7 Common IT Recruitment Challenges and How to Solve Them

In the IT industry, the competition for qualified tech talents isn’t something new. Even though every year the demand for software developers continues to grow, the global shortage of experienced programmers is likely to increase from 1.4M to 4M by 2025. Therefore, this creates plenty of hiring challenges in the IT sector making it more difficult to fill tech positions with skilled coders. What are the main challenges tech recruiters face and how can they overcome them?   

As an experienced IT recruitment agency, Alcor has plenty of insights on this issue. In this article, I’ll outline key IT recruitment challenges in 2022, provide some ways for solving them, and share an effective solution on how to hire desirable software engineers for your team! 

7 Most Popular Recruitment Challenges in the IT Industry 

1. Lack of software developers  

Every tech company has its hiring requirements and finding a candidate who meets them is not an easy feat. Moreover, it gets even more difficult if you work with a rare tech stack. The main reason for this is widening IT specialists gap which results in a less than desirable candidate pool.  

Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Use different sources 

Posting a job description on a job board is not everything you can do to find the needed programmer. Using various recruiting sources and platforms broadens your candidate pool and increases the chances of hiring the developer that you’re looking for. These sources include developer communities, recruiting platforms, or databases (Google Developers).  

– Train junior devs  

Too often, tech companies don’t pay special attention to entry-level programmers. Yet hiring junior coders with an opportunity to mentor and educate them results in dedicated team players. This person will be trained in accordance with the company’s approaches and principles, as well as have a deep understanding of internal processes and the product. For example, we helped the company Ledger find a candidate for their Junior QA Manual Engineer position. The candidate had already worked in this position for 1.5 years when the company was looking for QA Automation. They decided to give the test task to this dev, and he did this with no trouble. Eventually, the programmer relocated to Paris, and today he remains a part of the Ledger’s team. 

– Introduce employee referrals 

The software developer community is extremely big with plenty of networks and connections. Introducing a referral program to your staff will motivate them to help you find the candidate you’re looking for. Notably, the study reveals that referred candidates have higher chances to be hired and are more likely to accept the offer. 

– Adopt creative candidate-attracting methods 

When a business social network like LinkedIn is overloaded but you have a hot vacancy, consider creating banners on social media websites or making a video ad. Such original approaches will draw the candidate’s attention and raise their interest in your company as potential employer.  

– Consider offshoring destinations  

One more way to access talented software engineers is to look for them in different regions around the world. For example, Eastern Europe is one of the leading destinations for tech recruitment due to the skilled talent pool of over 1 million software engineers, moderate salary rates, beneficial taxation policy, and convenient location.  

2. Unresponsive candidates   

73% of the global workforce are passive candidates and that’s the next point on the list of challenges in IT recruitment. For recruiters, it’s rather difficult to get a dev who isn’t actively looking for a job. Because of this, passive candidates don’t respond to messages and emails (or even notice them).  

Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Customize messages and e-mails 

Personalized messages are more likely to draw software developers’ attention to your proposition. To write a good, customized letter, a recruiter should learn more about the candidate’s background, preferences, and motivations. Thus, a message like this will stand out from dozens of others that don’t resonate with the programmer’s professional goals. Have a look at this template for a customized letter: 

– Share career opportunities  

The #1 reason why people change their jobs is career opportunities. Programmers are motivated to grow as professionals, so including these possibilities in your message will catch their interest. These can be developing new products or features, working with new technologies and approaches, or having a chance to lead a team, etc.   

– Use messengers & social media 

Professional networks and email services are overloaded not only with job propositions but plenty of other information. This factor also reduces the response rate. As an alternative, getting in touch with developers through WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, or Twitter can bring more replies. At the same time, it’s crucial to be careful with reaching candidates through personal social media due to privacy issues or concerns. 

3. High competition among IT employers   

Competing with top players in the tech market is also among the main challenges when recruiting IT professionals. The problem is that such companies are usually better represented on the market and offer more employee benefits. Thus, skilled and niche candidates are highly motivated to join a big tech business rather than a no-name or smaller company.  

Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Promote your employer’s brand 

When you expand abroad in new regions and countries, make sure that potential candidates in the local market know about you. Studying the foreign market will give you an understanding of how to promote your company there. You might also cooperate with agencies that provide marketing & advertising services to help you build a strong social presence.  

Want to learn how a powerful employer brand helped an IT company enter a foreign market with flying colors? Learn more here about the Tonic Health experience! 

– Improve the company’s bonus package  

Software developers appreciate companies where they feel valued and pay special attention to what the business can offer as their future employer. These benefits can be different: flexible working schedule, hybrid work model, free English classes, medical insurance, and stock options, etc.  

– Be proactive in the IT sphere 

Seasoned programmers often attend different tech conferences, meet-ups, and lectures to learn more about the latest trends in the tech industry from experts. So, if you participate in such an event as a speaker or sponsor, you’ll put the wind in your employer brand and might even ignite the interest of professional software developers to your company. 

