Top tips to help your recruitment during The Great Resignation
Computing speaks to Rhona Carmichael, Managing Director of recruitment firm Harvey Nash
The tech skills crisis has been ongoing for many years, but with so many staff moving on during The Great Resignation, many CIOs are left trying to run their departments with little more than a skeleton crew.
Recently Sainsbury's CIO Phil Jordan admitted that ‘…it's never been tougher to recruit technology staff."
Another retail CIO told Computing that he was recruiting at full throttle just to stand still, with a third of technology roles unfilled, and as many staff leaving as joining.
Rhona Carmichael, MD of recruitment firm Harvey Nash put the crisis down to a ‘perfect storm' of factors created in part by the Coronavirus pandemic. Those factors include the fact that all organisations are now vying for tech talent, rather than purely tech companies, and that employee expectations have risen.
So how can organisations ensure they're at the front of the queue for the best people?
Carmichael said that firms should look at the overall employee experience.
"You need to have an honest look at your employee proposition," said Carmichael. "It's not just the salary and job content, but the flexibility you're offering, like how, where and when you work. Work life balance is being seen as increasingly important for job seekers. So ensure your compensation, benefits and culture are all in the right place.
"Once you have a good idea of the proposition, make sure you can articulate and market it to ensure you get the right type of candidates. It's partly about personalisation of experience. People can pick and choose the type of role, company and culture they want. You need to ensure you're matching to the right candidates. It's hard because you might not know where the company will settle in terms of the physical workforce present, that's still being worked out in lots of cases."
She also recommended that organisations keep a toe in the recruitment market, rather than expecting to be able to switch the function on and off at will.
"Response time to job adverts is currently at an all-time low. You can't just go out one week to hire and then switch off the recruitment machine, you need to constantly work to build up those relationships. And you need to ensure that the recruitment process is fast because that's your shop front and you need to ensure you're marketing the opportunity as well as possible. If you get any part of the process wrong, others will do it better and you won't be efficient."
And the problems don't stop once candidates have accepted your job offer, Carmichael continued, adding that people still get approached and offered roles even after negotiations have seemingly completed.
"You have to work to keep candidates engaged between signing the contract and actually starting at your organisation. Often these days candidates leave jobs early on if something better comes along, so your onboarding needs to be really slick. People increasingly feel that they need to do the right thing for themselves, and if the job doesn't match up to what was described they'll have lower reservations about moving on quickly."
As ever, honesty is the best policy when it comes to setting expectations.
"Everyone is struggling to work out how we work in this new hybrid way," Carmichael added, referring to the mix of remote and in-office work. "So it's important to have discussions with potential employees around how many office days are expected. Most people seem to want to be in the office around two days per week, but some tech candidates prefer to be in the office more often. So companies need to work out what's acceptable to get the right level of performance."
With this mad bunfight for the best staff, it would be unsurprising to see all thoughts of diversity drop out of the recruitment process. But Carmichael argues that this would be a big mistake, and extremely counter-productive.
"Research shows that employees will look at your diversity and rank truly diverse companies higher. And candidates are not just expecting companies to do the basics, they can see through box-ticking exercises. Candidates will often ask about the support on offer and the internal initiatives that are being run."
However this push from employees hasn't yet translated into a more diverse industry.
"We haven't seen a shift yet in terms of numbers of females entering the industry, though the massive skills shortage might help. Organisations need to broaden their thinking and widen the types of people they'll consider for their talent pool.
"That might not easily be done for certain roles which require a specific skillset, but for some in-demand roles like product management you can take people from different backgrounds and put them through academies to train them up. We all need to play a part to ensure we pull talent in from a more varied set of backgrounds," she concluded.
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