How can marketing strategies boost your tech talent acquisition?

Originally published on PURE LAMBDA

Introduction

According to the European Commission, over 70% of businesses have said that the lack of staff with adequate digital skills is an obstacle to investment. To make your business thrive, you need to have the right tech talent. But competition for tech talents is fierce. As a CEO or Executives, you need to stay out of the box in your recruitment strategy.

At PURE LAMBDA, we believe that you can easily re-use marketing strategies designed to target customers, to target future employees and specifically engineers and tech candidates. In this article, we will tell you HOW.

First, as a CEO or Executives, you need to ask yourself some fundamental questions before entering a (tech) recruitment process:

• How do you make your company a good employer?
• How to make enough noise, so the (tech) talents know you exist as a company?
• What are the key incentives to retain your talents? Onboarding costs a lot, so you don’t want to make false promises and repetitively lose your talents.

Those questions are the same when you are looking at attracting and retaining customers. It is the conversion-retention mantra.

Phase 1: Conversion: How do you make your company known and visible?

As an employer, you want to go where your ideal candidates are. You might go to schools where people just graduated. You might go to places where engineers learn and continue learning like online classes, conferences, meet up, etc…

For a meetup, you can just go quickly to meetup.com, search for the technology you are using, and you will find the right group in the location of your choice. If one meetup or group seems appropriate to you, it is then easy to reach the host and ask if you could be a speaker at the next event. While speaking at the meetup, you can highlight your company, detail the tech pain points you are facing, and state clearly that you are hiring. It might be the perfect way to collect contact information (and resumes) at the end of the meetup session.

The software industry also relies on collaboration and learning. It is then important to diversify your approach by writing articles or raising questions on dev.to or medium.com, for instance. Dev.to is a community of software developers getting together to help one another out by writing in-depth articles on specific technical topics. You can also write directly on your medium account or on your own hosted blog, which is also helpful for your employees and tech engineers, offering them a space to write, share their insights, and empower their expertise while doing it in the name of the company.

Phase 2: Retention: What is the ultimate employee journey in your company?

The best ambassadors of your company are your employees. Of course, you need to make sure they are satisfied with their work environment first, but using positive employee testimonials is very powerful in the recruitment process. You can leverage platforms such as Glassdoor. It is an American website where current and former employees anonymously review companies. Glassdoor also allows users to anonymously submit and view salaries, as well as search and apply for jobs on its platform. Be aware that it is illegal to incentivize your employee to give good ratings, but it is not illegal to ask your employee to send a rating or write a review of your company. It is a risky game, but highly rewarding. If you are afraid of what your employees think of your company, you are doing something wrong.

Retention happens when your employees don’t consider themselves as “another number” in the company, but when they feel they are part of a community, feeling happy to come to work because of the social connections they might get and the interesting challenges they have to solve. The secret sauce to that is creating off-work events. If you are doing it in person, you can easily invite your crew to the pub. But if you have a remote team, which is more and more the norm today, it is a bit more tricky, but it is not impossible. You can build a strong company culture, even though your entire team is remote. For instance, you can send chocolate or sweets to all of your team members. It is a little attention, but “sugar hit” always works. Furthermore, it is much more inclusive than wine or other alcohol-focused events. You can also send a surprise gift with a personal note from the CEO to create impact and engagement. Last year on LinkedIn, an employee reported that he received some cookies with a personal message from the CEO and a coupon for a day off to use whenever the employee wanted. Some companies are also doing “Wellness Friday”, with one Friday per month dedicated to wellness for all the employees. For a pure remote company, some companies invite a standup comedian via zoom to benefit their employees. The Washington Post also reported that you can invite a Goat to your zoom meeting.

Creating daily interconnections between your employees is the key, aside from the fact that you are a remote team or note. You can, for instance, have a meeting room on Zoom always open, acting as the coffee machine room, where employees can meet and talk for a 10 min break. You can always create code pairing days, where you pair one of your employees with another, so they can exchange if they have an issue on a project and solve it together. It is also about creating knowledge transfer and ownership redundancy.

Phase 3: Keep it up: fostering a healthy company culture

As per a recent PURE LAMBDA article dedicated to Hacks for setting up healthy company culture and showcasing it, it is paramount to always put your team and your employees’ well-being first, so they don’t burn out, but also so they are not bored out. Creating a healthy company culture may seem like a daunting task. Nonetheless, doing so can open your business up to better applicants, improvements in productivity, and better employee retention and morale.

To keep your employees, you need first to give them a clear career path. Empower your team. You could run a survey every six months asking your employees if they believe in the company’s vision, if the pay is appropriate, and if they are happy with the benefits or the vacation policies…

Secondly, always promote internally before hiring externally, and it is better for the company culture and less expensive. Help your employees build their careers, ask where they want to be in 5 years, and assign them tasks to move forward and train themselves.

Conclusion

Finally, never hesitate to invest in your team. The better your employees get, the more effort you put into making them better, and the more loyal they will be. The world is small, so even if an employee leaves, they can always come back later with advanced knowledge. It is important that they keep an excellent image of the company they worked in if they come back.

To finish on a small note of humor: “the CEO tells the CFO that they need to improve employee training and wellbeing. “What happens if we spend all this money to train them and they leave!” the CFO worries. “What happens if we don’t train them and they stay?” replies the CEO.”

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Originally published at https://purelambda.com.