In the technical industry, human resource (HR) managers are focused on recruiting the most talented employees because their skills directly influence the development of a company. As a result, the level of competition for talents in this industry is high, and HR managers need to adopt rather unique and innovative strategies and approaches in order to attract professionals. Thus, it is important to discuss specific and innovative approaches to attracting candidates and provide recommendations for HR managers to make their recruiting strategies updated and more effective.
The development of unique approaches to catching new talents in the technology industry started with the active use of social media, conferences, and hackathons for computer programmers and designers. Today, HR managers and recruiters use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram for building relations with potential candidates and promoting job positions through posts and advertisements. Conferences and hackathons are also actively used by recruiters to find appropriate candidates among participants while focusing on their speeches and presentations. Still, these approaches have become almost traditional for the industry in recent years, and more unique techniques include the use of mobile applications and even games. For example, Amazon used the dating application for promoting its hiring campaign (Papic, 2017). Moreover, Uncle Grey used the game Team Fortress 2 in order to find and recruit professional developers (Papic, 2017). These approaches are associated with the trend of using all available online platforms for finding IT and other technical specialists.
There are also strategies in HR management that are oriented toward more long-term goals. According to the Chief Technology Officer of Hootsuite, the company is focused not only on finding talents but also on developing and educating them. The emphasis is put on promoting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) positions among students from high school (Forbes Technology Council, 2016). A similar approach oriented toward educating potential employees in the industry is also used by Cisco because the company organized the Cisco Networking Academy (Forbes Technology Council, 2016). This approach potentially leads to preventing skill shortages in the technology industry in the future.
Recommendations that can be provided in order to improve recruiting strategies and use innovative techniques are associated with the focus on the variety of online platforms for finding talents and spreading job positions. It is possible to use different types of social media for addressing the target audience, including YouTube and Google advertisements. The examples of using applications and games demonstrate that it is important to adapt even those platforms that were not discussed as appropriate for recruiting in the past. Therefore, the key focus should be on determining the target audience and platforms that they use most frequently in order to apply techniques that are typical of marketing.
The examples of using innovative approaches to recruiting in the technical industry support the idea that HR managers need to use unique approaches to finding new talents because of certain skill shortages in the sphere. As a result, if HR managers and recruiters do not try to adapt their techniques to the needs of the employment market, they can fail to attract the most appropriate candidates. From this perspective, the competition in the industry among employers makes recruiters use their creativity and specific marketing approaches in order to achieve their goals and find people who can add value to their company.
References
Forbes Technology Council. (2016). How four successful companies attract tech’s brightest employees. The Forbes. Web.
Papic, T. (2017). 8 creative ways to recruit employees in tech. Web.