Recruiting, hiring and retaining employees are all challenges in today’s competitive employment market. And it’s extra challenging when it comes to technology professionals. In this article you’ll gain tips on how to recruit those elusive young technology professionals.

For human resources and talent professionals filling tech roles can be daunting. When Indeed surveyed tech hiring managers, 83% of the survey’s respondents felt like they were losing out on real revenue and serious productivity, not to mention burning out their current team, thanks to a serious shortage of top talent.

The challenge is particularly trying for technology markets such as security integration in which there is often an awareness gap by which the best prospective employees aren’t aware of career opportunities in the particular market.

In this article, the first of a two-part series, any company looking to recruit technology professionals can learn from the practices at ConnectWise, a business software provider, for which hiring and retaining quality employees is crucial to business success. The second part of this series will address training and retention.

ConnectWise partners, meanwhile, can go a step further working side-by-side with the business software developer on recruiting and onboarding objectives. Learn more here.

Hiring Technology Professionals: What’s at Stake?

The importance of hiring the right person is hard to put into words. Recruiting and retaining top talent can be the key to success for a lot of companies as they establish themselves and grow.

ConnectWise has identified a three-step series of best practices to help guide professionals tasked with hiring technology professionals:

1. Interview Best Practices

Conducting a useful interview tests the skills of even a seasoned hiring manager. The truth is that the selection process is about a lot more than just experience. You’re also looking for someone who brings something unique to the role, and you want to make sure your choice fits smoothly into the cultural dynamic of not only the team, but the company as a whole.

What to do? Focus your interview questions on more than just skillsets or the standard “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Consider more in-depth questions that your applicants might not have prepared for, like “What do you do that other people find annoying?” or “Tell me about someone who is better than you at something you care about.” There’s no perfect answer here, just a selection process that lets you see how a candidate responds to an unexpected question, and whether they’ll be as honest about their faults as they are about their strengths.

2. Onboarding Processes

Your onboarding process sets the tone for an employee’s entire career with your company. You want to make sure that it’s smooth, organized, well thought out, and really prepares your new employee to do their job well. After all, if you set them up to fail from day one, they’ll probably do exactly that. If your onboarding process gets them started on the right foot, they’ll be more likely to stay with the company for the long haul.

What to do? Start by talking to your existing team. What do they wish they’d know when they were onboarding? What worked for them, and what seemed to be missing? Talk to your newer team members and your veterans, and make sure you’re keeping track of how their onboarding could have been better. Armed with the information from your existing team, you can put together a documented onboarding plan that fills in the blanks for new hires. As each person comes on, don’t be afraid to update the onboarding document as you learn new things or processes/company details change.

3. Offboarding Improvements

Let’s be honest, firing someone feels bad. But it’s also a necessary part of keeping your team strong, happy, and productive. If you can’t get someone out the door when the time is right, they poison the team with negativity that eventually will drive away even your most loyal, valuable employees.

So, how do you know when it’s time to let someone go? Without a defined process in place for handling offboarding, you’re stuck with employees whose issues are bringing the whole team down because you can’t figure out how to fire them, or you’re letting people go without following a process that makes the reasons clear. Either way, you’ll be left with a team that feels less than secure.

What to do? Have a plan in place to identify team members who aren’t a good fit, document their issues, and offboard them when the time comes. Make sure your plan not only covers the human resources details of how and when to offboard an employee, but also what happens after they’re gone. Don’t leave your existing team holding the responsibilities for their own jobs plus the role that’s been abandoned without a documented plan for how everything is split, tracked, and finally taken over by a new hire.

Now that you have successfully hired your new techs, you need to train and retain them. Stay tuned for our next installment to find out how!

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our FREE digital newsletters!

Related Content