Top 10 Challenges For Hiring IT Resources In 2023 A Technical Recruiter Perspective. 

IT has become a critical and integral part of every business – from multinational and large organizations that maintain mainframe systems and databases to Medium and small businesses that own one or a few computers.

IT has become a critical and integral part of every business – from multinational and large organizations that maintain mainframe systems and databases to Medium and small businesses that own one or a few computers. Information technology is used in multiple organisational areas, from customer relationship management, inventory management, management information systems, data management systems, and communication between employees, customers and suppliers. Most organizations, particularly those in the digital space, depending on the IT department to keep the network of computers connected and functional. 

The IT department of any organization has three primary concern areas: governance of technological systems, infrastructure maintenance and systems functionality. Other than that, IT professionals within the department work on computer hardware and software internally in various ways that significantly contribute to the success of an organization. These responsibilities will differ from company to company, even though there are common activities. For instance, in another organization, the duties and responsibilities of different IT professionals would include administration, technical support, communication, programming, app development and company website. 

Do recruiters face any challenges when recruiting IT resources? What are the current challenges, but most importantly, what will the process of hiring IT professionals in 2023 look like from a recruiter’s viewpoint? That will be the focus of this article. Keep reading to know what to expect as a recruiter and practical ways of overcoming anticipated challenges. 

Challenges Of Hiring IT Resources Today 

The recruitment and selection process has never been easy. From determining the right set of skills and academic qualifications a certain IT position demands, to advertising, shortlisting, conducting interviews and finally selecting the right talent, the process is demanding and highly time consuming. That’s why many organizations choose to outsource their service to experienced and renowned recruiters. Still, recruiters experience a couple of challenges before they finally find dependable and responsible IT professionals. Some of these challenges the recruiters face in 2022 that are expected to continue in 2023 and beyond include:

  1. Accelerated Digitization Post COVID 

The business arena post covid19 has experienced an increased demand for tech professionals, hence, more challenges in the hiring process of Tech professionals. Many organizational activities and tasks have shifted from the traditional office to online and more organizations have since embraced cloud storage solutions. Many businesses have gone beyond attracting walk-in clients to their brick-and-mortar stores because they have set up e-commerce stores where most of their business activities happen. Increasingly, payment processes are taking place on the internet. The business world has continually experienced a huge shift that previously would have been unimaginable. 

All of the above situations described above have led to an increased demand for tech professionals within every company. Therefore, in the post-COVID environment, the demand for tech talents isn’t only limited to IT companies and companies across all industries. What does this mean to the recruiters? It means that a company recruiter should look for the right talents capable of ensuring that organizational goals are met on time and within budget. They must establish creative ways of attracting the right talent pool and then selecting the best based on the qualifications, availability, affordability and ability to settle in an organization for a reasonable period, to at the very least, see through the planning, execution and completion of several IT projects. It would be unfortunate if a company depended on a recruiter to find an IT person for a given job and then went back to the same recruiter after three months to help them find another candidate for the same position. While this always happens without the company being at fault, recruiters should do everything possible to find IT talents that can stick with an organization reasonably. A person’s attitude and traits are big indicators of their ability to offer their services for a sensible period before thinking of leaving to another company – especially if the work environment is friendly and allows growth. 

  1. New Skills needed, accompanied by a shortage of the same.

With nearly every company embracing new digital technologies, the demand for tech talents is at an all-time high. In turn, the tech hiring process has become more demanding than ever. Increased digitization means many vacant positions for tech professionals that must be filled. Some of these roles include cloud computing, Full-stack development, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. This means that the IT industry is in high demand for a special workforce -a multi-skilled workforce capable of handling the ever-evolving IT positions in different organizations. There are a lot of evolving happening every day, so much so that many IT positions remain vacant for a long time due to the shortage of skilled persons. Institutions of higher learning are racing against time to produce tech professionals who can handle emerging technologies. We can no longer dispute the fact that there is an acute shortage of tech professionals and the Tech industry players need to act swiftly, lest things get out of hand. 

A Gartner study revealed that 64% of IT executives confirmed that tech talent shortage is an obstacle to their company’s adoption of emerging technologies. A report by IMF predicted that the tech talent shortage will grow to over 85 million tech professionals by 2030, which may translate to a revenue loss of over $8 trillion yearly.  Other factors that have led to IT talent shortage include limited career progression and inflexible working hours, job burnout, absence of learning and training opportunities from employers and low compensation. Things are about to get really ugly if the players don’t act accordingly. For instance, in the US alone, the tech professionals shortage may lead to a revenue loss of $162.25 billion by 2030. At the same time, China may miss the opportunity of generating $44.45 billion in revenue by 2030 due to IT skills shortages. 

The situation isn’t different in the UK tech market. By 2030, Great Britain will not realize approximately 9% of its technology, telecommunications, and media revenue because of the IT talent gap. By 2024, Sweden will experience a 70,000 IT talent shortage in the tech industry, going by a report generated by the Swedish IT and Telecom industries. Some of the most in-demand roles with a shortage of skilled people include Cyber, DevOps, Python, Cloud, Full Stack Development, Java and Data + Analytics. A shortage of these skills has got employers worldwide worried and concerned because, without these skills, it will be impossible to adopt digital transformation as fast as possible. 

