Ten Talent Realities For Finding, Keeping, And Developing Talent in 2023

The challenge of employees quitting has been exacerbated by the Great Attrition, which many firms are currently experiencing as tech talent rushes out the door to explore better opportunities. Additionally, remote work culture has increased the chances for an employee to quit since location is no longer a barrier to finding jobs.

Building a strong talent strategy is one of the most critical steps a company can take. Regardless of the hurdles in finding tech talent, organizations can only survive in this digital era if their teams are technologically proficient. As a result, tech talent should be one of the top priorities of companies.

This article will highlight in-demand skills that must be present in a company's tech workforce and the top 10 things required to find, retain, and develop the tech talent and HR priorities for 2023.

In-Demand Skills

The fast-growing tech industry primarily requires two kinds of skills: technical skills and soft skills.

Tech Skills

Software development 

Software developers are responsible for using programming languages, tools, platforms, and other technologies to create apps, debug, test, etc. Software development jobs include multimedia programmers, IT consultants, web developers, and more. Software developers play a crucial role in modern companies. They ensure that applications and websites run smoothly and efficiently.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is focused on creating intelligent agents, which are systems capable of reasoning, learning, and acting autonomously. A big selling point of AI technology is its ability to automate tasks that would otherwise require human knowledge or expertise, like pattern recognition or data classification. This can increase productivity and efficiency while reducing errors.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity protects computer networks and systems from cyberattacks. Jobs in cyber security typically require software development engineers, cyber risk analysts, and network engineers. Improving data management and customer confidence are benefits of a successful cyber security strategy. Cybersecurity professionals are some of the most in-demand workers in the current job market.

Networking and IT 

Networking and IT skills are useful in cloud computing because network administrators and IT administrators work to keep computer systems running smoothly. These skills primarily include:

• Cloud administration
• Maintaining local area network (LAN)
• Wide area network (WAN)
• Troubleshooting

Cloud

Cloud computing is popular because it is easy to use and provides dependable results. Cloud technology professionals deeply understand the concepts and technologies involved in cloud computing. They also work on assembling and evolving cloud platforms using common models such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

DevOps

DevOps is a combination of Development and Operations. It helps to manage software development and IT teams. DevOps aims to test and release software. Some well-known companies that use DevOps are Netflix, Amazon, Adobe, and Flipkart. DevOps methods are Agile, Kanban, and Scrum. The benefits of DevOps are increased employee productivity, and it can help reduce costs.

Soft Skills

Adaptability

Being adaptable in the workplace means working in different environments quickly and efficiently and learning new skills as needed. This ability to adjust to new surroundings and learn new things is important in any job.

Communication

Communicating your ideas and opinions to others is a crucial skill to have. A good candidate must be able to listen well, effectively present their ideas, and also write clearly.

Time management

Good time management skills are essential for any company as it shows that employees can be trusted to manage their work and meet deadlines efficiently.

Critical thinking

Companies test their employees' critical thinking skills to see if they are up to solving problems. Critical thinking requires employees to use their imagination, experience, and research to solve issues. It is a complex process that can be difficult to do under pressure. However, with practice, critical thinking can become second nature.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence, more popularly known as EQ, is the skill set that allows individuals to understand and manage their emotions. Furthermore, people with high emotional intelligence can understand and relate to the emotions of others. This ability is incredibly important to communicate better, collaborate more effectively, and display strong leadership qualities - three key skills essential for any successful individual in today's workforce.

Top 10 Considerations to Find, Retain, and Develop Tech Talent 

There is a lot of tech talent in the market. But, with high demand and competition, finding the right candidates for your open positions can take time and effort. Here are the top 10 considerations for finding, retaining, and developing a company's tech talent pool. 

Multifaceted talent management

With the competition for top tech talents in the corporate world becoming increasingly fierce, attracting great talent is only half the battle. Companies must also focus on retaining such talent by creating a work environment that embraces inclusivity and diversity. Tech talent should have access to different career paths to develop the skills they value most. These factors are especially important in a hybrid work and remote work setting.

Companies must also invest in the "recruit to retire lifecycle" to ensure that talent does not leave quickly. This begins with creating a virtual powerhouse, a dedicated team responsible for overseeing the workforce, from recruiting and onboarding to generating new career pathways and continually upgrading capabilities. 

This comprehensive talent approach involves three areas:

Workforce

Create a precise awareness of the talent gaps, establish a practical plan to bridge the gaps, and develop a recruiting approach that focuses on applicant experience.

 Work model

 Implement a working model that enables small groups of engineers to tackle intriguing challenges without being constrained by layers of managerial oversight.

Workplace

Foster talent development via diversity and a supportive culture, which is especially crucial in hybrid and remote models. This can be done by assisting individuals in developing their most valuable asset: their abilities.

