The tech industry is booming.
According to Forbes, job growth in the tech industry is projected to increase by 14.2% by 2032, creating an estimated 377,500 computer and IT jobs.
Part of this enormous growth is our love of all things tech. Most of it, however, is being fueled by the AI race. The International Data Corporation (IDC) expects global spending on AI development to reach over $500 billion worldwide by 2027 alone.
Where money is spent, however, there’s competition. If you want the best developers and IT specialists, you’ll need to be proactive and have a robust, comprehensive talent acquisition strategy.
This article covers everything you need to know about strengthening your acquisition strategy so you can start drawing on better talent today and well into the future.
Talent Acquisition: An Overview
Hiring new talent requires several critical steps.
First, you need to understand your needs and outline the role. You’ll then want to use the top candidate relationship management strategies to build and maintain strong relationships with your top talent during the hiring process.
Finally, you need to successfully onboard that new talent so they can integrate into your workplace as smoothly as possible.
You can go into the acquisition process without a plan for your long-term strategy. You can hire a body to fill the role quickly. That’s what standard recruitment does — it fills roles.
But acquisition goes further than that as it aligns your business strategy with the recruitment process. Being proactive about your acquisition in tech can help you avoid panic hiring, which is when you quickly hire anyone who can do everything on your to-do list.
Instead, with a solid talent acquisition strategy, you can plan ahead, build strong teams, and work together toward your business goals.
How to Strengthen Your Talent Acquisition Strategy
There are several ways that you can strengthen your talent acquisition strategy.
Understand your needs
One of the first and most essential steps of building an effective talent acquisition strategy is understanding your business’s needs.
Each team operating in your business needs to outline what they do, the scope of what they do, and finally, what they need to accomplish their goals.
That will help you develop a new acquisition strategy based on what’s needed to achieve those goals, ensuring that you only hire people who will be able to do exactly what your business needs.
For example, if you’re a large enterprise with many outdated systems and disparate or siloed datasets and find yourself struggling to keep up with more data-forward businesses, then your acquisition strategy should be tailored to deal with that.
To strengthen your talent acquisition strategy, you could include hiring people who can optimize and understand the data that your organization holds now as well as the data your company may hold in the future.
To help you select the most suitable candidates, you could ask questions such as “What is API integration?” and “What’s a data warehouse?” as part of the recruitment process to ensure you only hire candidates who can do what you need them to.
It’s also important for you to know the overall process so you can create the necessary roles. In this case, you’ll need roles such as:
Data manager
Data strategist or consultant
Data scientists
Data administrators
Quality checkers
App developers
Naturally, larger companies with increasingly complex legacy systems will need more comprehensive teams. If you’ve only been operating for a few years, you might be able to get away with hiring a consultant or someone to do contract work. Otherwise, you’ll need a full-scale team working around the clock.
Either way, understanding the exact steps to accomplish that goal is how you can outline the tasks and, eventually, the roles needed to help your tech company thrive.
Improve your employer profile
Understanding exactly what you need can help you hire better and build teams strategically, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the right people will apply for your open positions. That’s why you also need to improve your employer profile.
When you build a tech startup from the ground up, you must consider workplace culture, perks, and how to draw in top talent, even if you cannot offer top salaries. This takes time to develop, and you don’t need to have it perfect to start hiring top talent, but you do need to embody those values.
How you do that depends on your scope, audience, needs, and brand. For example, a wellness tech company that’s created an app to connect people to self-guided therapeutic sessions will naturally want to invest more in their employees’ mental and emotional health.
A company pushing to be the leader in AI development will instead want to consider how to help support ambitious developers. You could invest in further training or perhaps offer a grant and a certain percentage of time for staff to invest in their partnership ideas with your company.
From there, you need to market your efforts. Create compelling employer profiles on social media, job boards, and even through third-party methods (for example, get your name in the news!).
Create a seamless and professional hiring and onboarding program
A great hiring and onboarding program will help top talent immediately feel wanted and appreciated.
Those who don’t feel like they have a lot to offer will be less picky, but you want top talent. People with top talent know their value, so show how much you appreciate them.
To do just that, you need two things:
Automated candidate tracking and management: This tool lets you easily manage candidate applications. Simply being prompt with sending out interview requests, automatically sending updates, and seeing what’s left to do lets your HR team create an excellent first impression for your chosen candidate.
An in-depth onboarding program: The manager of each team will need to develop an onboarding program, ideally with the help of the existing team. Create a checklist of what needs to be taught and a reasonable timeline so everyone involved knows what to teach and when.
Remember soft skills when hiring tech talent
One thing that’s often forgotten when hiring for STEM roles like those in tech is soft skills.
According to Forbes, the top soft skills for 2024 and beyond include:
Strategic thinking
Presentation skills
Critical thinking
Mentoring
Emotional intelligence
Resilience
Resilience is by far one of the most critical on that list as a report by World Economic Forum found that, in 2023, surveyed companies predicted that 44% of workers’ skills would be disrupted in the following five years. This means more training, retraining, or even pivoting would be needed.
While jobs will grow in the tech industry, the skills needed will drastically change. That’s why it’s so critical that you specifically look for career agility when you hire.
Career agility means being adaptable. Look for proof a candidate has consistently looked to further their development. Someone who frequently retrains or furthers their knowledge and skill set will be invaluable to your business since they’re better prepared to keep up with the changing needs, tools, and methods in the tech industry.
Adopt AI as part of the recruitment process
The good news is that you can use AI tools to speed through the recruitment steps so that you and your HR team can focus on the acquisition process.
You can use AI to sort through and screen applications and resumes to pick out a shortlist of applicants that your HR team can manually review faster and more effectively.
You can also use an artificial intelligence virtual assistant to help your HR team handle calls. While AI virtual assistants are usually used for sales calls or as a customer service tool, they can also be used to assist your HR agents themselves.
You may want to conduct phone or video interviews, for example. That AI assistant could automatically pop up with helpful information so that the recruitment team can access all the relevant content and materials they might need during the conversation.
Offer career and skills development with every role
You’ve found the best person for the job, and they’re doing phenomenally — until the tech changes. If you don’t continue investing in your staff, they’ll increasingly become obsolete. That’s why you must create a development fund for your employees.
Don’t just offer further skills development options but horizontal career development as well.
For example, say you’ve got a highly talented designer in your marketing department who wants to take their career to the next level. You could sponsor their enrollment in the Ironhack Web Development course, requiring them to stay on with your company afterward for a certain period of time.
They finish that course, and boom, you have a talented artist who understands your brand identity and can use those design skills directly in your site and app designs.
Wrapping Up
The tech industry must ramp up its hiring approach from mere recruitment to a full-scale talent acquisition strategy. This includes redefining your employer brand, improving your succession planning approach, and overhauling the hiring process.
Just remember to look for resilient candidates — the go-getters, the ones who push themselves and love to learn.
It’s not just your new hires who need that go-getter attitude toward learning and development. You, as a leader, need to be agile and adaptable, too.
If you feel like the tech your teams are using is beyond your know-how, reboot your knowledge with an Ironhack bootcamp!
Author Bio:
Natasha Thakkar - Content Marketing Manager
Natasha Thakkar is a Content Marketing Manager at Oleeo. With more than a decade-long experience in marketing and handling global projects up her sleeve, she's turned her passion for lead generation and impactful communication into a journey of building Oleeo's brand, network, and audience. Catch up with Natasha on LinkedIn.