4. Long interview process 

While speaking about recruitment challenges in the IT industry, a protracted job interview is another point to mention. Some tech companies have 5 or more interviewing rounds and very often this approach scares developers off. Moreover, while looking for a new job, candidates consider several companies at the same time. That means that a software dev can get multiple offers from other potential employers and lose interest in your company. 

Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Minimize the interviewing stages   

2-3 interviews are the optimal number of stages to learn about a candidate’s tech competencies, soft skills, and figure out whether he/she is a good match for your team. You may also speed up the interview process by conducting a panel interview where a group of people from your company ask the applicant job-related questions.  

– Give fast and meaningful feedback   

In between the stages, it’s crucial not to delay providing the candidate with feedback. The best way to do this is to send your candidates follow-up emails that contain the results of each interview stage and further instructions. Moreover, if you give constructive feedback, candidates are 4 times more likely to consider your company as a future employee.  

5. Time-consuming tech tasks  

Technical assignments which take plenty of time are also among IT recruitment challenges. The problem is that software developers find them frustrating and might even drop out of the interview process because of them.  

 Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Deploy alternative hard skill testing techniques 

There’re plenty of different methods to evaluate technical skills which are more welcomed by software developers. Technical pre-screening, short coding sessions, or pair programming will help you avoid burdensome technical assignments. Yet if you decide to give a test task, it’s a great idea to make it short (up to 2-3 hours to complete) and/or paid for.  

6. Counteroffers 

So, finally, all the interviewing rounds are done, your company and the candidate seem to be a perfect match, and you’ve offered them a job. However, at this point you might be faced with one of the most common challenges in IT recruitment – a counteroffer. This is likely to happen if the current employer of your candidate is not willing to let them go, so try to persuade them to stay in the company by offering a better salary, perks, or new exciting job opportunities. 

Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Work with concerns and motivations 

One of the techniques recruiters use to handle counteroffers is going over the developer’s motivations and goals, highlighting how joining your company contributes to reaching them. At this point, it’s important to be honest and transparent with the candidate. If there are other concerns, you can schedule a call to discuss them or initiate a visit to the office to meet the team and dive into the working atmosphere.  

– Offer additional bonuses 

In case a candidate has a counteroffer with a higher remuneration, you can offer them a sign-in bonus of 50%, 80%, or 100% of their monthly salary. In addition to this, you can dwell on the possibility of salary raise after passing the probation period. 

7. Not enough internal tech recruiters 

When there is a need to assemble a development team of 10+ tech talents on short notice, that’s a sizable task. And the difficulty here is that tech companies might lack internal resources to hire a big development team, which is one of the hiring challenges in the IT industry. When there’s not enough tech recruiters to deal with this task, chances are that the deadlines won’t be met, and the hiring process will be protracted. 

Ways to solve this challenge: 

– Involve an external IT recruitment team 

To hire a big team of tech talents without delays, IT companies tend to engage extensive tech recruitment teams via professional IT recruitment agencies. These providers usually have a large tech headhunting pool and the best scenario is when their IT recruiters work together with IT researchers. In this way the tasks are allocated more effectively, while the desired results are achieved faster.  

Consider Alcor BPO Your Trusted Partner 

Sift, an American product company that develops smart fraud detection solutions, wanted to expand abroad and chose Eastern Europe as its offshoring destination. They needed to hire 30-35 programmers within a year but didn’t have enough internal recruitment resources. Therefore, the company decided to cooperate with a reliable IT recruitment services provider – Alcor. At first, we engaged 14 professionals from our IT recruitment and account management departments to bring Sift’s ambitious plan to life. Thanks to our big headhunting team and their expertise, we hired nearly 30 skillful software developers for Sift within a year! We also helped Sift shoot a video with their Hiring Manager for an employer branding campaign, which resulted in more devs being eager to join their team. In short, Alcor helped Sift reach its goals and assemble its own team of skilled software developers in Eastern Europe!  

If your company is a product tech business that needs end-to-end IT recruitment in Poland and Romania, Alcor is an answer to your needs. We focus on headhunting Senior/Lead developers, including programmers with niche technical stacks. Our IT recruitment department consists of over 40 tech recruiters and researchers who know how to deal with all the challenges in IT recruitment that I described above. We also have internal resources with over 600,000 verified candidates and use cutting-edge hiring techniques to recruit talented coders. Our vacancy closing time is from 3 weeks, and we guarantee to hire the first 5 software engineers for you in just 1 month!  

Final Thoughts 

The lack of pro developers, passive candidates, high competition among tech companies, long interview process, burdensome tech tasks, counter–offers, and not enough in-house IT recruiters are the most widespread hiring challenges in IT talent acquisition. Luckily, there are many ideas and life hacks that recruiters use to tackle them. But if you don’t want to deal with the afore–mentioned tech hiring issues yourself and would rather delegate the recruitment process to experienced professionals, Alcor is happy to help you assemble a team of top-notch developers in Eastern Europe!