How to create the perfect hiring strategy for tech talent

Discover how to create and employ the most effective hiring strategy, so that your company can attract and retain the top tech talent.

Effective hiring and recruitment strategies are crucial when it comes to finding the best tech talent.

In many ways, your recruitment process is one of the most impactful elements of your company. It’s responsible for gaining you the top talent ahead of competitors and directly impacts your brand reputation. This then feeds back into the success of your hiring strategy. In other words, the better positioned and well-regarded your company is, the more likely you are to attract the best candidates.

Your hiring strategy is an inextricable component of your company’s brand and success, so you must spend time developing a rigorous approach that supports the foundations of your business. But where do you start?

To shed some light on this modern-day conundrum, we’ve created a comprehensive step-by-step hiring strategy guide.

So, strap yourself in. It’s a big blog, but very useful!

The art of creating the best tech hiring strategy

Define your needs

Before you delve into the vast talent pool from the outside world, you need to look within. While it might sound like a corny quote from an old philosopher, it’s an integral part of the process.

To develop a strategy that meets your company’s unique goals, you need to have a clear idea of what it’s you need from it in the first place.

Ask yourself:

• What are the company’s goals for the next year?
• How can your hiring process make these goals more attainable?
• What kind of human capital will help you reach those goals?
• Which roles need filling, and in what order of priority?
• How much financial capital do you have to fund this hiring initiative and employ the prevailing talent?

Once you have established your needs, it will be easier to develop an effective hiring strategy.

Define your budget

As we’ve mentioned, one of the first things you must do when creating hiring and recruiting strategies is to define your budget, both for the hiring process and the candidates you want to hire.

You need to appeal to top candidates if you want to deter them from joining your competitors too. So, one of the best things you can do when defining your budget for candidates is to look at industry-standard salaries and benefits.

Research the market and uncover the benchmark for your competitors’ candidates and similar talent in your field and location.

To develop an accurate salary benchmark, start by:

• Understanding the scope and requirements of the jobs you’re hiring for
• Using online resources, such as job boards, industry reports, salary checkers, career websites, and surveys
• Networking with other professionals in your field
• Preparing to be flexible in salary negotiations
• Depending on your available finances, you will hopefully be able to meet – or succeed – industry standards.

Evaluate your Employee Value Proposition

Otherwise known as your EVP, your Employee Value Proposition is essentially the value you are offering to candidates in return for their dedication and loyalty to your organisation if they were to join.

Among other things, your EVP primarily encompasses:

• Compensation
• Stability
• Respect
• Location
• Work-life balance

The more enticing your EVP, the more likely you are to stand out to the best candidates in the market.

When creating your hiring strategy, you need to think about whether your EVP is saying everything you want it to say to prospective employees. If it doesn’t already, your EVP needs to demonstrate to candidates that your company culture is respectful, inclusive and professional. It also needs to show that you prioritise the health and well-being of your employees and not just the success of the company.

As part of your hiring strategy, your EVP needs to be clearly defined and included in job descriptions. You must write a comprehensive list of your benefits, including opportunities for progression, competitive salaries, the defined employee experience, your unique selling points, any flexible working options you provide (as hybrid models remain most appealing to 2024 candidates), and any wellness packages that you offer.

The more you offer employees in the short term, the more you will get out of them in the long term. At the same time, you need to be realistic about what you can give all your employees. In other words, don’t offer more than you can afford to.

Understand what your hiring pain points are

Once you know who you want to attract and what you have to offer them, you need to examine your hiring pain points.

Your pain point could be that you have a limited budget, or are hiring for a niche role. Whatever your strategy is lacking, you need to have a strong understanding of it to find a solution to overcome it.

For example, if one of your pain points is that your company hasn’t got the staff or resources to employ a rigorous hiring process – to sift through countless resumes and undertake hundreds of interviews – consider branching out to a reliable recruitment agency that can do the hard graft for you.

Another pain point that many companies experience in their hiring process is mistakenly hiring people who do not meet the demands of the role they’re filling. To avoid this, focus on creating a recruitment strategy which involves strict vetting and only enables adequately qualified and experienced candidates to progress to the interview.

Whatever your pain points are, the better you understand them, the easier it will be to find a solution for combatting them and streamlining your hiring process.

Look at your hiring channels

Take a look at your current hiring channels and examine how you can reach more of your dream candidates.

Platforms

Consider which platforms your ideal candidates are likely to be on.

As of December 2023, LinkedIn and Indeed were the most used job sites by candidates by a mile. However, this may not make them the most suitable for your hiring needs. You need to research which job boards are most used in your area of business, by the age group that you are aiming to hire from, and by those with the necessary experience. As a starting point, consider the best top job sites we recommend for tech talent.

