If you’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to recruit new team members, you may already have missed the boat. But all is not lost! With increasing demand for niche skills within IT, the best candidates rarely accept the first offer that comes along. We are often told by software developers that they might receive over 50 calls a day when they first post their CV on an online database. So you need to make sure there are plenty of good reasons why they should choose to work for you, and not one of your competitors. Below are our top tips for securing the best talent on the market in today’s market.

Recruiting top IT talent in today’s market

1. Move quickly! If you like the look of a candidate’s CV, act immediately. Candidates that receive in excess of 50 calls a day will not be on the market for very long, and if your competitors move quicker than you, you will miss out. The same goes for making them an offer. If you want to move the process along quickly but find you are too busy, some recruitment companies (like our good selves) will offer to do first interviews with candidates. We can also administer a bespoke technical assessment so you get a good overview of the candidate’s skills and save yourself some time.
2. Don’t waste time waiting for perfection! Don’t miss out on a great candidate who you really rate just because they don’t tick every single box technically – by the time you’ve found a ‘perfect’ candidate that might not be such a good fit for your team, the candidate you actually liked will be off the market. Ironically, in the time that you wasted trying to find perfection, you could have trained up the first candidate in the skills they were lacking.
3. Be prepared to impress. Candidates that are very much in demand know all too well that the interview is a two way process, and they will want to know why they should pick you ahead of your competitors. Don’t expect them to choose you based on having a look at your website or even offering more money – make sure you sell them the challenge, the progression, and the company culture. The best candidates are rarely on the market because they want more money, so you need to make sure you are offering them what they want.
4. Expect to be impressed! Just because they have a lot of interviews doesn’t mean they shouldn’t prepare impeccably for every single one, so these top candidates ought to impress you as well! Be thorough in your interview process, and involve colleagues in the interview if you can in order to get their feedback on whether you should make a hire.
5. Get everyone on board with your decision, including HR. Once you have decided to make an offer to a candidate, don’t let them slip away by taking ages to get an offer to them in writing. It is shocking how often things go wrong at this point, particularly with large organisations that you would expect to have quite a slick operation in place! A candidate that verbally accepted an offer over the phone will soon start looking elsewhere if it takes a fortnight for him to get the offer in writing – don’t let sloppy paperwork be the reason that your team loses out.
6. Work with the agency, not against them. A good agency will do a great job for you – finding the candidates, interviewing them, testing them, and providing you with guidance and support throughout the process. If you decide to work with multiple agencies you won’t get such a good service – this puts pressure on the agency to sacrifice quality in favour of speed. Give them time and space to do their job properly, and trust their judgment.