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Strategies to Widen your IT Talent Pipeline

By Vahid Haghzare, Director Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment &
Armae Garcia, Marketing Associate, Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment

One of the top IT Recruitment Agencies in Hong Kong, Dubai, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Singapore, and Japan, SVA Recruitment is an IT and employment agency that provides jobs, executive search, and recruitment services.

Companies are reassessing their recruitment tactics to be certain they get to candidates beyond the conventional approach of hiring.

The Tech Industry has been hiring new candidates typically through colleges and universities, roughly restricting the access to potential IT talent for reasons that not everyone is capable of attaining college, and most competent candidates have already bygone their college years.

With this limited range for recruitment, companies may be overlooking a lot of skilled and competent applicants who weren’t being reached by the existing recruitment strategies imposed by these organizations.

Research by Harvard Business School reports Employers will often pay anywhere from 11% to 30% more for candidates with a college degree, yet employers also report that “non-graduates with experience perform nearly or equally well on critical dimensions like time to reach full productivity, time to promotion, level of productivity, or amount of oversight required.”

An under-qualified applicant who’s willing to learn and be trained on the job can have the same impact as an applicant with a college degree, with relevant programs, seminars, and workshops for understated youth with possibilities and opportunities in IT Industry. Most times, there are also candidates who are more skilled and experienced who haven’t been employed in a while, and who can be trained more to fulfill existing business needs.

Here are some ways for your company can reevaluate your recruitment strategies that can reach a wider range of manpower, and make more opportunities for unnoticed candidates:

Internal Training Programs

Companies should not always hire new talents and expect that they meet the skillset your company is searching for. But if you would just look at the diverse teams that your company already has, you will realize that you may have many skilled and experienced employees who are also keen to learn and develop new skills and capabilities through workshops, certifications, and other educational means. Consult and communicate with them first to see if anyone’s willing to be trained so you can know who to transfer to IT.
Retraining your employees is a significant process to catch up on the breach in skills of your company’s organization and value internal talent

Apprenticeships

This program integrates actual work experience with exceptionally designed training, aimed at bringing in talented, young adults who aspire to work in the technology industry. Apprentices get to be paid during the work and training (“earn while they learn”), different from internships which only offer college credit. Apprenticeships are sponsored by companies, as they acquire more experience, their salary increases at the same time. This program opens the talent pool to candidates outside of the traditional hiring pipeline.

Candidates are typically enrolled in community college programs, or they might already have a four-year degree in a non-technical field and want to change career paths without taking on more debt in another four-year program.

Candidates in these programs are trained on how to traverse corporate environments alongside the skills and knowledge that they should fulfill for their jobs. These kinds of programs can produce networking opportunities for candidates by mentoring those who have finished the program and arranging meetings with partners.

Returnships

Returnships are dedicated to giving opportunities to more experienced, senior workers who went on a career break and now looking to go back to the professional world. These candidates may have substantial work background, but employers might overlook their resumes because of the employment interval, and new technologies and current skill trends may be overwhelming for them since those weren’t job requirements a decade ago. Going back into the IT industry can be especially intimidating due to the pace of change. These programs validate the experiences that these candidates have- they just require extra months of seminars and training to get them worked up.

Here’s how this works: Candidates will undergo a six-month program wherein they will have the training, seminar, mentorship, and real job experience. This might hopefully lead to an opportunity for a job offer once the training is complete.

In Asia, most of these programs involve women as they are the ones who need more time off to raise children and their families. This situation is more likely to increase in the coming years as this pandemic is increasing the number of people who are losing their jobs because of more duties and responsibilities required at home and at work, therefore many women are being forced to leave their jobs.

Some returnship programs offered have the specific objective of helping women return back into the tech industry. Candidates will begin one week of engaging training. Afterward, these candidates will start working full-time in the positions they applied for, which involve project management, networking, engineering, technical project oversight, and the technology training team.
The benefits of the returnship program are redefining conveyable skills and especially providing women the opportunity to return to the industry after taking a break from their careers.

Specialized IT Recruiters & Head Hunters

You cannot find the best candidates usually because not all of them are looking for a new job. He or she is probably busy doing great work at a competitor and being well looked after by their employer. Specialized Recruiters and firms label these folks as ‘passive talent’; and they may take a longer time to find. Recruiters have the time and means to find this talent and are already likely to communicate with those individuals about their external options if the need arises. A specialized recruiter likely knows these candidates, how to contact them, and how to motivate them. Recruiters find candidates that HR and hiring managers can’t normally find themselves. And so they must be considered an important source for your company’s strategic Talent Pipelining.

SVA Recruitment is ideally positioned to support the continual demand for IT talents in the tech companies and looking to hire in Hong Kong, Asia, and Worldwide. Please let us know if you would further advise on the above topic or your hiring needs

Visit our Job page for more Job opportunities and the Current Candidate page for available candidates.

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Silicon Valley Associates is ideally positioned to support the continual demand from tech companies and IT Departments looking to hire in Hong Kong, Asia, and Worldwide. Please let us know if you would further advise on the above topic or your hiring needs