Adverts

Are you advertising your vacancies in the right places? Depending on your target candidates, you could be advertising vacancies on:

• LinkedIn
• Indeed
• Reed
• TotalJobs
• Your website
• On social media (Instagram and Facebook ads)
• The government website
• Local/regional publications
• Internal communications
• Alumni networks
• Professional networks

Don’t be afraid to showcase your vacancies on multiple platforms that you know your target audience visits.

Consider external support

As you know, enforcing an effective hiring process takes a lot of time, money, resources, expertise, and staff.

Hiring a recruitment agency that knows how to deal with top talent and can predict market changes will undoubtedly make your hiring process smoother and more successful. 

Employee referrals

One of the most effective ways to appeal to candidates is to ask your existing employees to promote the company and its benefits to any available talent suited to your vacancies.

An employee referral is a recommendation of a candidate for a job vacancy made by one of your existing employees. As they come from known and – usually – trusted sources, employee referrals help guarantee that the recommended talent is suitable and qualified for the role.

Another benefit of employee referrals is that they are often quicker than other recruitment techniques. Your company can skip the initial job advertisement and screening processes and contact the referred talent directly. Interestingly, candidates who have been referred by an existing employee are up to 6.6% more likely to accept a job.

Of course, one of the main benefits of establishing an employee referral programme is that it’s much cheaper than alternative recruitment campaigns. Your company will not need to pay for any ads, job board memberships, or external recruitment companies when it comes to employee referrals. However, it’s normally a good idea to incentivise existing employees to take part in referral programmes by offering them financial compensation or some sort of reward for each successful recruit they bring in.

Consider establishing an employee referral programme to reach an untapped market of candidates, but it’s advisable not to rely entirely on referral programmes if you are looking to recruit at scale.

Build your own talent pools

As well as seeking external conduits for advertising your vacancies, consider how you could create a community of prospective employees.

For example, you could start hosting networking events for interested candidates and passive employees.

Passive candidates are employees of companies who are not actively seeking a job change but may be interested in one if approached with the right offer. You can meet passive candidates in person at industry networking events held by other companies or on your own!

If you decide to host your own networking event, appeal to both active and passive candidates by making the event relevant to them. For example, you could highlight your company’s progression opportunities or run a seminar in their area of expertise.

Another way to maximise your existing talent pool is to investigate previous unsuccessful applicants. Applicants who have applied to your jobs in the past may not have been suitable at the time but may since have gained relevant experience and still be interested in working for your company.

If you can make the most of the talent you already have access to, you can minimise the effort and resources required.

Build your interview process

The interview process is the making or breaking point for potential candidates; you need to perfect the process to ensure that you don’t deter top candidates from accepting your job offers and to help guarantee that you only end up hiring the very best.

Begin by having a clear set of assessment criteria. Alongside gaining more information about candidates’ experience and qualifications for the role, the interview process is also your chance to gain a deeper understanding of them as people and potential colleagues.

To ensure you make the most of this opportunity, make sure that you have prepared questions that will help you determine whether each candidate is the right fit for your company.

Once you’ve established your main goals of the interview process, you need to strategically lay out the practicalities. How many rounds of interviews you undertake will depend on the number of applicants, the competitiveness of the role, your timescale, and your budget. Don’t forget, you’ll need to decide how many members of staff should be present at each interview too (and which ones).

If you are hiring for tech vacancies, consider the kind of aptitude tests and skills assessments that your candidates will need to undertake to prove their competence.

Next, you need to consider the candidate experience. The interview process is not only a chance for you to decide whether a candidate is the right fit for you, but it’s also their opportunity to decide whether you are a good fit for them.

To make the candidate experience as positive as possible, streamline the interview process. If candidates feel that the interview process is too demanding or time-consuming, they may not bother progressing. It needs to be accessible. Casing point – did you know that making the application and interview process mobile-friendly makes candidates over 11% more likely to pursue a role?

One of the most underrated elements of the interview process is the feedback loop. If you want to improve your interviewing strategy, it’s essential to gather feedback and opinions from your applicants. If you are struggling to convert interviewees into employees, consider implementing an interview candidate feedback system, so that you can understand what is preventing top candidates from accepting your offers and use their experiences to improve your interviews.

Diversity and inclusion

Take a step back from your hiring process and think about how or whether you are reaching out to candidates of all backgrounds. To assess the diversity of your current hiring process, consider undertaking a diversity hiring audit.