Bridging the talent gap

While 58% of businesses assess their talent gaps, they often need to pay more attention to how significant those gaps are. To formulate effective talent strategies, businesses need to take stock of the capabilities they already have versus the capabilities they require to generate value. This is especially important when it comes to cloud talent. 

Businesses only evaluate talent at the role level instead of assessing individual skills. Workforce planning should be frequently undertaken to keep up with changing demands and variations in organizational structure.

Advantages of Talent Gap Analysis:

• Enhances and defines a candidate's talents with company demands
• Evaluates the critical skills employees need to develop
• Assists in the recruitment process by defining the need for skills or interests that present workers lack

Focusing on the candidate onboarding experience

Since the first few days on the job are critical to the new employee experience, the onboarding process should be as smooth as possible. A great onboarding experience increases the chance of retention. Employing software to automate onboarding is a great way to improve a candidate's experience. A few key features to implement include a customized interface, instructions on the software's main features, and a digital handbook or guide to help the candidate get up to speed. By making it as easy as possible to onboard, the company will be more desirable to future candidates and existing employees. 

Ways of improving the onboarding experience are: 

a) Ensure that engineers and other relevant roles are included in the hiring team for tech talent. Potential candidates want to interact with fellow technologists during the interview process.

b) Good candidates are ambitious and have many choices. Create an interview and assessment process to help stakeholders decide in as little as one day. Use platforms such as HackerRank to assess the candidates' skills before they even arrive for the interview.

c) Recruits should have a designated onboarding point of contact to help them find their way around the company. A smooth transition will increase the likelihood that talented employees will stay with the company for the long haul.

Developing an employee value proposition (EVP)

Money is essential, but the best candidates are usually more excited about using cutting-edge technologies, developing their skills, being part of a company that values technology, working towards a worthwhile goal, and, most importantly, taking on fascinating and stimulating challenges. To attract and retain employees, it's essential to have a strong value proposition for potential recruits.

Say a public sector company wants to increase the number of applicants and shorten the time it takes to fill vacancies. As part of its EVP, it could focus on a mission to benefit society by creating online services for all citizens, enhancing the citizen experience, and making administrative services more efficient and reliable.

Programs and company culture must support the EVP to enable it to take root. If talent notices a mismatch between the claimed EVP and the ground reality, they will quit and, worse, warn others. This may be disastrous because job seekers often learn about organizations through third-party sites like Blind or Glassdoor.

Building roles in-house

Organizations enable employees to acquire the abilities they need through skill-building activities to achieve strategic goals and establish a competitive edge. The skill development process begins with defining and recording the organization's essential competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors), identifying skill shortages, and planning to hire those skills inside the business.

Skill building benefits the company and its people by:

• Improving individual and organizational performance
• Helping individuals and organizations prepare for the future
• Employee engagement and retention
  

Building empowered teams

Empowerment not only influences team involvement but also impacts productivity. According to Zenger Folkman's research, only 4% of employees are willing to put in extra effort when empowerment is low, whereas 67% are eager to take the initiative when they are empowered. The willingness of employees to give more at work has a substantial influence on production.

Teams can be empowered by:

Giving team members responsibility

Empowerment is correlated with higher job satisfaction and performance. When team members feel they have control over their work, they will feel more empowered. Therefore, leaders must give team members more responsibility at work.

Recognition, rewards, and encouragement

Acknowledgment and support for the staff when they observe additional effort. Leaders that were successful at expressing gratitude had higher levels of empowerment.

Removing obstacles and unhealthy norms

Exceptional tech talent requires a working environment more conducive to their skillset to reach their full potential.

The most successful companies remove obstacles that might stand in the way of their best developers. They invest in high-quality, reusable code and give their engineering team the best planning and development tools to simplify their work.

They attempt to automate over 80% of testing and make it continuous, with development occurring only once test cases are produced. Leading firms also invest in low-code and no-code platforms, allowing the average business user to design apps without software knowledge, thus allowing experienced developers to focus on more challenging tasks.

One possible strategy to explore is the site-reliability-engineering (SRE) strategy, which assigns specialized champions responsible for eliminating toil for developers. This helps improve efficiency and overall productivity.

Emphasizing developer happiness

To retain top talent, companies must create an atmosphere in which developers are recognized as innovators rather than code writers and are active players in the business.

According to McKinsey's Organizational Health Index research, IT operations overall score far below the average in terms of organizational "health" (the ability to align around and implement strategic goals).

Business leaders can change this situation by making the quality of the developer experience a core criterion of success and closely monitoring job satisfaction using data. Microsoft, for example, utilized calendaring data (among other sources) to identify that management practices linked to meetings were lowering engineers' job satisfaction in the company's devices segment. 

One of the most significant metrics to monitor is how many developers bring other developers to the company. This signals how strongly employees believe in the company's vision and are comfortable with the work culture.

