
Wow, January blew by. You realize that’s 8.5 percent of the year, give or take? How are you doing on your 2018 goals? Hopefully well; but if not, no worries. You have 11 months to get back on the track you designed for yourself and your team. As you transition from Q1 to Q2 planning, what should you think about in terms of recruiting the best tech talent for projects, long-term work, etc.? Here are 25 concepts, ideas, and tools to consider.
General Tech Hiring Trends
#1: Dice’s own 2018 Salary Report showed how specialized skills are driving up the salary market. #2: When you combine the rise in specialized skills with low levels of tech unemployment, you can see where tech salaries could skyrocket; but at the broadest level, they are flat compared to 2016. The average tech professional salary in the U.S. for 2017 was $92,712, which was only a 0.7 percent increase from 2016. About 33 percent of tech professionals earned a bonus, which averaged just about $10,000. The contract rate did rise 5 percent, to about $72.32 an hour. #3: Highly specialized skills are driving up salaries, but they’re not necessarily the skills most in-demand presently. Here are the fastest-growing technology skills based on Dice job postings. It’s also interesting to see the ratio between Internet of Things (IoT), which is discussed constantly in the media around recruiting and tech in general, and Docker, which most people probably have limited ideas around. IoT is very important, undoubtedly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean companies are hiring for it at scale just yet. #4: Hiring processes are increasingly revolving more around the candidate’s previous experiences in addition to the skills noted above. Obviously, you want to make sure the candidate is technically vetted, but hiring managers are more and more trying to assess fit, makeup during stressful periods, and the broader context that the person would bring to a team. #5: While there is a lot of talk about unicorns and startups, the biggest hiring powerhouses in the Bay Area tech hub are still huge enterprise companies: Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, and Google/Alphabet are 1-5 for 2018 expectations.Interview and Onboarding Trends
#6: We know culture is important to top tech talent. We’ve known that for years. Interestingly, then, many companies are still doing “exit interviews.” There is value to be gained here, sure. But oftentimes the employee is already checked out (mentally), or maybe concerned about how truthful they can be in such a setting. What about this idea of “entry interviews,” then? Here’s how it works: between offer acceptance and first day (or within the first week), the team lead sits down with the new employee and talks to them about their approach, goals, preferred ways of working, what they respect/value in teammates, etc. Adam Grant, famous for Originals and his newer book with Sheryl Sandberg, has championed this approach:In the first week on the job, managers sit down with their new hires and ask them about their favorite projects they’ve done, the moments when they’ve felt most energized at work, the times when they’ve found themselves totally immersed in a state of flow, and the passions they have outside their jobs. Armed with that knowledge, managers can build engaging roles from the start.#7: Team-based hiring will increasingly become important. I won’t belabor this point, but I just want to say: hiring managers are often very busy, and a low-context relationship between hiring manager and recruiter can reduce the quality of candidates coming in. Hiring managers end up managing the new hire; the team actually works with him or her every day. As a result, some companies are turning to team-based hiring for their impactful tech roles. #8: Onboarding will become more important to the overall experience of tech hiring. Antonio-Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook product manager and the author of Chaos Monkeys, describes a typical first day at FB:
Your first day at Facebook, you’ll have two emails in your inbox. One is a sort of generic, “Welcome to Facebook.” And the second one is, “Here’s a list of software bugs to fix.” On your first day, you’ll pull a version of Facebook’s code to your personal machine that’s your version of Facebook. You’re encouraged to go ahead and make changes, upgrades, improvements, whatever, from day one. You’re actually entrusted with that much authority. Facebook is literally a quarter of the internet everywhere in the world, except China. Here, some 22-year-old engineering grad has a version of it on his machine and he’s going to push a change to it today.How powerful a Day 1 is that? It seems a lot better than walking around meeting a lot of people, right? That entrusts the new hire with authority and a sense of respect from Day 1. Shouldn’t that be the goal?
We’re Going to Keep Using Data Better
#9: In a recent article on job-search trends for 2018, Peter Cappelli of Wharton has a rather direct quote:“As organizations have gutted the recruiting function, many players with different interests weigh into the hiring process, and individual ‘hiring managers’ who will be the supervisors have disproportionate influence. Recruiters are specialists in understanding recruitment and selection. Hiring managers are not, and they are ‘going with their gut’ to sort through candidates. The reason that job seekers do not know what to do in order to be hired is because hiring managers do not know what they are doing, and as a result, they all do something different.”While potentially a bit harsh, it’s also true. In the supposed era of data (which Dice lives and breathes daily), hiring managers should not be allowed to use “trust my gut” as a rationale for bringing in someone, much less someone at a likely $92,000+ salary (see first section). Companies will increasingly see the costs associated with poor hires and apply data-first practices to hiring, whether blind scorecards from the team or some combination formula developed internally. Point being: the era of “I like the cut of his jib!” will increasingly fade out in 2018 and beyond.
...and We’ll Align Process and Tech Better in Recruiting
#10: Our friend William Tincup of RecruitingDaily is fond of this one: “This may be an unpopular opinion, but process matters more than technology for successful recruiting.” Gasp! But in reality, he’s right: you should be level-setting your processes every six months. To wit:- Where are the choke points?
- Who or what is holding things up?
- Where are you posting?
- Where else should you be posting?
- Are your recruiters mostly doing scheduling and screening, or are they strategizing and relationship-building?
Here’s Where We Talk About Automation
#11: Whoa, how did we get this far and not mention automation? Well, in short: because everyone else is, and you’ve probably read about it already. The most important thing about automation (from a recruiting context) is going to be two-fold:- Can you use it to free up your recruiters for more valuable work?
- Can you make the candidate experience better?