Hiring tech talent right now is not an easy task. Recruiters are trying their best to navigate the most challenging talent market in recent memory. It’s a market where more jobs are available than candidates, and companies large and small are fighting for the same skillsets and talents. With reports of record-breaking salaries in the tech industry, it’s clear that employers are desperate for talent, which means pulling out all of the stops to get them.
Therefore, recruiters have to work twice as hard to convince candidates to choose their opportunity over the competition, and there’s an awful lot of competition out there. The recruiter’s role is changing and is becoming almost more promotional and sales-led than utilising their searching skills. They now have to sell the role to candidates.
People drive a business forward, and therefore many leaders are now putting a considerable amount of pressure on recruitment teams. If a startup is trying to scale, it needs people on board to facilitate growth. Not only this, but it requires exceptional talent that can take the business to a new level.
Another issue is that many businesses had to let go of internal recruiters during the pandemic as hiring was postponed. Without needing to hire talent, they didn’t need to be paying full-time salaries for people to search for them, and now talent teams are significantly reduced. These factors are leaving recruitment and talent teams stretched to the limit, and their wellbeing is at risk.
It’s widely claimed that the hardest job to recruit right now is a recruiter. Even in this competitive candidate-driven market, it’s harder to find people to recruit talent than the actual talent. If in-house recruiters are stressed and overwhelmed, this could lead to their resignation and more pressure on businesses to hire people that can hire talent. This is why companies of all sizes must look after the mental health and wellbeing of their talent teams. Despite pressures to hire and targets to meet, no employee should be facing burnout as an organisation tries to scale, and talent teams are no exception.
While the tech recruitment market remains challenging and highly competitive, pressure on recruitment professionals will not die down. Therefore, we wanted to share some tips for looking after their mental health and wellbeing, as well as some tech recruitment tactics that can relieve some of the pressure and make hiring easier.
Use tactics other than direct sourcing
Direct sourcing is an excellent way of reaching talent, but it takes a lot of work from recruiters, which startups may not have in the current market. Therefore, it would help if businesses looked to alternative tactics to support their sourcing and assist in-house teams. Digital talent attraction, for example, is an excellent way of raising brand awareness and ensuring that your job adverts are seen by a greater variety of qualified candidates. Using social media platforms that aren’t traditionally linked to recruitment can help your job advertisements to reach passive candidates. In addition, digital talent attraction can drive online applications, which will save in-house recruitment teams having to reach out to candidates directly.
Digital talent attraction and social media advertising can also be used to build a ready to hire talent pool. A talent pool is almost a database of candidates who want to work for you and have registered interest. By doing this, recruiters have a network of potential candidates to look to before a role is advertised, accelerating the recruitment process. You can also add past candidates to this pool who may be acceptable for other roles. Then, when things calm down for talent teams, they can nurture this talent pool by sending emails or content to build your employer brand image and maintain anticipation.
These tactics aren’t intended to replace the work of your direct sourcing team but rather work as additional strategic support. They can help to drive applications and speed up the recruitment process. However, most importantly, they can ensure that already overwhelmed talent teams aren’t having to source and reach out to candidates on top of everything else. They have additional touchpoints which aren’t job boards. Instead, candidates are coming to your talent team, and many of them will be people who aren’t necessarily actively on the jobs market.
Check-in on your talent teams
Checking on teams is vital to understand the pressure they’re under. Simple conversations can help you understand the workload and find actionable solutions to help, especially in remote work. If you don’t communicate and talk to your talent teams, you’ll have no idea of their pain points and stresses. While the recruitment landscape is so intense, checking on your talent teams should be much more regular as this will help them feel supported and understood. Make sure they know that they can voice any concerns or struggles easily. This will improve your employer brand as they’ll feel heard and supported during challenging times, but it will also ensure you’re one step ahead of problems. The last thing scaling tech businesses need is talent teams leaving them and putting their growth plans on hold until they can hire recruiters. Therefore, taking the time and effort to check in and identify issues early could make all of the difference. It means you can act in response to concerns quickly rather than waiting until it’s too late.
Look at the benefits you offer
In the new world of work, there are plenty more benefits that you can offer your talent teams to help them to destress and focus on wellness. As remote working has become more the norm than a benefit, workplaces are looking for ways to enhance the lives of their employees when working remotely and in a hybrid model. Options like healthcare benefits, gym and fitness discounts or even online courses in yoga and other wellness activities are becoming more widely seen in workplaces. Also, looking for options that can help relieve other stresses on teams daily lives (like childcare support, financial advice, or even legal advice) could help reduce anxieties outside of the workplace, contributing to poor mental health. Finding benefits that help prevent burnout or relieve real pressures on teams is an achievable goal that can also enhance your employer brand.
Focusing on benefits and culture for all teams could also help you retain talent. Improved retention will relieve pressure on recruiters trying to replace existing team members. If you revisit the advantages of working for you and cement them in your EVP to reach all aspects of the business, you will improve the chances of retaining employees.
Create a strategic recruitment plan
We all know the saying, fail to prepare and prepare to fail. Well, if your recruitment teams are under significant pressure, it’s a huge support to plan and prepare for future hires. In the current talent market, it can take longer to hire tech talent, which is in high demand than it usually would. Therefore having an idea of the roles you need to hire earlier gives recruitment teams time to plan, advertise specific, harder to fill roles earlier and can buy your business more time overall.
Talent mapping can also help you to assess the skills within your organisation. Therefore, you can identify potential future leaders, any opportunities to upskill or reskill and even determine which areas of the business may need additional heads as you begin to scale. Of course, it takes time to assess the company in this way, but it can give recruitment teams a greater sense of direction rather than trying to hire as many people as possible in a short space of time.
Of course, there will always be surprises when team members leave and need to be replaced. However, planning for as many future roles as possible as you scale your business will create a plan of action and allow talent teams to feel more focused, organised and supported throughout this challenging time.
Outsource Recruitment Support
Finally, one way you can support talent teams with the demands of today’s talent market is to outsource recruitment support. By enlisting the help of an RPO provider, you aren’t replacing your talent teams but rather taking away some of their workloads. You can ask RPO providers to help with sourcing and screening candidates or give them specific roles to fill themselves. They work as an extension of your talent team and, therefore, will help you to achieve your recruitment goals in any way possible.
Outsourcing tech recruitment isn’t admitting defeat but rather a strategic tactic to help your talent team overcome challenges. You’ll receive expert advice, sector-specific experience and extra support for hard to fill tech roles. With flexible RPO, you’re able to scale up and down the services you access according to demand. So, if your growth pauses and hiring has to stop for any reason, you aren’t tied into a huge recruitment contract. Talent Works’ flexible approach to RPO is designed to complement startup growth’s changing and unpredictable nature.
Talent Works is an RPO provider based in both the UK and the US, helping scaling tech businesses find talent globally. We’re currently helping some of the most innovative and exciting names in tech to surround themselves with talent through tech recruitment, employer branding and digital talent attraction services.
Contact us to find out how we can help you.
