What’s the key to a great tech hire? It’s all about crafting an ideal match between company and candidate. However, that’s a challenging task for recruiters and HR professionals everywhere, because the factors that’ll attract and retain candidates go way beyond salary and perks: today’s employees are influenced by everything from a company’s remote-work policy to its position on social justice movements.
Understanding tech professionals’ perspectives can make or break a company’s ability to make a truly great hire. Dice’s latest Sentiment Report offers crucial insights into tech professionals’ feelings on flexible schedules and remote work satisfaction, salary transparency expectations, the importance of employer brand and reputation, and much more. We hope it will give you a comprehensive grasp of how tech professionals are responding to these and other factors, so you can best meet their needs while simultaneously attracting, hiring, and retaining the best possible technology talent.
While there’s so much more in the full report, here are a few of this year’s most important tech sentiment data points and employment trends:
Remote work remains very important to tech professionals. What do workers want from their jobs? Seventy-three percent of the tech professionals we surveyed said it is “extremely” or “very” important to have the opportunity to work remotely at least three days a week with their next role or organization. Many companies have abruptly pushed tech workers, along with everyone else, to return to the office, throwing expectations (and schedules) into chaos. Tech professionals, knowing the specialized role they play in organizations, want a more collaborative approach to scheduling remote and hybrid work, and they expect continued flexibility from their employers.
Far more tech professionals are likely to change employers. The biggest surprise in the data was the number of tech professionals who said they’re likely to change employers within the next year. Given the lingering fears over the economy and other factors, we expected the number to be flat or to drop year-over-year. Instead, 60 percent of tech professionals said they will likely change employers next year, a shocking 15 percent increase over last year. While excellent news for companies wondering how to recruit top tech talent, provided they can offer the compensation and benefits that tech professionals want, this number should be extremely worrisome for organizations attempting to keep their best talent.
There’s a sizable gap between tech professionals and employers on salary transparency. Pay transparency is becoming increasingly important to tech professionals. The majority of respondents agreed that a lack of salary transparency negatively impacts their perception of a company and discourages them from applying. Despite this, only 44 percent of HR professionals we surveyed said all of their job posts disclose pay information. That’s an issue when it comes to attracting tech talent.
Employer brand and company culture continue to impact tech professionals’ decision to join a new employer. Continuing last year’s trends, nearly 9 in 10 tech professionals feel that employer brands are important when considering new roles, and a majority said they would not apply for a higher-paying role at a company with a bad reputation. Employer brand today risks getting lost in the shuffle of other buzz terms in our world; failing to pay attention to just how important these things are to tech professionals could be a very costly mistake.
We hope you find the information and advice in this report useful, and that it can add both inspiration and substance to your retention and hiring strategies in the months and year ahead.
