You may face challenges when it comes to the recruitment process to search and attract tech professionals in the technology industry. This article will discuss the top 10 tech recruiting challenges in 2023 and how Manatal's applicant tracking system (ATS) and recruitment CRM can help hiring professionals streamline their recruitment processes.
What is Tech Recruiting?
Tech recruiting involves the process of attracting and hiring skilled individuals for various jobs within the technology industry. This recruitment process has become increasingly important due to the growing demand for professionals in technology-related fields. It is a crucial function for companies that are looking to innovate and stay competitive in today's fast-paced business environment.
Top 10 Tech Recruiting Challenges
However, tech recruiting is not without its challenges. Let’s take a look what are the top 10 challenges technical recruiters may face in tech recruiting and what their solutions are.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 1: Facing Talent shortage
Finding and hiring the right tech professional are constantly evolving and growing, creating a high demand for a skilled tech professional in the technology industry. So, tech recruiters often struggle to find enough qualified candidates to fill the available positions. This is because there is a mismatch between the skills that employers need and the skills that job seekers have. This talent shortage poses a serious challenge for technical recruiters who want to attract and retain the best talent for their organizations.
To overcome this challenge, tech recruiters need to think outside the box and look beyond the active job seekers who are actively applying for jobs when it comes to tech recruiting. They need to leverage different strategies and tools to reach out to the passive candidates who are not actively looking for a job change but might be open to new opportunities. They make up 70% of the global workforce[1], and can offer a rich source of talent for recruiters who know how to engage them.
Read our guide on recruiting passive candidates to learn more about how to use this talent pool for your openings.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 2: Finding Passive Talent
Speaking about passive talent, engaging them can be challenging, as they may not respond to traditional recruitment methods or job ads. However, establishing a positive employer brand can help capture top candidates’ attention and make them interested in working for your company.
Using an ATS, tech recruiters can track recruitment metrics and HR analytics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of their outreach campaigns and optimize their strategies to target passive talent effectively. The system can also automate tasks such as sending personalized emails, scheduling interviews, and updating candidate profiles. Moreover, the system can provide AI recommendations to help recruiters identify relevant candidates quickly based on their skills, experience, and fit with the company culture.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 3: Facing Competition
Other than about the candidates, tech recruiters need to stand out in a challenging field. Job seekers are selective due to the competitive job market and often focus on company values and reputation when deciding to apply for a job. They also look for employers who can offer them career growth, learning opportunities, and a positive work environment.
Recruiters can create a strong employer brand and attract more qualified and engaged candidates with a branded career page. They can tell their story and showcase their culture to potential hires. Additionally, users can customize their job portal with the company logo, colors, images, videos, testimonials, and social media links.
They can also display the current job openings and allow candidates to apply directly from the page.
Check out these excellent career page examples to optimize your company’s branded career page.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 4: Compensation Packages for Tech Jobs
Employers need to offer a competitive benefits package, including health insurance, tuition reimbursement, and retirement plans to stay ahead of the competition. However, these benefits can be costly and difficult to manage for smaller businesses that have limited resources and budgets. Moreover, some candidates may have different preferences and expectations for their compensation packages, such as stock options, bonuses, flexible work hours, or remote work opportunities. This can make it challenging for employers to tailor their offers to the needs and wants of each candidate.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 5: Internal Mobility in Tech Companies
The rise of internal mobility refers to the movement of employees within a company, either for a promotion or a lateral move to another department. Companies that prioritize internal mobility are also more likely to attract top tech talent because it shows employees a clear path for career growth and development. Furthermore, internal mobility can be particularly beneficial in the tech industry, where the demand for skilled workers is high, and the competition for top talent is fierce.
However, internal mobility also presents challenges for HR professionals, especially in tech recruiting. As employees move within a company, it can be difficult to keep track of skills, qualifications, and experience. This can result in mismatches between open roles and candidates and can lead to wasted time and resources.
With the rise of internal mobility, it is more important than ever to have the right tools to manage tech talent effectively, and an ATS is the exact solution you need to manage your talent pool and address talent shortages in tech recruiting by:
- Identifying and matching internal candidates to open positions based on their skills, experience, and preferences. An ATS can also alert employees of new opportunities within the organization and encourage them to apply.
- Creating a culture of internal mobility that supports employees’ career growth and development. An ATS can help managers track and evaluate employees’ performance, potential, and aspirations, and facilitate feedback and coaching. An ATS can also help employees explore different career paths and learn new skills through online courses, mentoring, or job shadowing.
