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1. Talent management
Companies have to invest simultaneously across the entire “hire to retire” life cycle. Develop a focused team dedicated to managing the entire employee experience, from hiring and onboarding based on a clear view of talent needs to creating a work environment where people can do interesting work and nurturing a culture built around developer happiness.
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2. Talent gap
Your talent gap is wider than you think. While 58 percent of organizations analyze their skill gaps, our experience shows that companies typically underestimate their size. Talent analysis has to go beyond the role level to understand what skills people actually have. And that analysis has to happen much more frequently than the typical once or twice a year in order to keep pace with changing demands.
Tech talent
Top 10 things to get right to find, keep, and grow the tech talent you need.
Click on each number for more information.
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3. Candidate experience
HR managers tend to focus on improving their recruiting processes and introducing efficiencies. A more effective approach is to “think like a recruit.” Talent wants to meet the people they’re going to work with, complete the interview process quickly (in as short as a day), and get moving quickly when they’re hired. “Post and pray” isn’t a strategy; tech talent isn’t just going to job sites, so be active in nontraditional channels, such as hackathons and curated sites.
4. Employee value proposition
Top talent is interviewing you, not the other way around. Understand what tech talent really cares about. Money is important, but top candidates also care about working with new technologies, building up their skills, being part of a culture that values technology, and doing meaningful and interesting work.
5. Skill building
Much of the talent you need will have to come from within, so ramp up your reskilling and upskilling capabilities. Make training both continuous, through ongoing learning journeys, and tailored, with learning programs created for specific roles and job families. Place an emphasis on building experience rather than simply providing certifications.
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6. Empowered teams
In many organizations, the ratio of engineers to management and coordination and support people is 30:70; that needs to be flipped. Build small, empowered teams with a clear mission, and let them execute. Support them by clearing organizational roadblocks and enabling team-level decision making.
7. Craft
Eliminate meaningless toil and bad practices—top talent won’t put up with it. Focus on eliminating as many barriers as possible by, for example, developing high-quality, reusable code and providing world-class planning and development tools to make engineers’ work lives easier. Top companies make more than 80 percent of testing automated and continuous.
8. Developer experience
Create an environment that delights and inspires your developers. Focus on developer happiness, and productivity and performance will follow. Make the quality of the developer experience a primary metric of success, and use data to closely track job satisfaction. One of the most important metrics is how many of your developers are recruiting other developers.
9. Career path
More than two-thirds of developers don’t want to become managers. Instead, they prefer to keep their craft sharp and pursue ever more sophisticated digital challenges. Create both managerial and non-managerial career paths, so your engineers have the option to grow and build up their skills.
10. Diversity
Create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) work environment—tech talent increasingly expects it, and it brings better results. Gender-diverse companies are 25 percent more likely to financially outperform less diverse companies, while ethnically diverse companies are 36 percent more likely to do so. Make sure that DEI is continuously measured and decisions are reviewed to track gender diversity in recruiting, retention, evaluation, and pay. Define clear technical career paths and focus on a well-structured path to first- and second-level manager positions.
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