How can recruiters overcome this challenge? While this problem requires multiple solutions, one way to address the tech professionals shortage is by considering global talent attraction. It’s not messy everywhere, thankfully. 

There are regions worldwide where recruiters can find diligent and efficient tech professionals to fill various IT positions. For instance, countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asian countries, such as Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, have an abundance of IT professionals. All these destinations are experiencing fast-growing IT hubs where tech experts exhibit extraordinary experience, skills, and English proficiency, and most importantly, their rates are affordable. These countries have tech professionals who constantly crave new business opportunities and projects and could make a good fit for different organizational teams, especially due to cultural proximity. 

Therefore, tech recruiters should look beyond local talent and consider the highly experienced tech professionals in the regions mentioned and many others as they encourage their clients (organizations across different industries) to consider the option of remote working. By allowing remote working and setting up the right policies to govern the same, the problem of tech talent shortage can be addressed by a great extent as the country seek other ways of containing the IT talent gap locally. 

  1. The difficulty of striking a balance between choosing the right candidate and hiring deadlines

Another huge challenge that recruiters experience in 2022 that will continue in 2023 is the dilemma of choosing the best candidate and rushing against time to fill the IT positions within the given deadlines. Organizations work with deadlines. When a position falls vacant, it means that particular business activities aren’t taking place as they should. Unfortunately, different company activities are interconnected – a network of activities – and if one isn’t as functional, it negatively affects numerous others. Therefore, if an IT position falls vacant, there is always pressure to fill it quickly. Sadly, it’s almost impossible to identify and onboard the right fit at the desired pace. Sometimes, recruiters bow to the pressure and choose between finding the right candidate and filling the position – they choose the latter, which has consequences. 

A bad hire, especially in the IT department, can hurt an organization more than it would hurt if the position were left vacant for some time until the right talent is identified. Organizational leaders need to acknowledge that employees are their business’ front runners – explaining why a bad hire isn’t only limited to a company’s financial resources but can also have a tremendous effect on the organisation’s productivity. Therefore, it is imperative for recruiters to embrace best practices while recruiting and hiring new employees. Cultural degradation may also happen if a recruiter makes a bad hire, posing huge risks to a company’s progress and success. Recruiters can prevent this from happening by choosing to fight a real war – a war of talent – which means giving their best to identify the best IT human resources possible. And achieving this means sticking to best practices by all means. 

So, what is the actual cost of a bad hire? It varies based on factors such as the type of industry the organization operates in, the salary of the IT worker, resources used during recruitment, onboarding and training, the resulting lost productivity and so on. The US department of labor reports that a bad hire may cost a company about 30% of the worker’s first-year earnings, with some HR agencies estimating the cost a little bit higher than this – ranging between $240,000 and $850,000 per employee annually. The consequences of a bad hire go beyond their pay and salary. It also includes the resources utilized during training and onboarding, which sometimes are more than the worker’s compensation in a monetary sense. 

In a nutshell, a bad hire costs an organization more than financial resources. A good way to estimate the cost your client will pay for making a bad hire through you as their technical recruiter is to include various factors such as the recruitment and advertising fees, relocation and training fees (for replacement hires), negative effect on team performance, disruption of pending projects, lost productivity, lost clients, training costs and the associated legal fees. The legal fees may crawl into the equation when an organization feels the ideal thing to do is to let go of a bad hire and seek better talent for the position. Such a decision wouldn’t sit well with the new hire, opening doors for potential lawsuits, which the company must respond to protect its image. 

On the other hand, if a bad IT hire makes poor representation to clients, it could negatively impact the company’s sales. Every interaction a bad hire makes with a company client introduces and increases the risk of a ruined company-client relationship. Imagine how much time an organization and its employees and the resources they have so far deployed to build a valuable relationship with their clients, which is then ruined by a bad hire courtesy of your agency as a technical recruiter. A bad hire gives your client less credibility in the eyes of the company’s clients. Team productivity could hit an all-time high if their morale dives. A bad hire can kill a team’s morale if they bring a negative attitude to the workplace. Unfortunately, negative vibes are infectious, so a recruiter should keep bad hires from any organization. Another thing capable of killing the morale and motivation of a team is increased workload due to a bad hire. A wrong hire could be incompetent, lazy or a mix of both. These particular defects will almost always result in an overworked team because the rest of the team members are determined to get things done. A wrong hire adds more stress to the managers. The managers and supervisors are already struggling with enough and reasonable pressure to manage teams. The situation can get worse if, on top of what they have to deal with every day, they have to deal with a wrong hire. Such an environment is bound to make any manager feel overwhelmed by stress. Hence, it’s wise to avoid a bad hire by all means. 

