The tech world is not quite like anything else. Being a tech candidate means you’re one of the most in-demand employees in the world – yet very few people actually know what you do. Tech candidates have a tendency to change roles more often than others, moving roughly every two years – yet they probably aren’t too familiar with what a job board is. They don’t need to. They can pretty much count on having a new opportunity in their inbox every time they log in to LinkedIn. But they can also pretty much count on the person writing that message not understanding the role they’re trying to sell them.
Navigating the world of work as a tech candidate is just different – and flooded. It’s no surprise then that 90% of tech candidates say that they’d turn to a recruiter when they’re ready to make their next career move. It has become essential for candidates and employers alike to turn to specialist recruiters to help them navigate through this peculiar world.
1: Too many opportunities
According to CareerBuilder, specialists in the tech industry receive up to 32 messages on LinkedIn every week. That’s more than four messages a day. And even if you’re not a specialist, LinkedIn has found that tech candidates, in general, receive more than double the amount of messages and reach outs than the average. Although this may sound like it makes looking for a new role easy, it doesn’t. What it does make it is time-consuming and overwhelming. More than 70% of tech candidates want to hear about new opportunities but nobody wants to be bombarded. Recruiters are a way for tech candidates to have a buffer through which only opportunities they want to hear about reach them.
2: Finding opportunities
It seems like a paradox: one reason being too many opportunities and the next being finding opportunities. It’s because the challenge is finding the right opportunity. It’s become so difficult for companies to find tech candidates that many have stopped using traditional recruiting methods altogether. What we’re finding now is that companies have exclusively started working through recruiters. Recruiters are now often the first, and sometimes the only, people to know about new opportunities at highly rated companies and top tech candidates know this. They know that being in a recruiter’s network means that they have access to those opportunities before anyone else. They also know that they don’t need to look for those opportunities – their recruiters will contact them.
3: Niche skills
Python, Kotlin, Java, NodeJS, Swift, SQL. You should know what that means if you work with tech candidates but unfortunately, many people contacting tech candidates, and even interviewing them, simply don’t. Candidates needing to explain to the people trying to assess them what it is they do in the first place is frustrating – to say the least. It’s been found that the second biggest problem tech candidates have with hiring is being interviewed and contacted for roles that don’t even match their skills. This is where tech recruiters are different. They’re specialists. They know their industry. They know what people in the industry do. They are not the people who are going to tell someone about a great front-end role when they’re a data scientist.
Above just understanding the actual skillset, recruiters are up to date on industry knowledge. Their wealth of knowledge ranges from what market-related salaries are, to which companies are doing well, to which companies have a lot of staff that’s unhappy and to which skills are increasingly becoming in demand. Drawing on their insider industry knowledge is a big drawcard for candidates, and should be for employers too.
4: Networks and long-term relationships
Tech recruiters build long-term relationships with employers and with candidates and these relationships help everyone involved. They have extensive networks throughout the industry.
For employers, this means that their recruiter understands their immediate job requirements but also the nuances of their company. It means that they will have candidates presented to them who match their culture, their team and who have the right technical skills. But more importantly, recruiters have a network of candidates who they’ve already screened and gotten to know.
As a candidate, when you are fielding LinkedIn messages every day with opportunities that are likely not relevant, it’s refreshing working with someone who truly understands what it is you are looking for in a role and a company. Tech candidates know that they always have the option to make a move and they know that they can wait until the right opportunity comes up. Having relationships with recruiters means they don’t have to look out for that opportunity or read through their 32 weekly LinkedIn messages. Their recruiter will find that opportunity for them.
5. Simplicity
I’ve mentioned what the second biggest obstacle candidates encounter with hiring is, but the biggest obstacle: just not getting feedback. This simple thing, along with other simple logistics can take up an immense amount of time and effort for both candidates and employers. Recruiters make everything simpler for everyone. If you want feedback – you contact your recruiter. If you want to reschedule – you contact your recruiter. If you want to negotiate a better salary – you contact your recruiter. The simplicity for a candidate to have one point of contact is incredibly valuable. And vice versa, employers also just have one point of contact between themselves and the various candidates they’re interacting with. It’s just simpler. Emerging technology is also being embraced by tech recruiters which takes this simplicity one step further. Hire Port, for example, allows employers to tap into not just one recruiter’s network, but a whole group’s without losing the simplicity because it’s all concisely managed on one central platform.
The tech industry is an ever-evolving world of its own. Navigating through this world with someone who knows the landscape makes it all a lot more manageable. Tech recruiters understand this world better than most. They understand the nuanced skills, the companies that operate within it and they know the right people for those companies. In the same way, the right candidates, know that recruiters now all of this. The simplicity, opportunities, network and knowledge tech recruiters can offer, makes it no surprise that employers are exclusively turning to them, and that 90% of candidates are too.
