A 2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap report from Gartner Inc. noted that 64% of IT executives cite talent shortages as the most significant barrier to adopting emerging technology. While IT leaders agree that their team is working more closely with recruiters to implement workplace technologies, locating the talent to execute and support is a significant challenge. As the demand for technology remains high in 2022, skilled IT workers will be hard to find and challenging to keep.

Staffing and recruiting agencies feel the insatiable demand from the market and pressure to fill as many vacancies as swiftly as possible. Meanwhile, they must also address potential candidates' new needs post-pandemic and the rising candidate expectations spilling over to the recruitment and hiring processes. 

So, why are companies struggling to secure and keep candidates?

New IT staffing hiring trends that are here to stay

The Great Reevaluation has brought about a renewed focus on hiring practices. IT talent-focused staffing and recruiting agencies must now embrace new methods, techniques, and technologies to remain successful and avoid losing candidates to competitors. More than ever, candidates with sought-after skills are willing to leave undesirable jobs and move into positions that offer flexible schedules with better benefits and salaries. 

From IT managed service providers to IT consulting firms, the companies that offer extensive professional development opportunities are also often more desirable for today's available candidates. In this field, given the massive shortage, upskilling and reskilling are a way to bridge experience and fill knowledge gaps while opening up the pool of potential talent. In a high-stakes, tight labor market, multiple strategies and tactics need to coalesce to broaden candidate searches and align with the needs of today's IT talent-driven business. 

Keeping the IT talent pool full

Offering the benefits and work environment employees are looking for is the first step in attracting new talent. Having a seamless recruiting and onboarding phase also increasingly impacts the conversion of top candidates. A complex or dated interview and onboard process can result in far higher no-show rates. Starts and stops and a vague sense of status can drag out the process for every candidate and create attrition. 

Meanwhile, hiring and onboarding aren't becoming less complicated or tedious: from I9s and background checks to drug screenings to personal information entry. A staffing professional's only viable weapon is to streamline with tech at the center. Recruiters can use flexible onboarding automation and compliance management software to make this process less painful—for both candidates who are excited to make the next move to recruiters who are desperate to gain more bandwidth. 

IT-focused staffing professionals are battling heavier workloads while utilizing outdated technology stacks themselves. Their tech infrastructures are often patched together, requiring them to juggle between dozens of browser windows open within a single piece of software, significantly slowing down their recruitment processes and delaying their reply and communication with potential candidates. These delays can be costly and result in candidates evaporating from the pipeline. Many of today's platforms are a frankenstack; eliminating double data entry, unaligned protocols, and holes in the process can help IT staffing agencies stay focused on the relationship. 

More advanced end-to-end staffing and recruiting software is helping to ease the workload of professionals by eliminating extraneous manual or awkward information transfers, leaning into human-centered automation, and effectively integrating tools for engagement at scale. When technology streamlines recruiting processes, staffing and recruiting professions are free to focus on building relationships with talent and building out those mission-critical talent pipelines.

More than ever before, the ability to be responsive and humanize the recruitment and onboarding process is necessary for creating and maintaining IT candidate relationships in a highly competitive environment. Now, the question for the staffing professional seeking to build a talent pipeline becomes: did my current tech position me for a long-term connection to the IT candidate or delay it?