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How to Prepare for Tech Hiring in 2020

November 8, 2019
 
iCIMS Staff
3 min read

Every employer will engage in tech hiring in 2020.

Retailers today scramble to hire software engineers who enhance the ecommerce experience, and job titles such as “chief nursing informatics officers” pop up on job boards across healthcare. Gone are the days where tech hiring challenges only fell into the laps of software providers or online services. Today’s HR leaders face growing pressure to recruit suitable candidates to match their organization’s growth trajectory, navigating many new skillsets and roles in the process.

The Current State of Tech Hiring

To prepare for 2020, we’ve collected benchmarks for tech hiring based on data from more than 25 million tech applicants between January 2016 to May 2019. Here’s what we found:

  • Tech hiring is increasing across all industries: In 2018, there were 18% more new tech hires than 2017, compared to the 14% increase seen across all other new hires.
  • There’s no shortage of applicants: On average, there were 43 tech applicants per hire in 2018. This is an increase from the 36 average tech applicants in 2016 and the 21 average applicants from all industries in 2018.
  • They may not be the right applicants: Employers filled only 6 tech positions for every 10 they opened, with consideration that a single job requisition may encompass multiple hires. Employers in all other industries filled 12 positions for every 10 openings.
  • Searching for quality takes more time: The 2019 average time to fill for a tech position is 66 days, compared to 43 across all roles.

If every employer is now a tech employer, then the competition is getting more intense. That’s why it’s all about the strategy you use. Every positive experience with a competitor creates higher expectations for yours. Be the example.

Authentically Engage Tech Talent to Fill Business-Critical Roles, Fast

Be easily found

First impressions are everything in tech hiring. Talented job seekers bring along high expectations when they look for employment. If your jobs don’t appear at the top of their search results or your career site is not clearly accessible from your corporate website, you run the risk of a top candidate moving on before they ever apply.

Draw in the applicants you need with job postings aimed specifically at tech talent. Narrow your applicants to those who are truly qualified by featuring quality information about the roles and skill requirements. You can find out what job descriptions resonate with tech talent by asking current employees what made them apply to your company.

You can also use Google for Jobs to make sure that your open jobs go to the top of search results and drive directly back to your career site. This avoids the onslaught of third-party job boards that require candidates to create additional logins and cause high drop off.

Present a genuine employee value proposition

Once the right job seekers make it to your career site, why do they stay? The information presented through each page of your career site should show your employee value proposition, which demonstrates the investment you place in your people. The content gives you the unique opportunity to show candidates what it would be like to work for your organization.

The best way to do this is to ask current tech employees what they love most about working at your company and feature their responses as testimonials throughout your site. That sense of connection is what differentiates employers in the eyes of job seekers, especially those who are being sought out by other organizations at the same time.

Offer flexibility

Being tech-savvy means that these job seekers are surrounded by convenient, fast, and seamless experiences from daily tools and services. That carries over into the hiring process as they are especially keen to notice where technology causes hiccups in disjointed systems, redundant data entry, hard-to-navigate job searches, limitations on mobile devices, or slow outreach from recruiters. That also provides them with an impression on how tech-savvy your company is.

It’s hard to feel passionate about a potential tech career at a company that presents you with an experience that is anything but cutting-edge. Avoid this with the modern tech interactions that candidates have come to expect such as text to apply options, instant response chatbots, mobile phone access, and keyword job searches.

Hiring tech talent has always been a hurdle but competing for highly skilled tech talent is the challenge ahead. Whether you’re engaging in tech hiring for the first time or you’ve been navigating it for years, it’s never too soon to pivot toward a proactive approach.

To learn more about what the future holds for tech hiring, check out the iCIMS 2019 Benchmark Report, Hiring Tech Talent for CIOs and CTOs.

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