You have a new job position to be filled up: that of a Senior Data Scientist.
Sounds like you’re going to have to work over time? Or skip a break or two to meet this particular requirement, perhaps?
As a hiring manager, you know a challenge is ahead of you when you’re asked to recruit cloud engineers, data scientists, or any tech related role, owing to their specialised skill set and fierce competition for them in the market!
A recent study in 2017 revealed that tech related roles are the highest in demand in terms of salaries, growth opportunities and postings; with a level of competition this fierce, it’s almost impossible to lure talent on the basis of benefits alone.
What makes hiring for tech roles so hard?
An understanding of what makes hiring for tech roles so complicated is the first step towards deriving solutions for the same. Let’s get to the roots of it without any further ado!
Scarcity of Talent
Scarcity of talent is the biggest reason in this regard. Studies have observed a huge skill gap in the market and has estimated that by 2020 there will be more than a million vacant tech and programming related jobs! Now these, undoubtedly, are huge numbers.
Do we need to consider revolutionizing tech education?
Fierce Talent Acquisition Competition
With a rise in the lack of tech talent, their salaries, too, are on the rise. The big players across the globe are willing to pay tech professionals handsome salaries. This has led to an obvious competition between the multinational companies for their acquisition- the result: a growing increase in tech professionals’ salaries.
While the big players are in a position to afford this sort of talent, start ups, however, are not. The crisis for talent acquisition lie in both the cases.
Candidate Assessment
Assessing a candidate for a tech role is yet another challenge.
It is seen that candidates are assessed using a few techniques like asking them to solve puzzles, whiteboard code tests, Big O Notation quizzes and detailed quizzes of the mystery corners of the language. While the candidate’s aptitude is certainly brought to light with these tests, their capabilities to work within the technical domain, however, remain undiscovered. To put it simply, these tests have zero correlation with the actual job performance and does not work when it comes to assessing candidates for a programming or technical role.
The want for an all-inclusive candidate
Like the lack of candidates with technical knowledge was not enough, companies are expecting their candidates to have possess a combo of emerging technology and keen sense of business as well!
“The challenge lies in not only finding individuals with the required tech skills but also people who can connect the dots to create a positive business impact,” says Harley Lippman, founder and CEO of IT staffing firm Genesis10. “For instance, there has been a focus for the last several years on enterprise data management, big data and analytics. Finding true data scientists continues to be a challenge. Companies, for a long time, have focused on getting their arms around their data and their disparate systems. Now the focus is on how to exploit the data to improve business decision-making and to create competitive advantage.”
Everything comes with a price and who know this better than the tech companies looking for the right candidates themselves – and of course, recruiters servicing these giants as well.
For a comprehensive solution to effectively tackle this particular recruitment issue, it is imperative we understood the roots of its causes. And now that we do, it makes it easier for us to come up with combat actions to solve the same!