Talent shortage especially for technical talents like developers is not new. Developer managers have always been struggling to hire good talent. The first obvious reason you may think is the lack of talent in the market. But that’s not the case with The Great Resignation.
Due to COVID in 2021 market sentiments have changed. Market sentiments have changed because of volatile social sentiments. And that includes talents in a post-COVID society.
This type of crisis creates trust issues among humans. And trust is something which cannot be regained so easily.
The Great Resignation has shown that The Institutionalized framework is broken
The value of the conventional process is dented during this pandemic. One reason for this is that we expected that the world we built using institutions was supposed to safeguard us. Many misconceptions like this have been broken because of the crisis.
This created distrust for standard traditional processes that people followed to get employed.
Now managers must look out and follow unconventional paths to find diamonds. They may not be fully qualified on paper but may have ambitions, attributes, and attitudes that make them a valuable fit for your company.
To maintain a talent pipeline managers can collaborate with educator training boot camps. It can be difficult to find an educator who teaches the same stack/tools which you are looking for but if you can find a good educator who teaches concepts and foundational skills then this Bootcamp may lay the strong groundwork for incoming talent.
Later you can design a special training process for these talents to get them ready for the role you are looking to fill.
Hiring cannot be 100% automated
You are hiring because you need more hands to handle the workload. While hiring you are looking for a person with integrity and reliability.
In these times, the gap between hiring and training is slowly filling up.
Young talent is learning by themselves by watching YouTube videos and online courses.
Managers need to look beyond degrees and certificates to get to know the capabilities of a person.
On top of that, talent is not aware of formal corporate structures anymore so if you expect that gems are going to come finding you I am sorry to say that it is not the case anymore.
Your job as a manager is to keep an eye out on online communities like Facebook groups, discord servers, slack teams, etc to find good talent and then nurture them to see if they can become a good fit at the company.
Personal connections always win over professional pressure
If your current talents are leaving then the solution is not hiring new talents but stopping existing team members from leaving the company.
In the current crisis, people have realized money doesn’t hold that much value for them compared to their physical, mental, and social health.
Most people are aware that financial health depends on these three parts of health. So they won’t mind terminating the contract to maintain the overall health of their life.
Adding to this behavior, remote work has opened the doors for the entire world to work with each other. So it is easier for people to get another job in a remote company at higher pay.
All of these make it more difficult to gain and maintain the trust of people to keep working with you. For that, you, as a manager, need to genuinely invest your time, efforts, and emotions in helping people grow at a healthy pace.
Your current developer can also help you train a fresher and make your job easier as far as the performance of a person is concerned.
You are not building a company anymore, you are building a community
Involve your team in the selection process.
Involving your team in the hiring process will help each teammate to feel that they are an important part of the company, or say community.
At the end of the day, people love to teach and they love to learn. Community culture helps senior developers realize that they are more than developers. They are mentors to junior developers by impacting their lives directly with their experience in the field as well as the company.
This builds stronger relationships within the company which keeps the whole community together.
Final note
Building a talent pipeline using unconventional strategies will improve your company’s hiring process while also training developers to acquire the exact skills and attitude suitable for your company.
Even if those talents decide to take those skills elsewhere you have done your part to lessen the talent shortage for the industry.
And if they stay and become your next senior developers, congrats! You won the round of team building.
Just don’t sit idle for too long. Since you know what success looks like, help others see the same by repeating the process as often as possible.
Another option for you is to become an old joke:
CEO: What happens if we train our employees, and they leave us?
CTO: What if we don’t train them, and they stay?
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