The inability to find the right fit for an IT position on behalf of the organization within the set timeline could also be occasioned by the shortage of skills mentioned above. However, as much as there is a need to ensure business continuity by filling a vacant position, it is better for the position to remain vacant for as long as the right fit hasn’t been identified. In any case, while it’s an expensive approach, the organization may choose to outsource that service for some time until the recruiter onboards a valuable resource to the IT department. 

Also, to speed up the recruitment process and find the right candidate, the technical recruiter may advise their client to also consider the global talent with the option of bringing aboard a remote worker – especially if the identified global talents aren’t willing to relocate. With increased digitization, it has become possible for organizations to work with tech professionals from other countries worldwide. The utmost importance is setting up stable and dependable systems and policies that allow smooth operations and the highest level of collaboration between in-office staff and remote tech employees. It’s doable, and in fact, the coronavirus pandemic showed the entire world that remote working is indeed the future of work. 

One of the things you must have noticed as a tech recruiter is that the bigger a project is, the bigger the challenges of finding a good candidate is. To avoid the pitfall of making a bad hire, the tech recruiter must purpose to go through the requirements and expectations of the candidates. This can be achieved by welcoming a candid conversation with every candidate – without giving too much attention to the specified timeline for filling the position. Finding a good fit for a tech position should take precedence over the need to fill a vacant position as soon as possible at all times. You would rather deal with a vacant position than fill it with someone who doesn’t fit the bill. 

  1. Non-competitive packages

In as much as the coronavirus pandemic brought some shifts that have done businesses some level of good, it also interfered with the projected growth and stability of many businesses. That aside, one major shift occasioned by covid19 is the realization by companies and their employees that their work can be done remotely. As such, since the pandemic, professionals have been on the lookout for better job opportunities. They are looking for career opportunities that allow them enough flexibility to concentrate on their personal responsibilities. As such, attracting the most qualified candidates in 2022 and 2023 and moving forward demands that organizations do more than raise the salaries they pay tech professionals. 

Sadly, small and medium enterprises lack the muscle to compete with larger enterprises from the salary perspective. Therefore, it is imperative they shift their focus away from pay-only packages to include other important benefits that the modern IT professional desires. A competitive compensation package in 2023 will include benefits such as fitness programs, health insurance, daycare or similar arrangements, tuition reimbursement, retirement plans, and, most importantly, flexible working hours for IT professionals. Therefore, recruiters should engage their clients on this issue since it will make their recruitment work much easier if organizations implement competitive packages. 

  1. A massive increase in freelancers

Emerging digital technologies have made tech professionals realize that they can go the freelance way. As such, almost half of those who intend to quit their jobs plan to enter the world of entrepreneurship to work for themselves. Skills that were at one point considered in-office tech positions now need to be sought elsewhere. This is a major challenge that tech recruiters will experience in 2023 and beyond in their bid to attract and onboard highly qualified tech professionals. How can recruiters combat this situation? To a large extent, there is nothing much they can do to change the situation. It’s beyond their control. However, there is one thing they can do. They can encourage their clients to hire contingent IT workers such as independent contractors or freelancers. This option is ideal when an organization faces a sudden spike in demand or need for specialized IT skills whose supply is short. 

Conclusion 

A lot has changed in the world of information technology since early 2020, when the coronavirus hit the world. Companies, employees, and recruiters alike had to adapt quickly to the changes that were taking place so fast. To keep businesses afloat amidst lockdowns and other restrictions, IT experts had to quickly develop and release to the market technologies capable of allowing business continuity. As a result, the level of technology adoption in organizations during and after the pandemic has never been witnessed. Perhaps very few people had foreseen the massive adoption of new technology in the various areas of an organization. The accelerated adoption of new technologies created a lot of IT positions in companies that are becoming almost impossible to fill. Tech recruiters are experiencing big challenges in their roles which are bound to worsen, especially due to the ever-evolving technology. Thankfully, there are practical ways of overcoming these challenges, such as searching for global talents instead of restricting the process to local talents and numerous other ways suggested in this post. At the same time, tech recruiters must anticipate challenges and engage a lot of creativity to make their work manageable and for them to deliver top tech talents to their clients. 

References 

  1. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/it-department
  2. https://tenisitech.com/managing-information-technology-the-4-it-roles-needed/
  3. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/uses-computers-inventory-control-2239.html
  4. https://qubit-labs.com/it-talent-gap-still-growing-in-2022-2023/
  5. https://blog.motionrecruitment.com/blog/tech-talent-demand-spiked-last-year-tech-talent-shortage
  6. https://www.turing.com/resources/the-cost-of-a-bad-hire
  7. https://www.transcend-solutions.com/2019/10/07/8-scary-consequences-of-a-bad-hire/
  8. https://www.roberthalf.co.uk/advice/recruitment-process/3-serious-consequences-bad-hire
  9. https://lumestrategies.com/blog/the-challenges-of-attracting-and-hiring-tech-talent/
  10. https://www.manatal.com/blog/top-tech-recruiting-challenges
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