Corporate recruiting teams are getting leaner, while overall tech hiring is rebounding and the competition for highly-desired skills and experience is fiercer than ever.
In the meantime, hiring is ramping back up, and so these teams have the same amount of work, and fewer people to do it. Besides the fear of more layoffs lurking around every corner, the recruiters and HR professionals who still have jobs are also facing the prospect of overwork and burnout.
Recruiters need help, and you’re their best option. Staffing firms and agencies can step in quickly, help plug holes, and be the extension of the team that these professionals desperately need. For the largest clients, their hiring needs can be even more acute, given the amount of money changing hands. They also tend to be the biggest hirers of tech talent, an extremely specialized group of candidates.
The current supply-and-demand imbalance in terms of open tech roles versus the number of existing candidates with these particular sets of skills has created an incredible opportunity for staffing firms to engage with, impress and partner with enterprise-level clients across many key industry verticals.
Like any staffing firm, you have your differentiating factors that you fall back on; the “why choose us over our competitors” pitch. In this piece, we’ll dig deeper into why and how your critical understanding of tech talent and the tech candidate market, especially as it relates to specific industries, can quickly be added to the top of that list. To help you take action as quickly as possible, we also provide selling points, differentiators, and positioning that you can use right now to start building and strengthening relationships with enterprise partners.
Acquiring and Retaining Enterprise Clients Starts with Exceptional Talent
It’s important to keep in mind most of the HR professionals and recruiters at enterprise companies are unlikely to be specialists in tech. Often, the greatest value staffing firms can provide is in demonstrating they understand the different tech specialties and that they have the internal experts who can source, engage and attract top tech talent candidates.
And according to our most recent Industry Tech Jobs Report, competition is heating up right now for top tech talent across a range of verticals. Couple that with HR and recruitment teams forced to operate with smaller headcounts, and the pressure is on for enterprise recruiters.
As of August, there were more than 208,000 postings for tech jobs, spread across a wide range of industries. It’s not just a matter of hiring the right tech specialists as quickly as possible… it’s also about ensuring those specialists have the right skills and experience for the role. That complexity means many companies are turning to staffing partners to target exceptional tech talent.
Here are three strategies to help streamline this complicated process:
Be The Expert Source on What Tech Candidates Want and Need
Targeting exceptional talent goes hand-in-hand with keeping up to date on what tech candidates want with their roles and what they expect from the next organization they work with.
Data from Dice’s upcoming Tech Sentiment Report offers some powerful insights into what candidates are seeking from employers and tech jobs today.
Here are some of our key findings from that report:
- A vast majority (73%) of tech professionals say having the opportunity to work remotely at least three days a week is “very” or “extremely” important when deciding on their next role.
- Three-quarters of tech professionals agree that a lack of pay transparency in a job posting discourages them from applying.
- Tech professionals take an employer’s brand and reputation into deep consideration when looking for their next role or organization. The majority (72%) say they wouldn’t apply to a high-paying role at a company with a bad corporate or culture reputation.
When the Tech Sentiment Report comes out in October, make sure you dig into it to learn as much as you can about what tech professionals are thinking about their careers, their current jobs, and the market overall. Using sentiment data to bring in better talent means understanding the areas that are unlikely to change (i.e., tech professionals will always care about their salaries) and those that may be more likely to shift (i.e., hybrid work preferences, thoughts on culture, etc.). Being able to delineate between the two will help you show, rather than just tell, prospective companies that you’re the tech talent expert. For enterprise clients, this can help convince them that they can lean on you to fill their roles with stellar tech professionals.
Build Your Network Around The Skills In Demand Right Now
The tech hiring landscape is constantly changing, with skills moving up and down in demand seemingly every day. This is especially true for different industry verticals, as depending on both company and industry priorities, needs can differ significantly.
For example, SQL, data analysis and information technology are in especially high demand right now within manufacturing. Whereas last year, when software engineering and development commanded significant attention from employers. Or consider the finance and banking industry and the current struggle for recruiters to find and land tech professionals with backgrounds in extensively-used cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure. As opposed to last year, when software engineering, Java and authorization computing were more center stage. The role of software developer has long been looked at as the incumbent when it comes to tech hiring, with the position rarely falling out of the top three in terms of open postings.
Ensure your recruiting team keeps up with the latest trending data to proactively build your network with in-demand skills (and certainly stay connected with us for the most up-to-date data, insights, and resources). Rather than simply reacting to a client’s needs, you can proactively respond to emails and enter meetings knowing you have tech talent at the ready with the exact skills your prospective clients need.
