Have you ever thought about creating a unique recruiting strategy for hiring your IT talent? Although, the field of IT is growing by leaps and bounds, most companies still follow the age old methods of recruitment. The traditional approach will be ineffective though, since hiring people in this day and age calls for a different approach as compared to before, and you need to alter the old modus operandi for that. Companies need to reevaluate their recruiting strategy for IT and technical talent.
Things to Consider For a Recruiting Strategy
Most IT companies do not have a distinct hiring strategy for their IT talent and often end up incurring high costs in their hiring process through external agencies. Since most companies lag behind in this regard, we have come up with a list of details to help them out here.
Identify your Best Team Members
Learning from past examples is the best way to move forward. The main reason why we talk about the correct hiring strategy is to make sure that you don’t hire people who may prove to be misfits for your organization and line of work. The best way to find out what strategy turned out to be the best for you is to pick out some of the most amazing performers within your team and see how they came into your organization. Some of the questions you can ask yourself in this regard, to make the future on the hiring front simpler, are as follows.
How did you find them?
How did you come across the current team members that are performing the best among the lot? Did they come to know of you through a campus drive, or were they referred by someone. All of this needs to be seen to check what recruitment strategy best suits you.
What was their background?
What kind of background did they come through and where were they working before. Knowing these details can improve your hiring strategy in the future as you will be clearer when it comes to which front to hire people from.
By knowing the answers to the two questions above, you could start investing in the recruitment option that you find common for such star performers. If these star performers were found through social media recruitment, then that is the way to go forward for you.
Internal Referrals
While most companies do not implement internal referrals as an option for recruitment, this method has proven to be really beneficial. There are numerous perks involved with asking your current employees to chip in with references to grow your team.
As soon as you start a referral program in your company, you need to let all your employees know what is happening. There is no use of a referral program if the employees don’t know of it in the first place. So, run a companywide email to make sure that all of you are on the same page. Once the employees have been educated regarding your new recruitment strategy, you should start giving them incentives for it. Even if an employee has a good referral, they would probably not be motivated enough to refer them if they aren’t getting the required incentives.
You can provide your employees proper incentives in the form of cash bonuses whenever a referred individual is hired. Moreover, the cost you will incur here would still be way less than what you would have to pay to a recruitment agency. By using your current employers to market the position for you, you could also ask them to explain the job description to interested referrals. This would save you both the cost and time, and would give potential employers a firsthand look into what they would be required to do, so that they don’t come blank like any other employee would.
Be Innovative
Social media has emerged as a powerful recruiting agent for companies wanting to innovate. If you want to innovate, you could also jump into this bandwagon. However, you shouldn’t use the same old bland forms of recruiting on social media. Social media calls for innovation and you have to be innovative enough to not paste the same old message across all platforms. Such an approach wouldn’t go down well with many candidates.
Once you have the correct message for a job opening, you can have your current employees share the message in their circle. To appreciate this, you could even get free lunch for them. This would not only put your hiring strategy on the spot, but will also get your current employees to appreciate where they work, while the costs incurred will still be less than what you’d give to a recruiting agency. Getting your employees to share all job openings on their social media will mean that you consider them important stakeholders and will also ensure that the reach of the post is increased.
Be Fast
All Human Resource rule books state that you should hire slowly and should be really careful about who you recruit. But, the current fast-paced market has meant that you need to do the opposite. A fast paced hiring strategy is all you need in this current IT industry, as your best interest lies in having an employee join you and become a part of your setup as soon as possible. Don’t let the right employees go anywhere else because of your elongated hiring procedures.
Your company’s recruitment strategy for IT talent should be both inclusive and innovative. Inclusive in the terms that it should incorporate the feedback of current employees, and innovative in the sense that it should account for the changing modes of communication.
Decide Consulting provides IT staffing services. Our conclusive hiring methodology enables us to bring the best IT problem solvers to your organization. Our entire management team comes from an IT technical background giving us a unique perspective on candidates and the industry.