Competing for tech talent in a job seeker’s market: 5 tips from workforce expert Raleen Gagnon of Experis
Remote work, evolving needs, and workforce migration have shaken up Montana’s hiring landscape. On July 21, 2021, Experis VP of Global Market Intelligence Raleen Gagnon hosted an MHTBA webinar to cover best practices to retain and recruit new talent within Montana’s technology sector. Our team distilled five key takeaways.
1. Understand the global trends impacting the workforce.
Gagnon identified seven primary trends that have rapidly accelerated in the past 18 months:
A huge shift to remote work.
The impacts that remote workers had on migration. Many professionally-skilled workers are moving, and organizations are starting to make decisions about long-term remote workforce strategies.
We're also seeing shifts in employee perceptions as it relates to technical and professional jobs, their expectations of remote work as an expected perk and not an earned perk. There are assumptions around their control over their schedules and how important different tasks may be in their work life balance.
Women have been disproportionately impacted both from travel and childcare constraints, but also from the way that we've shifted schedules and our expectations of remote work across the board.
Increased digitization and automation of work.
A concentration of incentives due to the shrinking workforce.
The demand has nearly tripled for on site, hourly workers. In the professional space in technology, in particular, we're also seeing some upward pressure on some of those wages.
2. Know your competition both locally and nationally.
Nationwide jobs have actually increased since COVID; Experis’ data show that there are 19% more jobs today than there were in January of 2020. In the same timeframe, there has been a 168% increase in blue-collar demand with a 27% increase in blue-collar turnover. White-collar (ops/logistics) demand has increased 115% with an 11% turnover increase.
Across the board, positions saw a 6-18% increase in wages and 16% increase in remote hiring demand. Not so in the IT and finance market, where the unemployment rate nationwide is 0% - 1%.
The top in-demand roles for Montana companies were IT support, software developers, and network systems administrators. The most sought-after skills included analysis, communication, and collaboration.
“There's an available workforce, there are people with the skills you're looking for, but they are in almost all cases engaged or working for someone else already,” said Gagnon. “So if we're going to hire these people we need to be offering them something more than what they're getting today.”
This could be a more flexible schedule, increased salary, a shorter commute, a better work-life balance, or more travel. The increased competition has put pressure on wages, and on average it is taking longer to fill open positions since pre-pandemic.
What do workers want?
Flexibility is huge. When we look at people who are making the decision to leave, it's because their company is forcing them to go back to the office too soon, too much, or not enough. Almost 90% are being hired out of another job. So the fact that they're citing this flexibility as a key reason for taking a new job is a sure sign that benchmarking and being aware of what others are offering around you and what is competitive for the types of people you're hiring is going to be a key best practice in the market.
Remote work is also key, because the migration of professional workers has increased nationwide. That means some of the skills that we used to know where to go to hire have moved somewhere else, and other people are starting to target these remote workers.
Best Practices
3. Look for hidden opportunities to leverage the skills of existing employees.
Wages are up, workers are down, demand is increasing, and competition is getting higher. But if your company is having difficulty hiring the skills that you need, Gagnon says you first need to make sure you retain the skills that you have.
“I'll tell you a secret because we've had a team of analysts and our organization, looking at patterns of career development on LinkedIn. And if you're looking to hire cybersecurity analysts, if you are looking to hire AWS architects, if you're looking to hire some of those hot skills that are in the marketplace today, I can guarantee you that 20% of the future skills you need are already in your current workforce situation,” said Ragnon. “So the opportunity is, instead of focusing exclusively on hiring and actually driving the turnover of your staff more, make sure we focus on retaining the people that we have as well.”
If you lose your current workforce, it's just going to increase the backfilling of those positions, which will impact productivity and likely come at higher wages. Tips to bridge the gap:
Do accurate and active analysis of performance reviews and find people who have said they want to advance within the organization
Look at your learning and development programs
Make sure your compensation is aligned so that employees are not going to be proactively looking to go somewhere else
Figure out what the career opportunity is for some individuals in the organization who may be one or two moves away from some of the people you need to hire
4. Expand your candidate pools by removing unnecessary requirements from job descriptions.
According to the Experis data, 92% of IT jobs available nationwide required a bachelor's degree or higher, but only 37% of candidates in the marketplace today reported having one. When I lived in Montana, only 87% of all the job postings required a bachelor's degree, and 36% of the candidates had one. But we use technology to drive our hiring process. If we use an applicant tracking system or a vendor management system to screen our candidates, and we have a bachelor's degree as a requirement, our technology is filtering out anyone who does not have that requirement and we might be missing some candidates who have the experience. So reducing education and experience requirements is common.
5. Develop explicit remote work policies.
As you’re hiring, Gagnon recommended knowing which jobs you expect to be on site all the time, be on site some of the time, be on site occasionally, or be on site never.
“There's a lot of data in the marketplace to help you classify those roles,” said Gagnon. “Including those policies in your job descriptions may feel like over-engineering, but clarity is going to help you be more successful in sourcing and hiring.”
Benchmark to know what other people are offering for these jobs, or have some of your staff go through the application process for other jobs that are in areas you’re looking into. Understand that if those applications are taking less time and doing less background checks and drug screens, you have an opportunity to become more competitive to the candidate experience.
Navigating migration
In 2020, people who were paid less than about $35,000 - $40,000 couldn't necessarily afford to move during this time, but those who had the means and the motivation to move to lower-cost or lower-populated areas did so because they didn't have to work on site. Those that are in green are the top ten inbound states for my migration. Montana is in the top half of inbound states as number 25, and is ranked number five in the overall best states for out-of-state employers based on tax policy, hiring, and local wages.
Watch the full webinar: Competing for Tech Talent in a Job Seeker’s Market.
Raleen Gagnon’s team provides consulting services to clients seeking insight into market trends, compensation strategy, and workforce alignment. She was previously the Director of Strategic Marketing at Monster Worldwide.
Software, IT, and technical recruiting company Experis is based in Boise, ID and is a part of global staffing firm ManpowerGroup.
About the Publisher: Launched in 2014, the Montana High Tech Business Alliance is an nonpartisan nonprofit association of highly-engaged high tech and manufacturing companies and affiliates creating high-paying jobs in Montana. For more information, visit MTHighTech.org or subscribe to our biweekly newsletter.
About the Author: Martina Pansze is the Communications Director for the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. She graduated from Whitman College in 2018 with a degree in Film and Media Studies.