarding IT talent management:

Technical priorities
Competition between hiring companies
Favored platforms for finding jobs
Likes and Dislikes

Technical priorities

Besides the priorities mentioned above regarding work culture and work location, software developers are still looking for the same things in job opportunities, especially the technical challenges. To the IT talents in the industry, Technical challenges/interesting tasks reign the most important features when it comes to choosing a new job. With the opportunity to be in one-of-the-kind experience, IT talents can find the motivation to work in that job. Trivial and day-to-day functions are the unfavored things.

Of course, salary is another important factor, but it only comes in third place, right after the flexible working hours and balanced lifestyle.

Favored programming languages

From the employers’ point of view, the most in-demand programming languages are JavaScript, Java, C# and Python. As the IT industry is booming, the needs for responsive, interactive websites are higher than ever, and JavaScript, with its object-oriented programming features, has become the most popular language in the industry.

There is a slight difference in what programming languages that candidates are capable of and what languages are favored by HR recruiters. For example, as most of the candidates asked know how to code in C and Bash, only a few of the recruiters want to hire someone with these programming languages.

JavaScript, Java, C# and Python are in the top 4 for both programmers and recruiters.

There are, however, some inconsistencies. For example, although ObjectiveC is one of the top 10 most sought-after languages, only 0.5% of developers said they actually liked the language.

Java and JavaScript receive controversial opinions on whether they are the most loved or hated programming languages. However, most of them agree that PHP is the most dreaded one. For the recruiters, 40% said they were looking for IT talents proficient with PHP.

ObjectiveC is also among the most sought-after programming languages, but the number of IT candidates with this skill is lacking.

Competition between hiring companies

The number of technology companies is spiking, with tech positions to be filled reaching the highest number ever. Under this circumstance, the recruiting department of one company faces a big challenge of finding qualified candidates while having to compete with many other businesses.

With human resources as the bloodline of the operation, many enterprises have raised the budget for recruitment, e.g., branding and recruiting platform. On the one hand, this has opened more doors for IT talents to reach more job openings. On the other hand, it makes it more competitive for recruiters to impress candidates. It also requires the enterprise to have a strategic talent management program to attain talents more effectively.

Favored platforms for finding jobs

78.3% of the developers said that they would go for LinkedIn for job opportunities. How the platform connects recruiters and candidates makes it easier for them to communicate. Transparency regarding the job descriptions and salary range also plays a key factor for candidates to choose a platform, and LinkedIn seems to have it all.

Despite all that, LinkedIn is not the only platform for recruiters. They can turn to networking events or job listings websites for candidate data. Tech-oriented, niche platforms take up a small percentile of the market, but high-profile candidates are likely to be listed on these platforms.

Dislikes

In general, irrelevance is the problem that both recruiters and IT talents face every day. While the candidates indicated that the irrelevance in the job offers and technical questions make them feel uncomfortable with the recruiters, talent recruiters also thought that they are not receiving enough relevant applications and CVs. Most of them are underqualified and not even close to the expected level.

Recruitment is never an easy task. If you need help with this, contact us for consultation: