4 hot hiring trends — and 4 going cold

A contracting job market in the IT industry over the past two years has influenced the way companies are approaching hiring this year. Even as fears of a possible recession in the near term have eased, according to a recent survey by PwC, many tech leaders are looking for innovative ways to grow without adding permanent staff.

With the Great Resignation in the rear view, along with the talent shortage that followed, just slightly more than a quarter of executives now identify finding and retaining talent a serious risk, according to the PwC survey.

The top strategic priority for companies across all industries, the survey reported, is incorporating new technology into their business model. That means IT leaders are looking to upskill current staff, find and develop talents within that staff, and speed onboarding new employees with specific skillsets.

Those strategic priorities have led to streamlining the application and interviewing process, a change in perspective on what makes a strong applicant, and a shift in how employers and potential hires see contract work, as described here by industry experts involved in identifying and hiring tech talent. 

Hot: Salary and benefit transparency

Ambiguous salary ranges are becoming less common, says Tony Le, director of talent acquisition at Mission Cloud, in part due to new laws designed to enhance fairness and equity by requiring employers to disclose salary ranges and benefits up front.

“Don’t get me wrong, compensation and negotiating salary is still a large part of the hiring process,” Le says, “but with multiple states now having salary transparency as law, and many companies open to remote or hybrid roles in those states, most companies are adopting a country or global salary disclosure in their job descriptions.”

And that’s a good thing, Le argues, making the salary negotiation process more efficient.

“Being transparent about salary ranges now gives both sides an open door to discuss it early, understand expectations, and make salary conversations more honest and open as opposed to guessing what each other is going to ask,” he says. “This will be a space that will continue to evolve for years to come, and new trends and behaviors will emerge because of it.”

The PwC Pulse Survey also suggests companies should lean into the shift and differentiate by amplifying their benefits and making their value proposition clear: “If your benefits are better than the competition’s, that gives you a big advantage in recruiting and retention — but only if potential recruits and applicants know about it.” 

Cold: Traditional job descriptions  

The PWC report recommends moving away from standard job descriptions and organizational structures, and instead seeking out candidates with a range of skills and the desire to learn new ones. “A skills-based approach … has implications across the organization, from designing career paths to building project teams to bonuses, incentives, and performance management.”

Caitlin Wehniainen, director of business development at staffing firm On Cue Hire, notes a shift away from IT employees moving up the ranks, starting with IT and application support. She confirms that companies are looking for a range of competencies in new hires.

“The focus is moving towards flexible roles that can evolve with the needs of the business,” Wehniainen says. “Tech leaders are looking for team members who are not just experts in one narrow field but who have the willingness to take on new challenges as they arise. This is also due to lean teams nowadays and lessening budgets with the rise in inflation and rise in outsourcing. By moving away from rigid structures, companies are better positioned to adapt to market changes and technological advancements. It also makes for a more dynamic and engaging work environment, which can be a significant draw for top talent.”

Ryan Worobel, CIO at LogicMonitor, says the company is moving away from trying to find candidates that check every box. 

“Skills development simply can’t move as quickly as technology,” he says. “Instead, we’re asking questions like, ‘Is this person excited to take on this specific challenge?’ That way we’re selecting highly motivated people who commit to being nimble, not honed in on one specific skill set that could very well be phased out.”

Hot: Diversifying your DEI efforts

Incorporating metrics into your DEI efforts can help improve practices that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, benefiting employees and the business, says Chetna Mahajan, chief digital and information officer at Amplitude.

“It’s crucial to emphasize the importance of building a team with diverse backgrounds,” Mahajan says. “The research and data support this, and simply meeting the minimum diversity efforts is no longer sufficient. We assess DEI metrics within my organization biannually, focusing on gender, age, and other parameters to inform our hiring strategy.”

Ed Thompson, founder and CEO of Uptimize, which helps companies find and hire neurodivergent workers, suggests that hiring underrepresented staff with a range of neurotypes, such as autism, ADHD, or dyslexia, can offer competitive benefits, compared to companies who may unintentionally exclude people who think differently. 

Thompson points to the example of an autistic technology expert he’s worked with who has multiple patents and developed important projects for NASA and Texas Instruments. And yet despite those successes, he would likely be looked over in a traditional hiring process. 

“If his employer was looking only for personality hires, his talents would’ve never been put to use,” Thompson says. “A big opportunity would have been missed.”

Cold: Adding new technology jobs

Occupations in technology fell by about 20,000 in April, with about 180,000 new jobs posted last month, according to the latest jobs report from trade association CompTIA. “Employers and job seekers continue to navigate a shifting labor market,” says Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, in a release.

