The thing about recruiting is that it’s cyclical. This makes sense, since those cycles closely follow the same general pattern as the larger job market.
When hiring is hard, as happens in a bull market, it’s because the demand for candidates generally outpaces supply – and so too does the demand for recruiters and talent acquisition practitioners.
Conversely, when hiring slows down, so too does our entire industry. This is easy to forget, since the average recruiting career, (5.5 years, at last count) means that most of us don’t last long enough to experience both boom and bust. Which is why I’d like to tell you a little story.
See, I began my career in recruitment in the mid 90s, at the beginning of the last period of extended economic and job growth. It feels like a lifetime ago; the Cowboys were winning Super Bowls, a Clinton was winning Presidential elections, and Boys 2 Men were winning Grammys. Yeah, it’s been a minute.
Back then, I was a tech recruiter in what was, in retrospect, a pretty exciting time to be a tech recruiter. This revolutionary technology called the World Wide Web had just moved from the realm of marginal hobbyists to mainstream consumers, leading to the dotcom boom.
eCommerce became big business – Pets.com, anyone? – and as established and emerging companies alike rushed to cash in online, object oriented programming reached a real breaking point. Companies were desperate to hire anyone who could develop a website or capably code for OOD.
If you think data scientists or Java developers are hard to find, try finding a Flash super user or someone with Unix scripting experience back in the dotcom days. Job boards barely existed, search engines were rudimentary, and the closest thing we had to LinkedIn back then was a Rolodex.
Man, I miss those days. High times for recruiting.
Let’s Get Digital: Tech Recruiting and Hiring Beyond the Buzzwords
Someone recently asked how we used to recruit before the Internet (kids, right?) and my answer hasn’t actually changed in the intervening decades of digitalization. When it comes to successfully engaging and converting tech talent, it’s really all about differentiation.
Joel Spolsky, the founder of Stack Overflow, has remarked that techies are hardwired to be suspicious of recruiters, and I think that’s largely true. It’s not easy to credibly represent an opportunity when you have no idea what that opportunity actually entails.
Sure, we can spout buzzwords and correctly use whatever industry jargon we hear from our hiring managers or job requirements. But you’re probably not fooling anyone.
This is why, way back when chat rooms and meetup groups were really the only ways to reach passive candidates at scale, I realized that my job was more than filling jobs. It was learning as much about those jobs as I possibly could. And in tech, the only real way to learn is by doing.
Which is how this recruiter found himself learning Visual Basic (yeah, yeah, I know it’s not really an object oriented language) SQL (OK, MySQL), Dreamweaver (worst HTML code ever) and more.
When I couldn’t figure something out, I asked good questions in the groups. Most of the time, they’d give me a good answer. I rarely identified myself as a recruiter, and almost never tried announcing I had jobs available.
When I did, it worked.
It still does.
A Developing Problem: Engineering A Solution for the Skills Gap
As hard as it was to hire tech talent back in the day, the skills gap has only grown. Even today, despite having access to social networks, search engines and stack ranking algorithms, finding qualified tech talent hasn’t gotten any easier; if anything, as finding candidates becomes easier, getting them to respond has actually become more difficult.
According to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for developers is estimated to grow almost 25% by 2026. That’s three times faster than the average for all occupations (7%).
Even companies outside the tech industry need developers and engineers to support their current business operations and fuel future growth. This is only further widening the already acute skills gap that’s been growing in the decades since the dotcom days.
If you’re a tech recruiter, the good news is, finding candidates is easier than it’s ever going to be. The bad news if you’re a tech recruiter is that finding candidates is still really hard.
That’s because more competition for candidates means less time to make hires.
The sheer number of opportunities available to most good programmers means that you’ve got to move fast, or they’re going to move on. The right time to fill was yesterday, most days. But that need for speed doesn’t have to come at the expense of quality of hire, contrary to what many recruiters think.
Hiring in any scarcity scenario is a tall task. If a recruiter has no concept of the right skills required for coding, nor any way to objectively assess those skills, then there’s no conceivable way for them to possibly find the right candidate, much less match that candidate to the right job.