Establishing alternate career paths

Excellent engineers should be expected to turn into something other than people managers. More than two-thirds of developers want to avoid becoming people managers. Instead, they improve their abilities and explore increasingly complicated digital problems.

Leading firms offer professional progress and attractive job opportunities through lateral career moves. For instance, employees at Amazon are encouraged to explore different products, channels, and responsibilities to learn new skills and build knowledge in numerous business areas. Thus, digital companies often establish managerial and non-managerial career routes for tech talent. 

Similarly, developers at Salesforce relocate laterally across several products to acquire expertise. The technical track should be arranged around distinct "job architectures" and expectations for progress at each level.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

Gender-diverse firms have a 25% greater probability of outperforming less diverse organizations in financial performance. On the other hand, ethnically diverse companies are 36% more likely to perform better than other organizations.   

In a similar vein, tech talent wants a diversified workplace culture. Valuable tech talent may decline a job offer or even refuse to apply to organizations that they consider to be non-inclusive. 

For this purpose, DEI leaders implement structural de-biasing systems, such as ensuring that DEI is regularly assessed and choices are reviewed ”for example, to track gender diversity in hiring, retention, assessment, and remuneration. Top companies supplement this by establishing explicit hiring goals, clarifying standards for candidate pools, and trying to eliminate unconscious bias. 

Some organizations are beginning to employ AI to assist and eliminate biased terminology in evaluation criteria and create incentives and metrics for leaders to model fair conduct.

Top priorities for HR in 2023 

Effectiveness of leaders and managers

 60% of HR leaders prioritize leader and manager effectiveness, and 24% believe their leadership development strategy does not equip leaders for the future of work.

As businesses and society grow, so do expectations for what leaders must accomplish. Thus, their responsibilities are more challenging. Leaders must be more real, compassionate, and adaptable. Despite efforts to instill dedication, bravery, and confidence in leaders, "human" leaders remain scarce.

Society needs more "human" leaders who are genuine, caring, and can easily adjust to new situations as they arise. Leaders who embody these qualities are often more successful in meeting challenges.

Change management and organizational design

This is a major priority for 53% of HR directors, and 45% of employees are tired of the constant upheaval at the workplace.

Digital revolutions, economic insecurity, and political conflicts have all resulted in significant upheaval and change. As a result, organizational design and change management remain key priorities for CHROs, particularly now as firms are dealing with the consequences of too much change and uncertainty.

HR directors must also assist tech talent in navigating change and mitigating the effects of change on their job and, more importantly, their well-being.

Enhancing Employee experience

47% of HR leaders prioritize the employee experience, while 44% say their firms lack appealing career routes. 

Many human resource professionals need help identifying the internal changes needed to advance their employees' careers.

Typically, career growth proceeds in three stages:

a) Set a trajectory and communicate the rewards and obligations of the position.

b) Look for in-role opportunities for prospective new roles.

c) Identify internal roles to achieve objectives.

However, the traditional path to a career needs to be clarified as the ways of work are changing. With the decreased hours spent in offices, potential career paths could be more apparent, and current skills need to be updated. Employees must be equipped for future roles, and current options must meet employee needs. Thus, HR professionals must now create the best-fit careers for people.

Recruiting

This is a top priority for 46% of HR directors, and 36% believe their current sourcing techniques need to be improved to get the talent they want. 

Regardless of broader macroeconomic conditions, 50% of firms expect talent rivalry to expand considerably in the next six months. This implies that recruitment executives must reprioritize recruiting tactics to line with current company demands, plan for numerous possible scenarios in this changing market, and confidently make data-driven choices.

A focus on three techniques supports talent and business outcomes:

1. Create an intelligence-driven sourcing capacity.
2. Create a fair internal labor market.
3. Structure onboarding for engagement.

Future of work

This is a key priority for 42% of HR leaders, and 43% still need a clear plan for the future of work.

The phrase "future of work" is still associated with a remote and hybrid workforce. However, while this shift is significant for many firms, it is only one component of the issue. Workforce planning, or predicting future personnel demands, is crucial to a future of work strategy and a major responsibility for HR directors. 

However, today's workforce planning is distant from reality, and conventional solutions for countering the disruptive landscape are unsuccessful. HR leaders need new ways to plan their workforce. 

Conclusion

To find, retain, and develop talent in 2023, there are ten realities companies need to be aware of. Primarily, it is essential to have a strong foundation of technical expertise.

With the ever-growing digital landscape, companies need to make a concerted effort to hire qualified tech talent to stay competitive and reap the value promised by digital transformation. However, large companies will only be able to do this effectively if they're willing to rethink their HR strategy. This is because tech talent thinks and acts differently than other employees and thus requires a different approach to recruitment and retention.

Cogent Infotech has an expert recruitment team and utilizes AI to filter the top 5% of tech talent for companies. Visit our website for more information on recruiting and retaining tech talent.