But some perspective is in order. Despite the ongoing news of layoffs at major tech companies, there’s still a skills gap, and tech workers across industries are in high demand.

“About 377,500 openings are projected each year, on average,” for IT staff positions, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, “due to employment growth and the need to replace workers who leave the occupations permanently.” 

Despite recent dips in hiring, tech jobs are expected to grow at double the rate for overall employment in the US, according to CompTIA, with total overall tech employment at about 6.4 million.

Hot: Looking inward

Sometimes the best option for meeting a staffing need may be to rethink how you look at your current group, says LogicMonitor’s Worobel. Once you’ve got a strong team in place, it can pay dividends to shift roles and functions that play to their strengths.

“The best thing I’ve done for my IT staffing this year is not to assume that all of my wants and needs will be solved with external hires,” he says. “It’s easy to default to a wish list of head count to make all your staffing problems go away — but often, your organization is already harboring amazing talent that needs to be in the right place.”

A Wall Street Journal report in May found that to meet needs around AI, employers are increasingly transitioning existing staff to work on AI-related projects instead of making new hires.

“Recognizing the significant costs of hiring and retraining, along with the damage to morale from layoffs, executives are strategically investing to develop and retain talent,” according to PwC’s recent survey. “They feel good about their current talent pools. Nearly three-fourths (74%) agree or strongly agree that they successfully attract and retain the talent they need.”

Cold: Complicated hiring approaches

Extended application processes are being reimagined as more streamlined, data-driven approaches that helps secure in-demand talent, says Puneet Bhasin, chief information and digital officer at Unum.

“A shorter process has reduced candidate drop-off rates,” Bhasin says. “And leveraging data-driven recruitment strategies allows us to identify talent hotspots in order to target outreach efforts in geographical areas with high concentrations of qualified IT professionals. It also allows us to better optimize recruitment channels so we can focus resources on the most effective channels for streamlining the hiring process and enhancing the candidate experience.” 

Mission Cloud’s Le says the single most impactful shift in hiring his company has adopted is a consistent interview process across all roles and departments.

“We rinse and repeat these components across all roles from junior to executive,” Le says. “We ensure our process includes elements of defining the role, selling the company, evaluating technical ability, values alignment, and a bar raiser. This allows us to be predictable in our hiring timeline, and set expectations across the company and with the candidates. Leaders are still able to customize their questions and their evaluation, but by having buy-in from the top down in structuring this process, we are able to ensure a fair, equitable, and consistent process that has truly differentiated our ability to make quality hiring decisions quickly.”

When hiring developers, Mike Saccotelli, director of solution delivery at SPR, favors short, in-person coding exercises versus assigning coders problems to work on from home over several days. Bucci says the move provides enough of what he needs to see — and the candidate is less likely to ghost you. 

“We use some simple coding problems that shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes to complete and focus on basic fundamentals of the language,” he says. “It enables us to get candidates through our hiring pipeline more quickly and enables us to close on candidates in a more timely manner before we lose them to a competing opening elsewhere.” 

Hot: More contract work

According to surveys from staffing firm Robert Half, 62% of IT managers plan to increase their hiring of interim roles to fill the skills gap and offer support for key projects. The company’s research also suggests 43% of IT pros are now open to contract work.

Those findings track with what James Lloyd-Townshend, chairman and CEO at IT staffing firm Tenth Revolution Group, says he’s seeing in 2024. 

“It may still be too early to be conclusive here, but I think we’re seeing a decline in the prizing of permanent roles over contract or freelance roles,” he says. “Our own research suggests that tech professionals are open to both in equal measure in 2024 — where typically permanent roles have previously been the clearer preference. It looks like businesses are also increasingly coming around to this perspective because of the immediate value IT contractors can add with digital transformation projects.”

Cold: Relying on education and experience alone

Firms can no longer hold out for tech talent with the university degrees and years on the job that might have been considered table stakes in recent years, argues Kim Pope, COO at talent search firm WilsonHCG.

“Traditional forms of hiring that are based solely on education and experience is a trend that’s going by the wayside,” she says, due in part to, “declining birth rates, aging populations, drops in college enrollment, and accelerating skills requirements.”

The CompTIA jobs report showed nearly half of all technology job postings didn’t require a four-year degree.

Instead, there’s a new focus on fostering talent based on fundamental competencies, Pope says, prompting employers to rethink education and industry-specific experience. “Now, conversations are taking place around thinking more holistically about talent, including external talent and a more flexible workforce underpinned by skills-first tactics and the ability to develop skillsets internally.”