We all want to get the best value for money, for ourselves and for our companies. As we move through Coronavirus and towards a ‘new normal’ many businesses are feeling the economic effects, and so it’s only natural that costs are examined more closely. But if you need to recruit, or want to expand, in these times, how can you find affordable tech talent? Here are some suggestions.
Make Sure HR Understands the Role
Unless you’re going to be running the recruitment process end to end yourself, it’s worth taking time to make sure that your HR department really understands what is needed in the role. An accurate job description is the best way to recruit tech talent. Sometimes finding a developer who has worked on a similar project but on a different codebase is a better call than a dev who has worked in the same codebase but is learning your business from the ground up.
Create the job description yourself and share it with your departing developer (if there is one) and other people in similar roles to make sure it’s as accurate as possible. Don’t just make it a list of technical requirements, add in some information on team culture, job responsibilities, and expectations to help candidates pre-filter themselves from your list.
Consider Output, not Salary
You’ve probably all heard stories about the 10x developer; that one dev who can do the work of 10. While that might be a myth, the truth is that not all developers are equally productive. If someone is asking for more than the average salary, there might be a good reason for that.
Sure, you could hire two devs for the price of one salary, but if that delays your project by months is that really saving money? If you find someone who is a great match culturally, has all the tech skills you need, and comes with great references then don’t quibble on price.
Understand what Developers Want
Would you be able to list the ten most important aspects of a job offer to leading tech talent? If not, then it’s worth taking a look at the 2019 Stack Overflow Survey. They’ve done the hard work so we can confidently tell you that developers care about:
- Languages, frameworks, and other technologies they’ll be working with (54.1%)
- Office environment or company culture (48.5%)
- A flexible schedule (45.6%)
- Opportunities for professional development (43.5%)
- Remote work options (31.7%)
- How widely used or impactful my work output would be (23.5%)
- The industry that they’ll be working in (15.0%)
- Financial performance or funding status of the company or organization (13.8%)
- Specific department or team they’ll be working with (12.8%)
- Diversity of the company or organization (6.8%)
Being able to provide what a developer is looking for will increase the value of your offer, even if the salary is a fixed number.
Widen Your Net
If you don’t happen to live in one of the top cities for tech talent, you’re going to have to put up with second best, right? Well, not necessarily. If you widen your net a little and make the world your oyster, you’ll find that not every tech rockstar lives in Silicon Valley. Open yourself up to recruiting a remote developer, and you stand a much better chance of finding a high-performance talent that just hoping the right person lives in your town or is willing to move there.
If the idea of recruiting from overseas gives your flashbacks to the early days of outsourcing, relax. Times have changed, and you can now have a 100% on-board employee, regardless of where in the world they happen to live.
In all honesty, the USA is going to have to embrace remote developers. The Bureau of Statistics forecasts that there will be over a million tech jobs without a qualified graduate to fill them. With the current attitude to immigration, companies will be forced to hire overseas to meet the demand for tech talent.
Speed of Recruitment
Hiring a new recruit is an expensive business with recruiting costs alone estimated to be around $30,000 in the US. A good part of that cost is the lost time to the project while you find your new hire – the average recruitment time is six weeks, often leaving little to no time for handover and extending the learning curve for your new hire.
The same isn’t true if you work with a specialist remote, technical, recruitment agency like us. We can have a shortlist of technically competent developers who are a cultural fit and are remote ready in under two weeks.
Specialist Recruiters
Which segues nicely into our next point which is that you will get a better result if you go with a specialist tech recruitment agency. Not only will they have a proper understanding of the job description you put so much time and effort into, but they know tech hiring best practices, and the best marketplaces to hire tech talent.
In Other Words, Hire Us
Why be bashful about it? We are the answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this blog post. How can you hire affordable tech talent? Talk to us. We’ve built a reputation for matching the right talent with the right opportunity. We have a bank of talent looking for remote opportunities, and if we don’t have the perfect person for you? We’ll find one.
Before we send you a CV, we will have validated the technical side of an applicants resume, made sure they are a great fit for your company or team culture, and that they have a proven ability to work remotely. We even handle all the complex HR stuff, so you can just sit back and congratulate yourself on a decision well made. Sound good?