- Reducing hiring costs and time by leveraging existing talent pools and avoiding external recruitment fees. An ATS can help streamline the internal hiring process by simplifying the application, screening, and interviewing stages, and reducing the need for orientation and training.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 6: Responding to Market Shifts
The technology industry’s rapid evolution leads to rapidly changing market needs, often making skills and qualifications obsolete within a decade. To address this challenge, tech recruiters must collaborate with hiring managers to identify the critical tech skills needed today and in the future. They must also source and assess candidates who have not only the relevant technical expertise, but also the ability to learn future technologies, adapt to changing environments, and solve complex problems. This requires recruiters to use innovative and data-driven methods to attract and evaluate tech talent, such as online assessments, coding challenges, gamification, and video interviews.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 7: Finding the Right Fit
Another significant challenge recruiters face is identifying the right fit for an organization. Recruiters need to consider not only the candidates’ skills and qualifications, but also their personality, values, and cultural fit with the organization. This requires tech hiring professionals to have a deep understanding of the organization’s vision, mission, goals, and culture, as well as the expectations and preferences of the hiring managers and teams.
Thus, the way to go around this particular challenge is to rely on good HR software such as an applicant tracking system (ATS). This nifty software has various tools that can help tech recruiters to identify if a tech candidate is a close match or not. The first thing recruiters are going to appreciate is the AI recommendations. The platform scans job descriptions and extract the core skills as well as the requirements they’re looking for.
Plus, an ATS can also be integrated with personality tests via open API. This means hiring managers can include various candidate assessment tools like pyschometric tests to measure a candidate’s work behavior, cognitive ability, and personality. With these sort of tests, tech recruiters will be able to make an informed decision whether the candidate is the right fit for the organization.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 8: Reducing Bias in Tech Hiring
Unconscious bias may be the reason behind the industry’s diversity woes, limiting the talent pool for job openings further. It can affect every stage of the recruitment process, from sourcing and screening to interviewing and selecting candidates. As a result, some recruiters inadvertently discriminate based on factors such as gender, race, age, disability, or sexual orientation, which can harm the candidates’ experience and reputation, as well as the organization’s performance and innovation.
An ATS can help tech recruiters eliminate bias by using objective and data-driven criteria to evaluate candidates, such as skills, qualifications, achievements, and potential. An ATS can also help tech recruiters anonymize candidate information, such as names, photos, or personal details, that may trigger bias.
Manatal’s ATS can help recruiters diversify their tech talent pool removing human biases from the equation thanks to AI-powered recommendations and scoring. By using an ATS, recruiters can reduce biases in recruitment and hiring and foster a more inclusive and diverse workplace.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 9: Using Data-Driven Decision Making
Recruiters and hiring managers must also stay closely aligned on what they’re looking for in a candidate. They must have a clear and consistent understanding of the job requirements, the desired skills and competencies, and the evaluation criteria. They must also be able to track and measure the progress and outcomes of the recruitment process, such as the time to hire, the cost per hire, the quality of hire, and the candidate satisfaction.
Manatal’s ATS solution enables fast parsing of multiple applicant channels and saves screening information to help identify high-quality candidates, reducing friction in the hiring process. Hiring professionals can also easily create and share job requisitions, candidate profiles, feedback, and ratings in one centralized platform. They leverage data for better decisions by providing advanced analytics and reporting features, such as candidate scoring, talent pool matching, diversity metrics, and hiring funnel insights.
Tech Recruiting Challenge 10: Streamlining Recruitment Processes
Traditional and manual recruiting methods can result in slow hiring cycles, high dropout rates, and missed opportunities. So to attract and retain the best tech talent in a competitive market, hiring processes need to be streamlined and efficient.
This is where hiring tools like an applicant tracking system (ATS) that allows recruiters to automate and manage their hiring process comes in. When recruiters and hiring managers able to computerize tedious tasks such as posting jobs, receiving applications, scheduling interviews, they can source, track, and evaluate candidates more efficiently and effectively throughout every stages within the hiring pipeline.
Additionally, an ATS can provide insights and analytics on the recruitment process like the numbers of applicants a hiring team have throughout a campaign, the source of applicants, time to hire, cost per hire, and the quality of hire. By having these data and metrics, recruiters can measure their recruitment performance and strategy.
Conclusion
In conclusion, tech recruiting is a challenging task that requires a combination of technical knowledge and effective tools to find, attract and retain qualified candidates. Recruiting for technical roles in tech companies is different from recruiting in other industries due to the specific demands of the role.
Some of the challenges in tech recruiting include competition for technical talent, rapidly evolving technologies that demand new skills, and the often-complex hiring process. To overcome these challenges, tech recruiters need to focus on building relationships with potential candidates, effectively using job posts and networking events, and staying up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies.
Tech recruiters also need to work with hiring managers to ensure candidates have the right mix of technical and soft skills for the position. Additionally, recruiters need to ensure the onboarding process is smooth and efficient to retain newly hired employees.
Sources:
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-100-hiring-statistics-2022-rinku-thakkar
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