Helping entrepreneurs hire the right tech people for their business If your business needs to hire people with tech skills you’ll be plenty of competition for talent - the UK digital technology sectors is growing 2.5 times faster than the economy as a whole which put pressure in the system. In addition, the nature of tech people and a recruitment process which is no longer up to the job can make hiring even more difficult. However, for your startup or growth business to succeed these may be vital people to bring into your business.
The issues to be overcome Technology people tend to fall into two categories: extroverts who can talk convincingly, but often don’t have the skills to back up their claims; and introverts with great skills, but who lack the salesmanship to get themselves through the interview process successfully. CVs and interviews usually don’t tell the whole story. This dichotomy of CVs and skills makes recruitment in the tech sector extremely difficult. This results in a recruitment process led by gut feel and intuition rather than facts and hard data – twice. First, the recruitment agency will intuitively pick the candidates they feel best suit the role you are looking to fill, followed by the entrepreneur doing exactly the same thing.
How can you overcome these issues? “The best available” When a startup or growth business needs to fill a vacancy because it is holding up growth, there’s a tendency to recruit someone from the candidates presented, even if there is nobody that properly matches their needs. If they have to pick from a pool of intuition-based candidates, there is a real risk of putting the wrong person into their team. A recruitment decision on hard data will not only put more of the right candidates into that pool but ensure the chosen one really does fit the needs of the business.
Balancing skills Adding tech staff into a team often means that new hire needs a blend of skills, across a range of technologies. Full stack developers, for example, will be expected to have a wide range of skills across the front and back-ends, as well as UX and customer-facing skills. Recruiters will assume that Cloud Systems Engineers know Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and other platforms so they can contribute across the needs of their client base. Balancing the skills pool across multiple staff may mean that you are looking for skills across multiple technologies, but with an emphasis, or depth of knowledge, in one or two; skills that maintain equilibrium within the business and allow the business to meet expected future demand. With over 1.5 million people working in the digital tech sector in the UK, finding the person