With the competition for business-critical technology candidates in the UAE tougher than ever, what can employers change in their approach to make sure that every hire is the ‘right’ one?
PwC’s 2019 annual CEO survey found that 80% of CEOs worried about the availability of candidates with business-critical skills; likewise, a similar survey found that CEOs ranked attracting and retaining key talent as their no.1 challenge.
As a tech employer in 2020, if you want to be confident that you are attracting and retaining the best possible talent for your organisation, it’s time to start applying science to your recruitment process. In this article, I will explain how.
Common Recruiting Issues
Several common recruiting issues tend to occur when hiring for tech roles, and these prevent your organisation from truly developing and growing in the way you had planned.
One of the primary barriers to an organisation’s growth is a lack of employees who possess the right business-critical skills, such as a chief risk officer, head of digital analytics, or a data protection officer.
The reasons behind making an unsuitable hire in these key roles can be one of many. Sometimes during the interview process, hiring managers ignore subtle clues that the candidate might not be entirely suitable, but the pressure of having a vacancy overrules their instinct. Sometimes managers are focused on other issues within the business; they lack confidence in their hiring ability or are simply too short on time to give 100% to the recruitment process.
Not only are tech hiring managers and employers enlisting the help of recruiters to hire for business-critical roles, but recruiters are also using increasingly advanced methods to identify and attract the right talent too.
The Scientific Approach
There are many recruiters out there who regard hiring as an intuitive approach, rather than a science, and they don’t necessarily locate the best talent in this process.
While this process might be adequate for finding entry-level positions, for key roles there needs to be a more involved, scientific method.
A typical recruitment process may involve the hiring manager or the recruiter focusing on whether the tech candidate has the right skills for the role in question and perhaps some general career questions.
For business-critical roles, it should look something like this –
- Your hiring manager or recruiter will undertake an innovative search based on carefully identified requirements that are necessary to the role and your company.
- An agreed methodology is used to find a shortlist of the best possible candidates for the role.
- Candidates are selected on an amalgamation of hard and soft skills (often, merely possessing the required qualifications will be enough for a recruiter to select a candidate when in reality, their soft skills, emotional intelligence, ultimate career goal and personal goals need to be taken into consideration).
The science behind the approach comes from the tried and tested knowledge your recruiter or hiring manager will have ascertained over time – what kind of people work well in your organisation, and what specific type of employees are you looking to attract to hit a particular goal.
Scientific recruiting is the practice of using data to identify precisely ‘what works’ and to repeat this process – this can only come from years of experience recruiting in the tech field.
It is a step up from other reduced models of recruiting which do not produce the highest standard of results – which is why it’s ideal for executive search hires.
Using Science for Executive Hires
When you employ a recruiter for an executive search for a business-critical role, you need to be 100% confident that the search will produce the ‘right’ candidate.
With recent research highlighting that 46 per cent of all new hires fail within 18 months, for executive hires, having to re-hire can be very costly indeed.
Have they been in business long enough that they know from previous experience exactly what kind of candidates will drive your organisation forward?
Does your recruiter have a dedicated research team who customise each requirement of the new hire?
Do they have the knowledge and foresight, based on data, to be able to predict what your tech organisation will need going forward?
Evidence-based hiring is what is needed for clarity that your next executive hire is the best possible person for the job, which is the way we operate at Flow Financial & Technology.
If you have been disappointed with the way new hires have not worked out in the past, is it time for your organisation to adopt a more involved, scientific approach to hiring for business-critical roles?
Finally
If you are looking for skilled candidates for business-critical and executive roles in the banking and finance technology sector, we can help.
We use an expert methodology to ensure that your organisation finds the exact talent you have been looking for: take a look at our recruitment process and get in contact with us about your next vacancies here.
Thanks,
About Flow Talent
Flow Talent have been sourcing the best Banking, Technology & Financial Services professionals locally and internationally for leading organisations across the Middle East region since 2018.
The Middle East is a dynamic and growing market where identifying top talented professionals for your organisation is highly competitive and we offer a range of recruitment services to help you with this.
To find out more get in contact with one of our team today.