How To Successfully Recruit Top Tech Talent
Logan Knight, Executive Recruiter, IT Division
By Logan Knight, Executive Recruiter, IT Division at Redfish Technology
We’ve all heard about the competition for top tech talent. Despite the Great Recession and the limp recovery, unemployment is very low for technical professionals in software, IT, and high tech. Hot spots like the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Seattle, So Cal, DC, Boston, etc. are thriving and the technology sectors growing. How do hiring managers successfully hire the technical talent they need in this labor market?
If you’ve tried recruiting top software development talent lately, you know that the demand is there. And the talent is too, you just need to find the right peeps. As a hiring manager you need to have a perpetual pipeline of talent or a funnel from trusted sources. This allows you to jump on exceptional folks (not literally of course) or quickly access them when the need arises.
Competing for skilled and experienced software developers and engineers isn’t really rocket science. It is about your network, communication and people skills, and the work of course! If your work in uninteresting, unchallenging, inconsequential, or if you are in a downwardly mobile company, well go do something else, frankly. But if you are part of an exciting company, tell the world. Keep that pipeline filled with potential collaborators via your professional and social networks, via industry associations, via your recruiter pals in the sector.
Your ability to effectively communicate your enthusiasm for your mission and work makes all the difference. Whether you are directly reaching out to potential employees & colleagues, partnering with your favorite tech recruiter, or working with the HR department, ideally communicating interesting challenges and company or project-related news is part of that discourse. Enthusiasm is contagious and will attract enthusiastic people. People who share your vision are more likely to respond when the fit is right.
Top technical talent differs from recruiting in other sectors in so far as personality and culture. Often technology wizards are not your mainstream persona. Go with it! Feed the creative side of people via flexibility and show off your quirks and flair. Great talent is attracted to great opportunity and out-of-the box work environments.
And given that the market is particularly hot right now, remember that agile is a process you can apply to your hiring too. When you find the right talent, you need to be able to move on it, even if this means deviating from your typical hiring process. Adapting the hiring process can make a huge difference to acquiring your first choice. A lot of companies miss out on opportunities.
An agile hiring process is a huge piece of high tech talent acquisition that certain companies are not picking up on. An overly long process is losing companies the top tier candidates. My advice is to take the steps to qualify a candidate before the onsite interviews, and then have your team and management ready to do a full intake at that first meeting. Enabling the hiring process through good thorough preparation and setting the expectation of being able to make quick, proactive decisions makes a huge difference in this market.
About the author:
Logan Knight is a technology recruiter at Redfish Technology, Inc. As an outdoor enthusiast, he can’t stay away from scenic mountain towns. After a career in the golf industry, including his starting and running own business, Logan has taken his client rapport building skills and refocused on high tech recruitment.
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