Well.. who doesn’t want to hire and retain the top talent for their organisation? After all, any organisation is only as good as its people. However, many organisations are often faced with this and struggle with strategic steps that they can take to hire and retain the top talent, especially in IT. In fact, tech talents are the most sought after in the current age and time. LinkedIn reports that tech professionals receive twice as many Linkedin InMails compared to any ordinary user.
As a specialist IT recruiter in Singapore, we’re brimming with different ideas on how we can share our ideas to hire and retain top tech talent with other organisations. In this article, we’ll aim to fill this gap by suggesting some ways for any organisation to think about how to hire and retain top tech talent. Below are some way to hire and retain top tech talent in Singapore:
A. Understand and Describe the Job on Offer
There’s a strange skew between hiring managers and candidates when it comes to job descriptions. Where 72% managers say that they provide clear job descriptions, only 36% candidates feel that way. The first step to that is understanding the positions that you’re hiring for, not just in terms of competencies but also in terms of what candidates in that stream of work expect in a career trajectory and if your organisation can provide that. It is important for the sake of actually retaining the best candidates that the description only contains what your organisation can really offer.
One way to think about job descriptions is that they shouldn’t just contain requirements and skills but also the impact and position of the role within the organisation itself. In terms of just the ability to attract the best talent, it is important to make structural changes to these descriptions like using action words to describe what the potential employee will be doing at the organisation rather than what the responsibilities would be.
B. Have a Talent Pipeline Ready
Just hiring from one source, through LinkedIn or a job portal is not enough today. You need to have multiple streams that you can capitalise on, for example employee referrals, candidate sourcing etc. This is particularly important because most of the top talent aren’t actively looking for opportunities but are generally open to hearing about roles if approached directly. This type of candidate sourcing does definitely require some sourcing skills and identification of the right people, which as a competency can be built in house or professionals can be engaged for help.
C. Demonstrate a Career Trajectory
Most tech talents generally look for a clear career trajectory in terms of where they could be within the organisation, say in a five year time frame. If you do not indicate that within your organisation’s system, it might be possible to hire the best talent for a while but it would be extremely difficult to retain them for a longer time.
D. Provide Opportunities for Learning
It is also recommended that employers provide ample opportunities to their tech talent to learn outside of their day to day work. Some examples could be providing access to on-demand training opportunities, the option to dedicate work hours to philanthropic projects for the organisation etc.
Agility in this context is also quite important to allow for your employees, which can be achieved by engaging them in the problem solving process from the get go, not just at their own level but at broader project and product levels as well. This will ensure they are bought into the organisation and not just their specific role.
E. Make the Roles and Work Meaningful to Your Employees
While to the managers and the organisation, a role might be the most meaningful and important to the core function of the organisation, it is important that it is communicated clearly as well. This is to help employees understand where they sit in the organisation and how their work impacts the organisation. Additionally, meaningful also translated to “purpose” in context of the younger generation and the upcoming batches of tech talents.
This could mean an organisational mission in every job description and alignment of all internal and external work with this mission. Research suggests that such organisations have 30% higher levels of innovation and 40% higher levels of retention than non-mission driven companies.
F. Provide Good Organisation and Company Culture
What defines the culture of your organisation is entirely specific to how you do things, however, there are some benchmarks that must be thought about. First, external culture- meaning how does your organisation deal with external stakeholders, the environment etc. in terms of work that you do or promote etc. Second, internal culture- what are the policies around internal hiring for senior positions (this might promote career trajectories and retain talents), how you treat even candidates (builds an image of the organisation) etc.
G. Measure What Works for Your Company
In the day to day of your organisation, it is important to also track some recruitment metrics to understand how your policies are working. Some things to consider are time to hire, candidate to hire ratio, source of hire, average tech retention time period etc. These metrics will help you understand the areas of focus for your recruitment team.
In our experience, these are a few points to consider while ensuring that you hire and retain top tech talent in Singapore. In the same breath, it is also important to consider revamping others steps in your hiring process, such as the interview process, communication with candidates, incentives and perks structures etc. At the same time, you can also think about engaging professional recruiters to help you, who already have domain specific knowledge and expertise in certain areas.
What are some other unique methods of hiring and retaining top tech talent in Singapore? Drop us a message here and we’ll share more of our unique tech hiring methods with your organization here.
Read More: Why Candidate Assessments Are Beneficial When Hiring Tech Talent