There may be more tech talent looking for jobs right now because of layoffs at some of the world’s largest tech companies, but finding the right tech talent remains an enormous challenge for most businesses. Beyond the rising costs associated with hiring and onboarding talent, there is increasing competition among companies to find experienced tech talent.
The global skills gap is significant and requires more strategic solutions. An April 2022 McKinsey study showed that 87% of senior executives say their companies are not adequately prepared to address the digital skills gap.
If you’re concerned about tech talent shortages getting even worse, you’re not alone. According to a recent Computing study sponsored by Tek Experts, a majority of tech companies have found it more difficult to recruit people with needed skills in the past two years and 94% also see their workloads increasing in the next five.
Better sourcing strategies are essential.
Here are three strategies that can help tech leaders substantially improve how they source the right tech talent and enable their businesses to thrive:
1. Reach Beyond Local Resources to Access Global Talent Pools
Even while executives around the world are pushing a return to in-person office work, a key part of your tech sourcing strategy should include leveraging technology to reach a broader pool of available candidates.
Thinking globally not only widens your access to talent, but worldwide operations also create strong competitive advantages. Global talent pools help ensure business continuity in case of regional shutdowns and improve customer service capabilities with a 24/7, follow the sun operations with no evening shutdown. Remote working and outsourcing have never been easier, and they are also a great way to improve diversity, coverage capabilities, and breadth of workforce skills.
If you’re only looking to hire in-person, local employees and not taking advantage of global talent pools, you could be giving your competitors a significant advantage.
How to Effectively Access Talent from Around the World
One way to widen your pool of available talent is Impact Sourcing where you outsource business services to people living and working in disadvantaged communities. Slightly different from traditional outsourcing, Impact Sourcing places almost the same priority on community and individual development as it does on business operations. This strategy usually includes technical skilling, power skilling and job-readiness training to prepare community members for their new career opportunities.
The digital skills gap has been growing for years which has led more and more innovative companies to choose outsourcing to efficiently address their critical technology needs. At this point, traditional outsourcing markets are saturated, competition is fierce, and it is more expensive and challenging to find talent in many of the IT outsourcing destinations of previous decades. In response, companies are choosing greenfielding to reach into new regions for the high-quality tech talent they need to serve their customers.
Accessing Global Talent Pools with Tek Experts
Greenfielding and Impact Sourcing are core strategies at Tek Experts. You can see it in how we’ve built and continue to expand our entire business around robust service centers in less saturated regions such as Rwanda, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Bulgaria.
Both these strategies help Tek Experts achieve our 24/7, follow-the-sun capability to serve worldwide customers.
2. Ensure That Gap Assessment is Part of Your Talent Sourcing Strategy
In this 4th Industrial Revolution, many job roles and needed technical skills are changing as we work toward digital transformation. It’s never been more important to consider both current needs and future skills gaps you can anticipate being created as roles evolve.
Before you choose how you’re going to find the talent you need, it’s essential to accurately identify your needs. Finding tech talent is hard enough, you want to know you’re identifying critical skill gaps that exist throughout your company to make the best use of the talent you hire.
Gap Assessment usually starts with fully identifying these roles and competencies needed to meet today’s needs and to achieve future objectives. You need to go beyond simple job descriptions and fully document the abilities and characteristics of each role. This helps identify existing gaps within your current operations so you know who you need to hire and can quickly identify what to address in your skilling programs.
Gap Assessment at Tek Experts Goes Beyond Technical Skills
Ironically, when developing tech talent, it’s important to also focus on the skills that set people apart from technology. We call these “power skills” and they include problem solving, communication, empathy, leadership and creative, strategic, and critical thinking. We know combining technical training with power skilling leads to improved retention rates and performance of existing employees and new hires.
Tek Experts is fortunate to have access to our sister company, elev8, and their innovative solution for tracking talent skills gaps. With their software, Talentwize, we’re able to give our employees insights into the skills they need to achieve their career goals and a roadmap for their journey. Giving our employees this opportunity to grow their careers improves performance and retention, which of course reduces the need for additional talent sourcing.
3. Leverage Pre-Boarding Skilling to Enable More Successful Tech Talent Sourcing
Companies can remove barriers to filling technical roles by not requiring technical degrees or 100% capabilities before they hire. They can broaden their pool of available talent by including candidates with less technical experience but an eagerness to learn and develop their technical careers.
A strategic pre-boarding skilling process not only expands the pool of eligible candidates to fill your critical tech talent needs, but it also gives you granular control over the skills these hires have. The result is greater confidence that available tech talent skills always match existing challenges.
Four Ways Digital Skilling Makes a Valuable Difference to Your Business:
- Engagement— 92% of workers say well-designed training programs have a positive influence
- Retention— 94% of employees would stay at a firm longer if it invested in their learning and development
- Savings— 79% of business leaders agrees it’s less expensive to reskill current employees than hire new ones
- Performance—Better employee training leads to happier clients and expanded contracts which can increase income per employee by 218%.
Tek Experts Is Committed to Pre-Boarding Skilling for Ourselves and Our Clients
Whether sourcing employees for our own operations or to be outsource professionals for our clients, Tek Experts looks first at learning ability, empathy, and eagerness to grow. Then we invest in each employees’ career growth. Leveraging our own training programs and those of elev8, we include both technical and power skills development to support an employee’s entire career journey.
Create your Own 3-Pronged Strategy for Tech Sourcing Success
Bringing these three approaches together creates a powerful solution for obtaining high quality tech talent at scale. Leveraging the expertise of partners to do it with or for you reduces your time to hire, supports your onboarding process and accelerates the path to value and productivity of needed tech talent. Tek Experts has deep experience in all three areas including talent sourcing, gap assessment and pre-boarding skilling, so you can turn to us for an integrated sourcing solution.
Learn more about the successful methods of how to source, skill, grow, and scale your talent in this eBook, How to Survive the Global Tech Talent Crunch.
