Five Trend In Tech Recruitment

Now that we are halfway through 2021 and a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring trends aren’t just predictions, but apparent consequences of the major change the world economy is going through. But how can you use the existing trends to better hire tech professionals? In this article, we will outline five main trends in technical hiring and give you practical tips on how to incorporate them into your recruitment strategy.

Trend #1: Remote Hiring

Trends show: remote work is here to stay. While some criticize it, the companies that value this opportunity, change their rules. While the kind of remote work that mirrors the way people used to work in offices exhausts employees with extensive Zoom meetings and a bad work-life balance, companies that revolutionize their approach to working remotely profit. Making your company remote means you get to hire from a larger talent pool. You also get exclusive access to candidates who only want to work remotely. So making remote work an option at your organization will also be an advantage going forward, as it will attract top tech talent from all over the world. Be innovative when building your remote work practice. As seen in the following trend, employee experience matters even more in the reality of working from home.

Trend #2: Importance of Employee & Candidate Experience

COVID-19-induced remote work period has shown everyone how much employee experience affects the company’s overall performance. Burnout, zoom fatigue, inability to balance work and personal life – all these conditions reached their peak during the pandemic. Many employees saw the pandemic as a chance to change direction which caused what some called “The Great Resignation”. While some leaders blamed the remote work model for it, others took responsibility for their employees’ job satisfaction and provided intentional support: socializing, flexible schedules, fewer Zoom calls. A company culture that prioritizes employee experience attracts more qualified candidates. Employer branding is one of the ways to express your company’s values to potential hires. For example, you can do it through your social media and website content by featuring your existing employees’ stories, highlighting how the company supported and helped them grow in their role.

Trend #3: Offshore Hiring

Remote recruitment allows companies to explore options beyond traditional direct hiring: freelance, outsourcing, and outstaffing. If you’re only starting to take advantage of remote work, the differences between these options might seem confusing. Let’s briefly sum up the work models behind each of these offshore recruitment methods and the different benefits and disadvantages they might have.

Freelance

Working with freelance developers requires a lot of flexibility and trust from the company. It usually means hiring someone through a website such as Upwork for a certain project, and either paying it per project or per hour. It is considered a cheap way to get coding projects done. However, there are many pitfalls of such collaboration. First of all, as the hiring process is much briefer than the traditional one, it is difficult to evaluate the developer’s exact qualifications and just how good they are at particular languages and frameworks. Moreover, the developer’s commitment to your company is weak, so the time they actually need might be above your expectations because they usually work on multiple projects at the same time. One way or the other, freelance proves to be an unreliable recruitment method. So unless you value its low cost over the risks it comes with, we wouldn’t recommend relying on this method.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing implies delegating a project to an outsourcing agency, which has an army of developers who complete the client’s assignment. This is a more reliable method than freelance thanks to stricter documentation and processes. Nonetheless, it is similar to freelance in that you will have to trust the job to be done outside of your direct supervision. Outsourcing companies have their own project manager who will communicate the task given by you to the developers. Like freelance developers, programmers at the outsourcing agency work on multiple projects simultaneously and don’t have any long-term commitment to a single organization. This might, in turn, lead to problems with the application in the future, once it is out of the programmers’ hands. Thus, just like freelance, outsourcing offers short-term collaboration for lower costs than hiring a developer directly but lacks reliability and commitment.

Outstaffing

Outstaffing is an offshoring hiring option closest to direct hiring. The way it saves your company money is by putting a middle man – an outstaffing agency, between you and a developer from abroad. These developers’ salaries are normally lower and that’s how you can save 30-60% on each hire. The outstaffing agency provides you with the best fit for your tech needs and deals with the legal paperwork, legally employing the developer. The collaboration model incentives the agency to work with the clients long-term since the agency takes a monthly commission as long as the developer works for you. To prove that our interests are aligned with our client’s interests, at Coder Staffing, we even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. The result: you have a full-time, fully committed developer who works remotely long-term, exclusively for you. To find out more about how outstaffing gets such outstanding results, read our article: The Ultimate Guide to Outstaffing.

Trend #4: Focus on Diverse Skills + Learning

While continuous learning is beneficial in many professional spheres, in Software development it is basically required. Indeed, new languages and frameworks, the corresponding updates, and new usages are what make this professional path an endless journey of learning. Companies also realize how more valuable a developer with diverse skills and desire to learn is to their goals. As projects require the use of new tech all the time, companies look for developers with a diverse coding profiles. Simultaneously, developers look for companies that support their growth and further skilling.

Trend #5: Video Interview

For both parties, the hiring manager and the developer, video interviews save resources – money, time, and energy. While the video format is the obvious choice for remote hiring, its advantages also work for the companies that hire for office-based or hybrid work. First of all, consider the resources video interviews save. The candidate doesn’t have to commute to the office and can tune in right from their home. If you’re hunting down experienced developers, offering them a short concise chat over Zoom would always beat the request to come to the office in order to meet the managers. Likewise, the managers can schedule more interviews and speed up the hiring process by using Calendly and Zoom/ Google Meet to efficiently schedule the interviews.

Moreover, it allows the hiring manager to record the meeting so the candidate’s answers can be revisited later. This will ensure a more thorough analysis of the conversation and might eliminate the biases of the first impression. If you plan to record the meeting, make sure you ask the candidate for consent.

Another pro tip: the behavior of the candidate during the video interviews can also reveal their level of comfort with video conferences. This is especially important for remote and hybrid teams, as online meetings and messaging are the main communication channels. Thus, the candidate’s comfort and proficiency in online communication are essential for a smooth workflow.