Tech professionals continue to take a company’s reputation and corporate culture into deep consideration when looking for their next roles. As with last year’s report, nearly nine in 10 tech professional respondents said employer brand is important when looking for a new employer. What’s more, more than 80% of tech professional respondents said corporate culture is the most important component of an employer’s brand.
To put it simply, tech professionals consider an employer’s brand and reputation to be intensely important when choosing an employer. They’re also interested in working for companies that share their values. Benefits of a good reputation include smoother hiring and a better retention rate.
Recruiter Tips
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Your employer brand is critical when it comes to getting tech professionals to sign the dotted line. Most important in presenting your organization or your client’s organization to tech candidates is the intricacies of what it’s like for tech professionals to work in the organization. That means doing the work of talking through what the organization does to create and sustain a compelling culture, and how it upholds the values that are important to tech professionals. For example, all employees will be focused on salary and health insurance, but many tech professionals will be very interested in your tech stack. In addition, focusing on examples of the projects they will be working on can help give tech professionals a sense of not only the type of work they’ll be doing, but also the level of impact they can make on the company. For a deeper dive into fine tuning elements of your employer brand to appeal to tech professionals, check out our Guide to Employer Branding. It walks you through establishing and strengthening your brand step by step.
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Alignment with tech candidates on mission and values is a key differentiator for organizational success. It’s worth noting that tech professionals place particular emphasis and importance on an employer’s approach to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB).
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Spend time during the recruiting and interview process evaluating each candidate’s values alignment. This entails considering your organization or your client’s organization’s values and seeing if a candidate has mirrored those through their previous experiences. For example, if you’re looking for employees who are committed to an inclusive and collaborative culture, listen to how candidates approach team communication and working with peers.
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Although we continue to see headlines about the shift to more skills-first hiring, tech professionals don’t want employers to focus solely on skills assessments. Keep your candidate evaluations holistic, with time devoted to cultural fit and other important considerations. That said, most tech professionals are open to skills assessments and think they’re effective, advantageous and unbiased. Candidate experience is absolutely key to effective hiring.
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As noted, tech professionals place great value on flexible and remote work benefits. Highlight benefits such as remote schedule opportunities and work-from-home stipends to attract significant a number of flexibility-minded tech professionals.
Employer Brand and Reputation
A tech professional’s perception of an employer’s brand strongly influences their decision to join that organization. Again, almost 90% of respondents to our survey said an employer’s brand is important when considering a new role there. About two-thirds said an employer’s brand is “very” or “extremely” important (this number was largely driven by professionals between 25 and 34 years old).
What does employer branding entail? Simply put, it’s a combination of company culture, corporate reputation, product and purpose, and commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Combined, these factors can determine how easily a company can attract, hire and retain the best tech talent.
Not surprisingly, respondents cited company culture as the most important component of an employer’s brand (84%). This makes sense considering that a vast majority of professionals say culture is crucial for job success, according to research from Gartner last year. Moreover, the majority of tech professional respondents (72%) said they would not apply for a role at a company that had higher pay but a bad corporate or culture reputation. While employees want jobs with good benefits, they also want a good reputation to go with it.
When you are considering a new employer, how important to you is their brand?
Would you apply for a role at a company that offered you higher pay, but had a bad corporate and/or culture reputation?
More HR professionals this year recognize that a good employer brand is critical when planning on how to attract job applicants, with more than eight in 10 indicating their reputation as an employer is “extremely” or “very” effective at influencing candidates to join their organization.
HR professional respondents said they mostly relied on internal employee surveys and reviews, metrics and ratings on sites like Glassdoor to measure the effectiveness of their organization’s reputation. In addition, more HR professionals reported using exit surveys as a bellwether for organizational reputation.
How, if at all, does your organization actively measure effectiveness of its reputation/brand?
Alignment With Mission and Values
Two-thirds of HR professional respondents said a candidate’s alignment with organizational values has a significant impact on the decision to hire. This metric is up significantly year over year, and it makes sense when you consider how values alignment contributes to lower turnover, higher job satisfaction, better teamwork, bigger contributions to an organization, and more diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB).
While this year’s economic uncertainty may have taken some attention away from DEIB, it remains a top priority for tech professionals. In fact, an organization’s commitment to DEIB is “very” or “extremely” important for half of tech professional respondents when considering a new employer (this tracks with national trends). This number was largely driven by professionals between 25 and 44 years old and with 10 years of experience or less.
How much does a candidate's alignment with your organization's vision, mission and values play into the decision to hire?
Skills Assessments
Over the past couple of years, organizations of all kinds have turned to skills assessments for their hiring. And for good reason: Last year, research from McKinsey found that hiring for skills is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education, and over two times more predictive than hiring for work experience.
Interestingly, the tech professionals we surveyed are divided on whether skills assessments are a good predictor of on-the-job performance (only a third agree they are a good predictor, while 40% disagree). Nearly half of respondents disagreed with the notion that skills assessments are the most important aspect of the interview process.
That said, the majority of respondents to our survey (62%) agreed that skills assessments are an appropriate ask from companies hiring tech professionals. Most respondents believe that skills assessments are effective (54%), allow them to differentiate themselves from other candidates (52%), serve as a better way to showcase skills than their educational background (57%) and offer an unbiased way to evaluate candidates (45%).
To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding skills assessments?
Trends in Offered Benefits
Although many employers offer important benefits such as health insurance and wellness programs, there’s still progress to be made on other key fronts, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid work. Using data from our 2022 Tech Salary Survey, we found notable gaps between the benefits tech professionals wanted and what’s currently offered.
The following represents the percentage difference between what tech professionals want and what employers are offering:
Gap in incentives technology professionals want and employers are offering:
The Bottom Line
Tech professionals want to work for companies with great reputations and corporate cultures. They also want a mix of well-established and emerging benefits, such as flexible schedule options. A company may need to work on improving its brand to secure the kind of talent it wants and needs.