Author: Neil Brogan

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost of hiring a new employee is $4,129, although this does not account for onboarding and training costs, which can be quite significant. In fact, the cost of hiring new staff was higher for more complex, higher-paying positions. This means that it’s fair to surmise that the hiring costs for a IT and tech positions are significantly higher.

With competition for top software developer talent growing fiercer all the time, you might consider using a local IT staffing agency to streamline your search. Local staffing agencies often excel at some aspects of recruiting, but using them comes with at least one important caveat.

Within three years, there will be a million more computing jobs than eligible applicants, according to Code.org estimates. This means top software developers and engineers will continue to be in high demand. They’ll be awash in opportunities and offers, and can take their pick. This causes hiring managers to try and find new ways to get their attention. How can they hire top software engineers on a startup budget? How can they find them on any budget? Companies, regardless of size, have P&L considerations. So how can you land enterprise talent in a competitive market while ensuring you get the best possible value?

In 2016, 43% of employed Americans reported that they worked remotely at least part of the time. That’s according to a 2016 Gallup poll of over 15,000 people, and these figures represent a 4% increase over 2012’s figures. The work-at-home figure was even higher in the tech industry, where 57% of workers indicated they worked remotely on a regular basis.

In today’s tech-centric world, many jobs are performed remotely. According to GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, 3.7 million Americans hold a position that allows for remote work. A survey of Fortune 1000 companies revealed that this trend is even more widespread on a global level, with workers working remotely as much as 50 to 60 percent of the time.

A recent meeting with your software development team leaders left you feeling a bit discouraged. You learned that while you have some very talented developers, most of these individuals are specialists. Specialists tend to have a very narrow range of expertise. For you, this scenario results in low skill redundancy and skill gaps that create major challenges for your team. Now, your team leaders are struggling to coordinate expertise, and the few individuals who are more versatile are getting overworked.

The rapid growth of the tech industry has made recruiting and hiring software developers increasingly difficult. For every one developer who’s available to work, there are five open positions. There are also dozens of unique programming languages and tech specialties to consider. Evaluating a software developer’s skill set and talents can be a real challenge. The popularity of agile development has made the practice far more collaborative than it was in the past. Collaborativity has benefits, but is also makes it a bit less likely that a developer can take true ownership of a project. So projects listed on developer resumes may not be accurately representative of their talents. Plus, the fast-evolving nature of this field means that work samples are of limited use. Standards change dramatically and quickly. This represents an added layer of complexity for talent acquisition.

You’ve recently received a wave of calls from prospective clients, and your company is suddenly faced with more work than it can complete in a timely manner. Outsourcing isn’t a viable option because the project is sensitive in nature and requires collaboration with a couple of in-house experts. Instead, you’re considering calling in a team of developers to work on-site with your team (aka insourcing). You’re confident this will be an effective solution, but there’s a problem. You need strict confidentiality, and you’re nervous because on-site talent would have access to lots of sensitive information. If that information got into your competitors’ hands, it could ruin your business!

Your company’s sales team has been in overdrive and they’ve just landed a series of new contracts. This is great news, but it also means that you need to hire new tech staff to satisfy your clients’ needs. But you’ve noticed that the software developer hiring process can be very inefficient. A common issue is that new hires are slow to get up to speed, and you need a tech team that runs at close to maximum efficiency from the start. This is where temporary staff can be extremely beneficial to your company. Temporary staff are chosen through a hiring process designed to ensure you get the best results as soon as they start.

How does staff augmentation compare to managed services, and how do these staffing models impact your tech and software development projects?

Your company has invested a significant sum of money and countless man hours into the creation and implementation of an enterprise software application. The goal is to streamline your company’s operations while increasing productivity and improving your bottom line. You called in a team of tech experts to help implement the app. But they left before your in-house tech team had a chance to ask about maintenance and updates.

When you dive into a new project, you expect that that project will go according to plan, remaining on time and on budget. But the reality is very different, with a vast majority of tech projects seeing delays and budget overruns. According to a 2016 study by The Standish Group, less than one-third of the projects performed in a one-year timeframe were completed on time and on budget. Another study revealed that 17 percent of tech projects go awry to the degree that they threaten the company’s very existence.

You’ve invested lots of resources in developing a talented team of software developers, but a recent company merger generated several new (and urgent!) tech projects that surpass what your in-house resources can handle. In short, it’s just not humanly possible for your tech team to address everything in a timely manner. But here’s the dilemma: you don’t need to expand your tech team on a long-term basis, so new hires aren’t the solution. And temporary staff can be very hit-or-miss in terms of their skill level, productivity and overall effectiveness. You could outsource the project, but you’ve had some bad experiences with this in the past, so you’re very hesitant to do so again.

In many fields and professions, recruiters and HR professionals routinely request work samples; samples that are representative of the individual’s skill and abilities. But the reality is that this approach just doesn’t work for most segments of today’s tech industry.

In February of 2014, Gartner made a prediction: within two years, the IT industry would see a movement to abandon traditional ERP supersystems in favor of a hybrid postmodern approach. This new strategy represents a shift away from the massive ERP suite in favor of a hybrid arrangement that blends cloud-based services and smaller, task-specific, in-house applications. Gartner predicts that by 2018, up to 90 percent of companies will still lack a solid postmodern implementation strategy.

With ubiquitous connectivity and increasingly cheap hardware, digital technology is increase revenue for brick and mortar stores through better customer experiences that result in better retention and greater profit per customer. In a post and video about their consumer insight tool, the SAP® blog mentioned some statistics about one nationwide retailer that used consumer data […]