Finding technical talent is a persistent problem for HR managers.
Today, 3 in 4 employers report difficulty filling roles, reflecting sustained scarcity and rising specialization demands, according to McLean & Co. The company also found that 71% of C‑suite leaders report recruiting specifically to close growing skills and competency gaps.
But what roles HR managers need filled and where those who might fit those roles might be found are constantly changing. “Add to this the reality that many organizations still struggle to define what they truly need, leading to unclear job requirements and inconsistent screening,” said Adrian Shackelford, practice lead in human resources advisory services at McLean. “Together, these forces make the problem both persistent and increasingly complex.”
McLean also found that core skills are expected to shift by 39% over the next five years, meaning organizations are constantly hiring for moving targets.
Here’s what HR managers can do to speed up their time-to-hire for these difficult to fill roles.
An old problem evolves and persists
The need to hire technically skilled candidates has intensified in recent years, said Shackelford; “The technology landscape continues to advance faster than talent can keep up, widening long‑standing skills gaps.”
And since the landscape is changing so quickly, those doing the recruiting may not know exactly what they’re looking for, Shackelford added.
To add to the difficulty, talented people are probably not hanging around on LinkedIn anymore, said Bryce Murray, principal of HoganTaylor Talent, because they’ve been inundated by recruiters. “They don’t respond on LinkedIn because they’ve either deleted LinkedIn or abandoned it,” he said.
Complicating matters, tech talent hiring is often done by people who aren’t well versed in those fields, said Murray: “Because you’re not an engineer yourself, it’s just more difficult because you don’t know how to articulate what you’re looking for.” That also means that the HR person in charge of hiring might not be able to detect if the person can really do the job, or is just faking their way through interviews. That can lead to possibly hiring the wrong person, spending time and resources onboarding them, and then needing to start all over again once the truth comes to light.
Finding the right technical talent, quickly
Skills-based hiring is becoming more popular.
According to McLean’s HR Trends data, it’s the top most implemented emerging practice. It helps organizations broaden talent pools by emphasizing “demonstrated capability over rigid credentials,” said Shackelford.
Successful organizations are also diversifying channels, strengthening employer branding, and leveraging internal and external marketplaces, instead of taking a “post and pray” approach, she said.
And because top talent has been inundated by recruiters — often those who are off target with their approaches — recruiters need to do more legwork to know if the person they’re reaching out to both has the right skills and would want to work for their organization.
For example, it wouldn’t take much digging in a potential target’s background to see they would never work for, say, a company in the defense industry, Murray said. That’s especially when it wouldn’t have taken long to see that a candidate is “probably not aligned with doing that kind of work in that industry. They get pretty annoyed about it.”
Companies should also take a page from tech giants and have an “always be recruiting” mindset when it comes to technical talent, Murray said, so they have a constant pipeline of potential candidates. “For certain types of talent that are fundamental to the success of an organization, you should always be recruiting for that talent, not just when you need it,” he said. That means categorizing and building those relationships and being known as an employer of choice.
That way “you don’t have as much of a Herculean effort every time you need to fill a role,” he said.
