3 Tips to Thrive in the Competitive Labor Market

The fight for talent in the tech industry has become an all out war. The labor market is tight and many companies struggle to matriculate high quality candidates into new hires. According to a study by Deloitte, the average recruitment process takes about 52 days while candidates remain on the market for about 10 days.

In order to make your company competitive when it comes to attracting and hiring rockstar candidates, consider refining your hiring process with these three simple steps to close the gap between the recruitment process and your new hire’s Day One. 

1. Make a Strong First Impression
   Typically, the first touch a candidate has with your company is with a recruiter; therefore, it is crucial to ensure that you and your recruitment team are aligned on what you’re looking for in a candidate. By providing timely and thoughtful feedback regarding candidate resumes that make their way to your inbox, you are informing your recruiter on what’s working and not working in their recruitment strategy and ensuring that you receive a stronger batch of candidates each time. Be sure to place check ins on your calendar with your recruiters to align on their recruitment strategies on a weekly basis. This regular communication cycle ensures that your recruiters are attuned to your needs and that they are communicating with candidates who meet your needs on a more consistent basis. Rockstar tech candidates have many options when it comes to where to work, and a disorganized and uninformed process (or an uncertain recruiter) can send them out the door as soon as they’ve walked in it.
2. Be Candidate-Centric 
   You’re not the only one doing the interviewing during the interview. Candidates are interviewing your company, as well, trying to assess whether the role and company culture are a fit for what they are looking for in their next move. Too many hoops to jump through that are facilitated by uncaring or uninformed interviewers can lead to poor candidate experiences. Instead of creating mazes for candidates to find their way though, make the application and interview process seamless while getting the key information you need to assess their candidacy. There is no need for a candidate to create an account or manually enter in resume information into an ATS. Instead, look for a candidate-centric ATS that allows candidates to apply easily for your roles. They’re navigating your process along with other processes, and if your process is too lengthy or cumbersome, they will go another way and will tell all their friends about their bad experience with your company. 
3. Modernize Your Mindset
   You’ll miss out on top talent if you continue passing over resumes and applications that don’t “check all of the boxes”, including college degree requirements. For this reason, it’s important to define your non-negotiables when it comes to qualification requirements. Taking the time to determine what skills, qualifications, and experiences are truly required to succeed in the role while providing flexibility when it comes to the “nice-to-haves” will allow you to engage with high quality talent that you’ve previously written off. To remain competitive in the tech labor market, powerhouse companies like Google and Microsoft are getting rid of college degree requirements in favor of more hands-on experience. They are moving towards placing more value in the lived experience rather than formal classroom education.  Therefore, if your company rejects candidates based on degrees alone, you might be missing out. Expand your mindset and your talent pool by determining the true qualifications necessary to complete the job successfully. 

Nothing makes a candidate drop out of the process faster than a lengthy and disjointed recruitment process.  You can plug the talent drain by establishing an organized end-to-end hiring strategy that’s candidate-centric and that gives you the information you need about whether the candidate will succeed in the role.
 

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