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Why U.S. Companies are Struggling to Hire Great IT Talent

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Summary: U.S. companies are struggling hire, recruit, and retain experienced development talent. Discover why this crisis exists and a smart solution for companies open to remote work.

In a tech-driven solutions market, attracting skilled candidates is essential to drive your business forward. And hiring experienced software developers remains the top concern for CIOs globally.

While the average recruiting process to hire a developer may take about 52 days, candidates don’t stay on the market for more than ten days.

Besides, 79% of hiring managers accept it’s challenging to find the right applicants for open positions. Though such situations are somewhat similar for all segments, the IT industry has the highest employee turnover rates.

If you wonder why, here are the most plausible reasons for this struggle:

Transient Workforce

The current millennial workforce is much more transient as they prefer jumping from one organization to another. IT workers are in great demand, and reports say that job-hopping allows them to earn up to 40% more in 20 working years. Moreover, the current workforce needs much more from their work benefits than what you can offer.

Modest paychecks with 401 (k) contributions and health insurance aren’t enough to make great talent stick around for longer. You can offer more benefits, but that will be an added cost for a business struggling to hire top talent.

Lesser Talent than Demands

Even after exhausting all your resources, you may not come across the right candidates. That’s mainly due to the gaps in employee skills compared to open positions. According to Robert Half Technology’s report, 89% of tech leaders say they can’t find skilled IT professionals, especially for verticals like cloud security, cloud architecture, business intelligence, database management, cloud computing, and DevOps.

No Work Experience

Another impediment in recruiting the right IT talent is the lack of work experience. As an employer, you seek experienced software developers possessing relevant qualifications, but that’s not all. Instead, you need a balanced workforce with adequate experience and excellent soft skills. That makes the job of hiring managers more convoluted.

As the young generation enters the job market and baby boomers retire, hiring gets more complicated. Though you may integrate an onboarding process to train, mentor, or educate the recruits, it adds to your hiring costs.

Budgetary Constraints

Employers spend a massive budget on hiring. It costs an average of $4,129 per job, and that doesn’t even include H.R. costs. Smaller organizations struggle with maintaining such lofty hiring costs. Unless you’re a Silicon Valley giant, these costs can add up, especially when your organization is struggling to pay for top talent.

Outsourcing helps several U.S. corporations fulfill their recruitment needs without overspending. However, it has limitations like language barriers, poor deliveries, and time zone differences. Options like nearshore outsourcing can resolve many of these issues. It offers potential IT talent without exploding your budget. Additionally, it cuts down your operational costs as there are no overheads like extra cubicles, high wages, work benefits, etc.

Location Challenges

A majority of top-level IT talent flocks to urban cities that offer high-paying employment within name-brand organizations. If your business exists in a low-budget part of the city, you may not attract a massive talent pool of software developers. Location can be a barrier to your hiring process.

Many argue over the fact that it’s a connected world where offshore outsourcing can remove any barrier. What about the projects that need your physical presence? You can handle most of your meetings via phone or the internet, but when a situation warrants, you must book a flight to your partner’s location.

Traveling to a country that’s 9-12 hours away is exhausting and cost-intensive. On the contrary, if your partner is just 3-4 hours away, consider it a bonus.

Massive Competition

Despite an upward shift in IT jobs, the skill gaps still exist. Hiring managers compete with others to catch the best fish in a shrinking talent pool. The competition is intense on several levels, including online resources and referrals. You may take the help of staffing agencies and pay extra to them or work with nearshore outsourcing.

Conventional Processes

Most U.S. companies still rely on traditional methods to hire a software developer, employee referrals being on the lead. LinkedIn research says that employee referrals account for 48% of hires, but most of these new recruits onboard on shaky grounds. If the employee referring them leaves before completing onboarding, you are left behind with a half-trained employee who is nothing less than a half-baked cookie.

Another drawback of traditional hiring is that you may miss quality talent in the urge to tick the right checkboxes. Educational requirements are the right start, but you can’t ignore the value added by hands-on experience and passion. It involves scouring other avenues of hiring, which is, again, a specialized and time-consuming task.

The human resource teams, already pressed for time, can’t handle it alone. You can save their troubles by working with nearshore IT companies that already have the team you need. They offer working experience, expertise, and soft skills in a single package, thus saving you loads of time.

Inconsistencies in Job Descriptions or Application Tracking

An inconsistent or disjointed hiring process does more harm than good. The slip-ups may happen at any stage of the hiring funnel. For example, creating glossy job titles may confuse the employees about their potential roles.

Even if it goes well and several candidates apply, you may run these applications through a tracking system that shortlists them according to the preset criteria. The biggest drawback of this system is a lack of personalized monitoring. It saves time, but you may end up with less desirable IT talents when you need software developers with specific skill sets.

Only one-third of U.S. companies admit they monitor their hiring process to see if they lead to the right candidates. Others wade in uncharted waters and spend more than required on finding sub-par talents.

Outsourcing helps mitigate this issue. Offshore outsourcing, though, may have some time-zone issues and regulatory differences. Both can be tackled by focusing on nearshore outsourcing.

Without spending thousands of dollars on recruitment, you can hire a software developer according to your needs. It gives you access to an unlimited Latin American workforce with the necessary skill sets available conveniently.

You can stay in touch with the remote team through your working hours, removing the communication constraints. Most importantly, the salary expectations are a fraction of what you’d pay to a US-based workforce.

Looking to add an experienced developer to your team?

number8 can help with that. Connect with us today or continue exploring all of our custom software development and remote staff augmentation services.

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