In recent years, the demand for IT professionals has been on the rise as more businesses adopt cloud-based solutions, data warehousing, and business intelligence. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that jobs in the IT industry are expected to grow by 13 percent over the next decade, with millennials projected to comprise 75 percent of the American workforce by 2025.
What does all this mean for your organization? Read on to learn about the IT job landscape today, why IT professionals are hard to find in 2022, and how partnering with an IT staffing firm can help ease your hiring woes and secure top candidate.
Job Market Today – Too Many Tech Jobs, Not Enough IT Professionals
We are currently facing a global tech candidate shortage. Based on another US BLS report, there was a need for 40 million skilled workers around the world in 2020. If this trend continues by 2030, the shortage is expected to reach a whopping 85.2 million. Organizations worldwide risk losing 8.4 trillion in revenue because of the lack of skilled candidates.
This shortage trickles down to IT professionals. Finding qualified IT professionals at a faster rate than your competition is one of the toughest challenges to IT staffing today.
Common Fails in Finding IT Professionals
You might be wondering what you’re doing wrong when after burning through your recruitment marketing funds, doing tons of networking, and using programmatic job advertisements, you’re still not getting enough IT staffing. Here are some of the reasons organizations are having a hard time finding IT professionals:
Uninteresting Job Offer or Organizational Culture
Your job postings might be visible on all available platforms, but they might lack quality and persuasiveness. IT professionals will scroll past them when you don’t have a job posting that does not catch the eye.
Here are some tips on writing an engaging job description:
- Simplicity is key.
- Provide facts about your organization.
- Think about how to address common concerns in advance.
- Describe job benefits and advantages clearly.
- Be visual—add a photo or video.
However, if your organizational culture seems outdated and hard to relate to, even the most engaging job posts won’t get you anywhere. Make sure that your message is consistent across all communication you put out. For example, if your job description is fun, your culture should tell the same narrative. Here’s how you can align the two:
- Evaluate your organization’s culture and values, look into what’s important to your target candidate pool, and find a common ground between the two.
- Collect feedback from your employees and peers on how you can align your narrative in all your candidate postings and organizational communications with your culture.
- Apply those feedback and set initiatives for improvement.
Putting Too Much Emphasis on Academic Achievements and Experience
Often, organizations will hire a candidate based on how many degrees they have or how much experience they’ve had. However, it’s not as simple as that when you look at IT staffing. A four-year technical degree is often considered irrelevant for IT professionals today. With the rise of people with non-traditional career paths but acquired skills through bootcamps or other training means, loosening degree requirements is one surefire way to find IT professionals to hire.
With the rising wave of remote work, the geographic radius where IT professionals find work becomes boundless. As recruiters, you must also widen your search. Additionally, focusing on soft skills over diplomas and experience allows for diversity and inclusivity, which can do wonders in terms of culture, productivity, and innovation in the workplace.
Putting Too Much Focus on Young Candidates
Relying on youth for IT staffing is a dangerous game. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be 1.4 million unfilled tech jobs by 2022 due to a lack of skilled professionals across multiple areas, including cloud computing, security, data and analytics, and mobile app development. So, why do most organizations prefer younger IT professionals? Here are some of the reasons:
- Younger IT professionals ask for lower salaries.
- They learn faster in comparison to seasoned IT professionals.
- They are more active, energetic, and ambitious.
Organizations often overlook that restricting your hiring efforts can only hurt the pursuit of diversity. Maintaining the age balance in the workforce is essential and brings a different set of advantages to the table, such as:
- Seasoned IT professionals are more resilient, and reliable, and tend to stay with ganization for longer periods.
- They can also serve as pillars of stability and maturity due to their vast experience of the ups and downs of the IT landscape.
Providing a Subpar Candidate Experience
Gone are the days when IT professionals need to jump through hoops just to land a job. The time it takes to process applications and do candidate interviews needs to be shortened. Candidates don’t have time or patience for lengthy interviews and test assignments. Ultimately, applicants are likely to walk away from job offers if they don’t think their effort matches their rewards.
When sourcing candidates, make sure you provide a good candidate experience. Improve the recruitment pipeline by removing redundant or trivial parts to ensure a smooth process. Provide timely feedback. Take the time to evaluate a candidate’s past projects instead of asking them to do one for you from scratch.
Offering Salaries That Are Below Market Average
This seems like a no-brainer, but many organizations often make this mistake. Lowballing your candidates will not fly if you want to get ahead of your competition. Furthermore, as pay expectations rise due to the high demand for candidates, maintaining a high-quality in-house team can cost a lot.
Another strategy you can employ is to curate attractive benefits and perks packages that stand up to the market competition. IT professionals put more importance on their well-being regarding how, where, and why they work. So, offering flexibility, insurance, and other privileges can be a favorable factor that drives their decision to work for you.
Not Accepting Hybrid Work as the New Norm
Every time an organization mentions “return to office,” there is a significant chunk of its employees sending out job applications elsewhere. Hybrid work is here to stay whether you like it or not—it’s now table stakes, not just a work perk.
Embracing a hybrid workplace can help you achieve operational efficiency and keep your team safe and happy. Organizations that embrace hybrid work will do more than just keep their IT staffing. Letting IT professionals work when and where they feel more productive will keep your employee retention high and help you attract new ones.
Not Enlisting the Help of a Specialized Staffing Agency
Unfortunately, a large number of Organizations make hiring mistakes that further add to their existing difficulties. Instead of partnering with a specialized staffing agency, many business owners try to recruit an IT professional on their own.
However, trying your luck alone may leave you with poorly-suited candidates and much higher costs than usual. If you want to ensure that your tech needs are satisfied correctly and effectively, then you need not look any further than a reliable staffing firm.
LET ACS PROFESSIONAL STAFFING FIND THE BEST IT PROFESSIONALS FOR YOU
If you find these tips helpful, put them into practice! Partner with ACS Professional Staffing, and let’s start building meaningful and long-lasting connections between you and the best people in IT, engineering, finance, administrative support, and more.
Finding and hiring the best IT professionals can be daunting in today’s market. But with ACS Professional Staffing as your partner, rest assured that our team of specialized recruiters can meet any of your short-term and long-term staffing needs. We aim to connect the best teams with the best people. Contact us today!