4 Steps to Hiring Top Tech Talent
The prevalence of digital transformation has increased significantly over the past decade, creating a heightened need for skilled labor. And with the recent barrage of pink slips coming out of Silicon Valley, and shiny startups going from boom to bust, companies across all industries have an unprecedented opportunity to snatch up the cloud talent they’ve been looking for to meet those key business objectives.
The Harvard Business Review agrees. Here’s what they’re saying:
“Right now, companies have a can’t-miss opportunity to ramp up their cloud ambitions: as tech companies limit head-count and eliminate programs, top talent — not just the bottom 20% performers — are coming on the job market. While many of them are being snapped up quickly, companies should think through how to move quickly when cloud talent becomes available so they can take a big step forward in their cloud capabilities.”
Simply put, now is the time to hire technical talent, upgrade technical capabilities, and future-proof your organization.
But what skills will the ex-Googlers and ex-Meta actually bring to the table? How do you know if you truly have the best candidates – with the job-ready skills you need to fill the skill gaps lurking within your team?
Here are four tips to help you move beyond the veil of the resume and find the best job-ready tech talent.
# 1 – Assess your team
First-things-first, you need to assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses. The goal is to understand your team’s skill gaps and what you need in a potential candidate to fill them.
To do this, you will need to directly observe your staff and survey their skill readiness. To get a real sense of your staff’s skills you can use skills assessments. Cloud Academy offers both hands-on labs and quizzes/exams. Assessments like these can help you to not only define your hiring goals, but also create a skills profile/map for every individual and team.
# 2 – Empower your recruiter for success
As the hiring manager, you will always have the best understanding of what skills and talent you need. But by outlining key requirements of the role, you can empower your recruiters to effectively target, attract, and screen candidates that meet your qualifications.
Information such as skills and certifications, work methodologies, and technology stack, as well as timelines and budget are just some of the details that you can provide to help your recruiter be successful when targeting top tech talent.
# 3 – Testing and Selecting
Now that you have sourced an elite batch of tech candidates, it’s time to assess them. Pre-employment testing can help to quickly identify talented employees who have the right aptitude to succeed on the job.
There are a plethora of platforms available to test candidates on software programming and language skills. But, if you’re interested in testing cloud skills, the market is pretty thin.
Fortunately, Cloud Academy’s pre-hire assessment tool can help you make the best call on a pool of candidates (or even consultants). We offer 250+ “lab challenges” that test practical skills in real cloud environments – including AWS, Azure, and GCP. If you’re considering our pre-hire assessment, you can check out this video for a real-time look at the experience.
# 4 – Maintaining skill readiness
In this fast-moving cloud world, making the most of new and existing skill sets can really help your bottom line. While reskilling and upskilling does take time, it can help to increase productivity and efficiency. In fact, creating a culture of continuous learning is great for everyone involved! Skills readiness positively impacts project readiness, which is good for the team and the company.
Cloud Academy is the standout solution for actually validating skills, proving job-readiness, and connecting training to real business results. Take a look at some of our case studies to see how we’ve helped companies overcome the issues of time that training can present.
The bottom line…
Today’s tech environments are complex, and highly-skilled tech staff are vital to helping organizations thrive through that complexity and beyond. Hiring the right tech candidate is good for retention, team morale and performance, and budget.
By being selective in your hiring process you can avoid quality issues that can result in reliability challenges, cutover issues, and the costly security breaches that can accompany a bad decision. For more on how to hire tech talent, including pre-hire checklists and sample business case letters, take a look at our eBook, “How to Hire Tech Talent in an Economic Downturn.”
