How to Hire Tech Talent: 4 Easy Steps
Hiring tech talent is increasingly challenging. The prevalence of digital transformation has increased significantly over the past decade, creating a heightened need for skilled labor. And with the recent barrage of pink slips coming out of Silicon Valley, and shiny startups going from boom to bust, companies across all industries have an unprecedented opportunity to hire the tech talent they’ve been looking for to meet those key business objectives.
The Harvard Business Review agrees. Here’s what they’re saying:
“Right now, companies have a can’t-miss opportunity to ramp up their cloud ambitions: as tech companies limit head-count and eliminate programs, top talent — not just the bottom 20% performers — are coming on the job market. While many of them are being snapped up quickly, companies should think through how to move quickly when cloud talent becomes available so they can take a big step forward in their cloud capabilities.”
Simply put, now is the time to hire technical talent, upgrade technical capabilities, and future-proof your organization.
But what skills will the ex-Googlers and ex-Meta actually bring to the table? And with competition high and resources low, how do you attract the best-of-the-best in your market — and more importantly, how do you make them stay?
For practical advice on how to build the tech team of your dreams even during a tech talent shortage, check out our recent post, how to attract top tech talent. In it we offer a step-by-step strategy with actionable tips to help you attract the talent your business needs.
Here are four steps to help you hire the best job-ready tech talent. For the complete free guide click the link below!
# 1 – What skills do you need? Assess your team
First-things-first, in order to hire the tech talent you want, you need to assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses. The goal is to understand your team’s skill gaps and what you need in a potential candidate to fill them.
To do this, you will need to directly observe your staff and survey their skill readiness. To get a real sense of your staff’s skills you can use skills assessments. Cloud Academy offers both hands-on labs and quizzes/exams. Assessments like these can help you to not only define your hiring goals, but also create a skills profile/map for every individual and team.
# 2 – Empower your recruiter for success
As the hiring manager, you will always have the best understanding of what skills and talent you need. But by outlining key requirements of the role, you can empower your recruiters to effectively find and screen candidates that meet your qualifications.
Information such as skills and certifications, work methodologies, and technology stack, as well as timelines and budget are just some of the details that you can provide to help your recruiter be successful when targeting top tech talent.
# 3 – Test and select your candidates
Now that you have sourced the best talent pool for your business, it’s time to assess them. Pre-employment testing can help to quickly identify talented employees who have the right aptitude to succeed on the job.
There are a plethora of platforms available to test tech talents on software programming and language skills. But, if you’re interested in testing cloud skills, the market is pretty thin.
Fortunately, Cloud Academy’s pre-hire assessment tool can help you make the best call on a pool of candidates (or even consultants). We offer 250+ “lab challenges” that test practical skills in real cloud environments – including AWS, Azure, and GCP. If you’re considering our pre-hire assessment, you can check out this video for a real-time look at the experience.
# 4 – Maintain skill readiness
In this fast-moving cloud world, making the most of new and existing skill sets can really help your bottom line. While reskilling and upskilling do take time, it can help to increase productivity and efficiency. In fact, creating a culture of continuous learning is great for everyone involved! Skills readiness positively impacts project readiness, which is good for the team and the company.
Cloud Academy is the standout solution for actually validating skills, proving job-readiness, and connecting training to real business results. Take a look at some of our case studies to see how we’ve helped companies overcome the issues of time that training can present.
Download the full guide!
Today’s tech environments are complex, and highly-skilled tech staff are vital to helping organizations thrive through that complexity and beyond. Hiring the right tech candidate is good for retention, team morale and performance, and budget.
By being selective in your hiring process you can avoid quality issues that can result in reliability challenges, cutover issues, and the costly security breaches that can accompany a bad decision. For more on how to hire tech talent, including pre-hire checklists and sample business case letters, fill out the form below.
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