As a company, staying in business is all about having an effective and talented staff who love to work for your company. As the future of work develops, technology is going to impact every industry and change every aspect of how business is performed. Talented tech employees are going to be heavily sought after and competing with other companies’ benefits may become difficult.
Attracting talented employees now, however, is the best way to beat out that future competition. There are a number of sources that offer talented tech professionals but finding the right person for your company revolves around determining what you want. In general, there are two lines of thought when it comes to recruiting: experience or education. Companies have struggled for years trying to place an emphasis on one or the other, but it is not black and white. Determine what your company is mainly looking for and this will allow you to source tech talent from the best area. Additionally, it will help ensure a better fit for both the employee and company which may equate to a low turnover rate.
Trade Schools and Bootcamps
If you desire talented tech individuals who have plenty of experience in the workforce, then hiring from a trade school or bootcamp may be the best choice for you. Unlike your standard college, trade school graduates are typically older and more experienced than young adults. This is due to the fact that trade schools and bootcamps offer alternative options to a traditional college degree.
Regardless of whether the institution is a trade school or bootcamp, the common theme is that students are prepared for a specific career with intensive courses. This results in employees who have both experience and knowledge. Recent studies have even shown that trade school graduates are arguably better set up for success than university counterparts.
As mentioned, however, trade schools and bootcamps are better for finding experienced professionals. Given that they are intensive courses, they don’t compete well with the extensiveness received from a college education. To that end, if an in-depth knowledge is what you’re looking for, consider relying on the traditional source.
Colleges and Universities
There’s a reason that companies have partnered with colleges for years and it is due to the reliable education and high-level of talent they yield. From learning to become a musician to learning to become a full stack developer, there is no shortage of options for a college student.
What graduates from a traditional path usually lack, however, is experience. If this is not a problem for your company and training programs are in place, then university students are a great source for talented tech professionals. It is worth noting that graduates with an online degree have the same high level of skill as those who attended classes in-person.
College students are typically moldable and can be assigned any task. This flexibility makes them quite talented when it comes to tasks as versatile as those based in a tech job.
What About Retaining Talent?
Retaining top tech talent is all about understanding the demographics of your employees. There are differences in needs depending on age, generation, and even where you are located. To that point, focus on putting out surveys to your employees and ask what you can do better. For the most part, financial wellness programs that promote the financial freedom of your employees, as well as comparable salaries, are smart options.
The work your employees may do can be difficult as tech jobs tend to be finicky. For perspective, coding and programming jobs are often about debugging software and simply finding a problem with the code. This is a detail-oriented and annoying task that can take days or even weeks in some cases. However, a programmer’s salary of nearly $100,000 makes these tasks more than worth it.
Conclusion
Depending on what you are looking for in an employee, there is guaranteed to be a source of talented tech professionals. The difficult part is actually figuring out which employees you wish to hire, but this is incredibly important to ensure the fit for both the employee and the company. Not doing so may lead to a bad fit and bad understanding of what your employees need to stay with your company.
