Welcoming 2020
As we welcome in 2020 and a new decade, we have a few thoughts on recruiting and the tech job market. In a word, it remains robust. It’s a challenging time to be recruiting for a number of reasons.
One is that we continue to have a shortage of top tier talent. While some companies may settle, venture backed startups and major brands need engineering depth.
For example, while there’s over 100K people in LinkedIn in the San Francisco Bay Area that hold the title software developer/engineer, Indeed.com lists nearly 6K jobs open with the same title. That doesn’t take into account the continued growth of Facebook, Google and others as they try to fill up new campuses.
And of course, all that talent isn’t top ranked ---it’s always amazing to us how many software engineers cannot pass coding challenges our clients give them.
Second, there’s a lot of shiny objects out there--self-driving or even flying cars, virtual reality, the advancement in any number of industries big data and artificial intelligence brings just to name a few—all competing for talent.
Third, no one is looking for a job. OK, that’s obviously not completely true but it’s close. Though, like the Lottery, you can get lucky, “Post and Pray” using job boards hasn’t been a viable strategy for landing to talent for some time, even more so in this era.
Talent pipelining, the process of developing an awesome network over time, is highly effective. Persistence in getting mindshare on a company is as well. We advise our clients to be open to conversations particularly when there’s a lot of hiring to do, go beyond the resume, take the coffee with the designer who may not have a current portfolio, and think about ‘opting in’ vs ‘opting out’.
It takes optimism, patience, hard work and a great process to land the best talent now more than ever. Happy hunting!
~Vikki |
