Certain tech jobs can be the hardest positions hiring managers have to fill. The specificity of the roles and competitiveness of the marketplace create a difficult environment to navigate. This is exacerbated by the fact that hiring manag
ers aren’t likely to have enough expertise in the subject matter to fully grasp the requirements of the position they need to fill.
With so much uncertainty in tech hiring space, how can a manager ensure they make the right moves to meet project deadlines and fulfill contractual obligations? We have a few secrets we’ve picked up over the years to successfully hire for difficult tech roles.
If you want to talk about your openings with a tech hiring expert, contact us today! We’re always happy to help. And if you want to forgo the trouble of putting these tactics into place, we can set you up with temporary tech workers quickly.
Tailor Your Offer
A critical point that often gets overlooked when hiring tech workers is that they’re often highly educated and they understand exactly what the market for their skills are. This puts them on much more even footing than the usual job candidate.
You should have a much more open and honest interview process with highly skilled candidates than you normally would. Dig in on what their career goals are and what they want their job to be like. Ask them about what they’ve liked or disliked about their job perks in past positions.
These preferences will be unique for everyone, and you may find areas where you can tailor your offer to the candidate. Maybe they like to set their start times or need to operate out of a slightly different workflow than your team normally works. If you can accommodate these requests, you’ll have an easier time snatching up these prized candidates.
Of course, if you don’t want to lend this kind of flexibility to a role, you can go the temporary tech worker route. Working with a staffing agency, these considerations are taken care of and you won’t need to change your work flows at all.
Get Online Early and Often
You can get a big jump on the hiring process by starting before you know you have a position to fill. Tech candidates live online, and they can be marketed to like you market to consumers, well before the “sales” process starts.
Tech workers are a captive audience for you to pre-sell your company to. You can soften them up as targets by running branding campaigns on Facebook and Google based on the affinity of the group. They are interested in things that few others are, which make them easy to target. For example, they’re the only people using Github, and they’re likely to use it a lot and feel a lot of ownership over the social aspects of it. This is something that Facebook and Google allow you to target with. A strong branding campaign sets you up for success when you need it.
You can also insert yourself into Facebook groups and forums that tech experts frequent. These workers are always connecting and collaborating because they’re more likely to see themselves as islands. Their knowledge is so specialized that they don’t have people at work they can confide in or ask questions of, so they turn online. If you are accepted in those spaces, then you’re already “in the club” and you’ll have a better time when it comes to hiring.
Of course, you don’t have to spend all that time getting in good with the tech worker crowd if you use a staffing agency. A good agency is already trusted by this critical group of workers, so you don’t need to build an “in” with them.
Consider a Temp-to-Perm Strategy
You may see your current needs as only solvable with a permanent hire. But take a closer look. What’s causing capacity issues for your team? Is the bottleneck in your current project workflow solved with short-term help to get through the crisis point?
Often, managers fail to see that they can get along with just temporary help for the moment. It feels pressing because you have a deadline coming up or critical project requirements that are weighing on you at the moment. You don’t want to feel like you’re under the gun like this again; you want the problem solved permanently.
But consider this, you can try before you buy, as it were, by hiring a temporary worker to finish the pressing assignment. If it works out well, a good staffing agency will be happy to facilitate full-time hiring. Here at Enterprise Staffing, we see it as one of our best successes when a temporary worker gets a full-time offer that they want to take.
So, if you’re looking to fill a tech position, contact us today. We’re happy to strategize with you about the best way to get your projects done today and in the future.