A lot of hiring in the past tended to rely on “hunches” of what was about to break out in terms of in-demand skills, but savvy staffing firms today no longer rely on such hunches to strategically build their networks. They’re arming themselves with compelling, accurate data from trusted sources. Differentiating yourself from the competition begins with data.
The first thing you need to do to differentiate and attract more talent with the most in-demand skills is improve your job postings. The aforementioned pay transparency is essential. And watch out for tagging your openings as “remote” if you require any in-office time.
Also, make sure you’re spending the time to understand both your client/prospective client’s values and your talent’s values, as alignment is key to a successful hire, according to two-thirds of the HR professionals we surveyed for our Tech Sentiment Report. Real connection and communication are essential to get to the heart of both parties’ values, so watch out for shortcuts. It can be tempting to automate as much as you can, and that can certainly help in a lot of ways; but don’t do it at the expense of real connections, as those can help you land the deal. Understanding values can give you a great sense of what your client is willing to offer, which can only help during negotiations with candidates.
In just a bit, we'll examine positioning a bit deeper, where we provide insight into how to translate these stronger relationships into better sales opportunities
Build Out Positioning Targeted at Enterprise Clients
Now that you know what tech professionals value in employers and jobs today and what enterprise clients are looking for, it’s time to craft effective positioning. Align your sales, recruiting, and marketing teams on how you’re differentiating your staffing firm, engaging with tech talent, and delivering exceptional talent and service to clients as you build out your positioning. If enterprise clients are at the top of your list, then it makes sense for you to customize how you’re presenting yourselves for those clients.
For many years, staffing firms have relied on some “tried and true” positioning to help them land clients. Positioning that tends to focus on elements like “better” service and “better” talent. While these are true, it can be very difficult to quantify or qualify how that impacts prospective clients.
At a high level, it’s key to dig deeper into these elements (which, to be clear, do matter to enterprise clients), and highlight why your talent is better (eg. You have stronger relationships with them because you actually understand what they want, respect their time, communicate well, etcetera), and how you deliver better service (eg. You can deliver that highly engaged and best-fit talent more quickly because of your strong relationships; you follow up at regular intervals with both talent and clients, etcetera).
Elevate this messaging/positioning by taking these points and applying them directly to enterprise clients and the challenges they’re facing. Challenges like a general distrust of recruiters, leaner recruiting teams that are maxed out and have budgets slashed, and more are - as we’ve discussed - putting staffing firms in the catbird seat, so to speak. You can deliver the right talent, that is highly engaged, at the right time. You can make the recruiting teams of your enterprise clients (or prospective clients) look like heroes with shoestring budgets and limited tech stacks.
So make sure what you’re sharing with prospective companies speaks to these elements with confidence. Not a marketer? That’s OK. If you have marketers on your team, ask them for help; if not, these materials don’t need to be anything fancy. They just need to get your expertise across, and the most important part is not the materials, but whether you can talk the talk in your discussions.
And of course, you can always leverage some of our data to help back up your statements (in your sales decks, conversations, etc).
After you have your positioning down, the next step is to determine how best to get the message across to prospective enterprise clients. This can include any combination of the following:
- Website
- Corporate social media profiles
- Corporate email marketing
- Sales conversations
- Sales emails
- Sales LinkedIn and social posts
- Recruiter emails
- Recruiter LinkedIn and social posts
Keep in mind that consistency in positioning across all channels is essential, so if you don’t think you can be consistent across all of them, you can always focus in on a few and make sure you’re doing those extremely well.
But most importantly: It’s absolutely imperative to get your positioning in front of the person who will be making the final decision on whether to move forward with your staffing firm. Identify if this person is your current point of contact. If it isn’t, share materials that your current point of contact can use to sell your staffing firm to key decision makers. The more you streamline this handoff, the more likely you are to get their business.
Overall, there’s nothing really Earth-shatteringly new here. You already know best what makes your clients and prospective clients tick, and you’re already doing a lot every day to build and strengthen these relationships. The difference in what’s being presented here is the scope of opportunity available to you right now in terms of being a go-to resource for enterprise clients on tech talent knowledge and expertise.
Leverage the right data and partners to uplevel your offering for enterprise clients, and use tech candidate acquisition, a massive pain point for companies across nearly every key vertical, and you’ll have a leg up on your competition. And when you’ve landed those fish, use Dice to help you fill your tech talent pipelines and get those clients the best tech candidates, faster.