It’s important to have adequate measures in place to make your hiring process non-biased and fair. If you haven’t done so already, implement the following changes to reach a more diverse pool of candidates:

• Reword your job posting – play around with altering the language you use in your job ads depending on the type of candidate you would like to attract. As well as personalising through language, all your job postings and marketing materials should include inclusive language.
• Display your diversity – make sure that any diversity you already achieve and celebrate is promoted in your job ads and company marketing. The more you appear accepting and non-biased, the more diverse backgrounds will be attracted to your vacancies.
• Offer more flexibility – long commutes or relocations are often a determining factor in candidates not applying for a role or declining an offer. If you can, provide flexible working to cater for a wider range of candidates.
• Blind hiring – to keep your recruitment process unbiased, consider implementing blind hiring, which essentially anonymises candidates’ personal information.

Master your onboarding strategy

Once a tech candidate accepts a job offer, it’s all about making their transition into the company as smooth as possible.

The following things will be essential when it comes to creating a positive and successful onboarding experience:

Communication and clarity

As soon as a candidate has accepted their job offer, you need to provide them with comprehensive HR guidance. They need a clear timeline of their onboarding, including their start date, agreed probation period, and a detailed idea of what their first few weeks will look like at the company.

To give successful candidates the support they need during the onboarding process, be in constant communication with them. Consider sending welcome emails, company leaflets, training opportunities and other supportive communications alongside their initial paperwork.

Remember, some of the best tech professionals will have a longer notice period. So, you need to keep them engaged and eager to join during this period.

A welcoming work environment

When they start their role, new employees need to be welcomed into the team. Prepare existing employees to integrate new workers into their teams and tasks and organise team-building activities to strengthen their professional bonds.

To help them learn the ropes, new hires can each be given a work ‘buddy’ or guide to talk them through their first few days. Implement consistent check-ins, so that the new hires feel supported and guided from the very beginning of their career at your company.

Adequate training and development

Although most new hires will be adequately qualified for their job roles, most new employees will need training to feel confident with your company’s unique way of working. For example, they may not be familiar with a certain software you use or may need to watch onboarding webinars to better understand the workflow of the company.

Skill development is something that should be offered to employees throughout their time at your company, and it’s important to establish your support of their professional development from their very first day.

With a solid employee onboarding process increasing new hire retention by 50%, it’s an absolute no brainer to get it right! So, whether you’re looking to improve your current onboarding process or create a brand new one, our checklist will ensure that nothing gets missed out.

To help with well this, you can download our employee onboarding checklist.

Evaluate and adapt your hiring process

The key to hiring strategy success isn’t just about building the right framework. It’s also about analysing and adapting it over time.

Here are some key metrics to help you achieve this:

Cost per hire

How much money is your company spending per recruit? Your hiring process should be economically efficient. To calculate your cost-per-hire metric, simply add your total spend on recruitment during a given time (both internal and external) and divide it by the number of successful new hires onboarded during that same timeframe.

Offer acceptance rate

Your offer acceptance rate tells you a lot about the success of your hiring process. The higher your acceptance rate, the more successful your hiring process is. If your acceptance rate is low, you know that there are things you need to change about the candidate experience and representation of your company during recruitment.

Time to hire

This hiring strategy metric tells you how much time your company spends from your initial interaction with a candidate up to the time that candidate is officially hired by your company.

If your time to hire is slower than you would like, think about how you can streamline the recruitment process.

Perhaps your communication needs to be more consistent, your advertising needs to be more effective, the number of interviews needs to be reduced, or the time between each hiring step can be shortened. It’s likely that the longer you’re time to hire metric is, the more money you are spending on recruitment.

Quality of hire

Although this metric is difficult to qualify, it’s important to measure the quality of your new hires as best you can. Factors include their adjustment to company culture, work ethic, job performance, sociability, and reliability. If you repeatedly find that your new hires aren’t meeting expectations, it’s a sign that your hiring process is not effectively enabling top candidates to progress or is not rigorous enough to funnel out unsuitable candidates.

Candidate experience

As we know, the candidate experience is one of the most important elements of your hiring strategy. Once new hires have been onboarded, create a feedback loop for them to share their thoughts on the entire process.

Learning from those who have experienced your hiring process first-hand is the best way to uncover its strengths and weaknesses.

So, how can you make sure that your candidate experience is the best it can be? Sian, one of the Delivery Consultants, has broken it down for you 👇

Enlist support to perfect your hiring strategy

You made it! If you’re thinking this hiring strategy malarky sounds time-consuming and complex, it might be time to speak to a specialist.

The truth is that hiring strategies are incredibly difficult to augment without the perspective of outside professionals, especially when it comes to finding tech talent. Creating an effective recruitment process on your own deducts time from your company without guaranteeing results.

That’s where we come in. At Revoco, we’ve helped countless businesses source the best tech talent and master the art of creating a winning hiring strategy.

So, if you’re keen to reduce your cost-per-hire, attract the crème de la crème of this highly competitive industry and enhance the onboarding experience, let’s chat.