Talent Hunt: The New Reality of the Recruitment Business
Over the recent years, the previously single labor market has split into two distinct sectors: one for high-skilled IT specialists and another for all the other businesses. The realities of labour market are fundamentally changing with highly skilled positions, especially in the technical fields, becoming harder to fill and with retainment rates for such specialists on the fall. The Internet has changed the way jobseekers respond to labor market trends giving them the ability to be more active than ever before.
During the last decade we have witnessed an increase of global competition and labor cost pressure, combined with a general shift in the workforce demographics: greater percentage of older workers, substantial generational differences, frequent changes in skill requirements, “war for talents”, labor availability concerns, and increased digitalization of most aspects of work life. There is a rapid increase of the use of digital robots and virtual personal assistants. Nearly 70% of the companies are using digital media in their business activities and about 40% of companies have contingent employees because they cannot find enough qualified full-time specialists. Full-time employment is replaced by more flexible alternatives. Even candidates in highly specialized roles are increasingly working remotely. In 2016 around 10% of people around the world were actively looking for jobs abroad. The top reasons for relocating were the following: gaining personal and working experience, better career opportunities, an overall attractive job offer, better standard of living, ability to leave in a different culture, learning new language, etc.
In EU countries and other industrialized nations, every company has virtually become a tech company. Increasingly, software development is a core part of every industry and a key driver of innovation. It is interesting to note in this sense that most software developers don’t work in software firms in the traditional sense anymore. Diminishing supply of technical talent is bound to slow down EU economic growth. In most European countries, Bulgaria among others, the hardest positions to fill include Software Engineers as well as other high-demand technology-related positions, more specifically: Senior Software Engineers, Senior System Engineers, IT Support Analysts, Solution Architects, .NET Developers, Data Scientists, and so on. Another tendency is the increased use of various specialized software, leading to fragmentation of the workforce. The software development roles also become increasingly narrow, such as a Java Developer, PHP, Web Developer, Front End Developer, Python Developer, Dot Net, Java Script, and many others. As a result, many new and unique job titles appear on the market every day. To attract such skilled candidates, companies need to start offering increased flexibility for workers and find new ways of outsourcing the any outstanding tasks.
Significant number of companies have already turned to talent outside of their ranks by hiring contingent workers, contractors, consultant, and freelancers.
It is pivotal for HR experts to understand in details how technology is impacting their respective field, take advantage of digitalization trend in the business in order to optimize it, shape their companies’ value proposition regarding type of available employment, and realign the overall HR lifecycle.
Author: Gergana Mashal CEO – Radioactive International Recruitment