Which, when it comes to recruiting, is really our only job.
Back Office, Meet Front End: Developer Hiring Insights for Recruiters
So, while there’s likely another economic slowdown on the horizon, and with it, an inevitable slowdown in recruiting demand and overall hiring activity, companies will stlil struggle to find the right tech talent.
If anything, they’ll become increasingly desperate in a down market, where qualified candidates are much more risk averse and less inclined to switch jobs; in a down market, even the most in demand candidates are unlikely to sacrifice stability for opportunity.
This all raises a critical question:
What is the current state of technical recruiting in 2019?
Here are 10 industry benchmarks that every recruiting pro needs to know about not only where tech hiring is at today, but also, where it’s going tomorrow, too.
- 90% of developers are employed at least part-time. Only 5.1% are unemployed and actively seeking a new job. As passive candidates, developers typically receive a lot of recruiter mail which makes them hard to engage. (Stack Overflow)
- Compensation and benefits offered is the number one factor in assessing potential jobs. Tech stack (languages, frameworks, and technologies) comes at number two, followed by opportunities for professional development in third place. (Stack Overflow)
- Developers prefer to be contacted via their private email address (63.9%), called on the phone (13.7%), or messaged via a job site (10.9%). Only 7.2% like to be emailed at a work address and 4.3% want to be messaged on a social media site. Whichever way you contact them, explain why you think they’d be good for the job. Make a reference to their prior work history, GitHub activity, or whatever caught your attention. (Stack Overflow)
- “Job,” “interview,” and “recruiter” are the top three words developers use to describe the annoying part of job searching. (Stack Overflow)
- An estimate of the compensation range is the #1 information developers want to see in the email from a company about a job opportunity. (Stack Overflow)
- It takes on average 2.88 days for developers to submit a completed coding test. (Devskiller)
- Coding tests sent on Tuesdays usually get the fastest response. Those sent on Wednesdays typically take the longest to be completed. It seems that developers prefer to keep their weekends free from recruitment-related activities. (Devskiller)
- Contributions to public and open source repositories happen during the work week and continue over the weekend. That said, developers are significantly less active in private repositories on Saturdays and Sundays. This suggests they want to recharge and take some well-deserved time off. (GitHub)
- 73% of candidates take a coding test sent to them as a part of the recruitment process. But 90% of developers who start working on a coding test go on to finish it. High completion rates suggest that when assessed with tasks resembling their everyday work, developers are less likely to abandon a test they’ve started. (Devskiller)
- The US recruits internationally while being a major source of international technical hiring. It comes as no surprise that India is the number one country when it comes to the number of internationally recruited candidates. The US is second, which makes it both a prominent source of candidates and the number one country recruiting from other countries. (Devskiller)
Know The Code: What Developers Really Want.
Look, you don’t have to put on your puka shell necklace or your MC Hammer style parachute pants and go back to the 90s to understand developers. In fact, probably don’t try that. But it does help to fish where the fish are. It’s not enough to just drop a line, though. If you want to lure them in, you’ve got to use the right bait.
This means taking the time to understand what programmers really want, and being able to speak their language – both literally and figuratively, if possible.
It’s way easier to find candidates today than on the bulletin boards and chat rooms we relied on in the 90s. The sourcing tech team at Seekout says the most developers can be found on Github – , which makes sense, since that’s where they post and share code.
Spoiler alert: if you’re trying to recruit techies on LinkedIn, you’re using the wrong Microsoft property.
An easy way to get started is to create a free GitHub profile. From there, start a repository, go through the start-up guide, populate your news feed and practice your programming as much as possible. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to figure out Ruby yourself – and be able to credibly talk about it to your candidates.
If you can speak geek, and if you know how to go beyond the buzzwords and actually talk about tech with candidates, then you’ll not only be able to better engage with candidates, but you’ll effectively differentiate yourself from most other recruiters, too.
After all, if you want to get programmers, you’ve got to get with the program.
