Needle in a Haystack:
A Faster, Smarter Way to Find Your Technology Candidate

If you are currently seeking work in IT, the ball is squarely in your court right now. While the country’s overall unemployment rate sits stubbornly at 9.2%, the unemployment rate for technology jobs is an easy 3.3%, reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, if you are the one seeking to hire technology workers, you are up against a tough challenge — and in need of an aggressive strategy just to locate potential candidates.

While the tech unemployment rate has always been lower than the overall rate, the current tech boom is widening the gap even more. WANTED Analytics, a recruiting business intelligence provider that informs the monthly economic indicator of hiring demand in the United States, recently stated:

At Talent, we’ve been seeing this firsthand as well. Along with a surge of positions and projects being green-lighted, we are seeing notably more companies hire full-time employees and contract-for-hire. If you count yourself among these companies and are struggling to fill positions, it might be worthwhile to take a second look at your hiring process.

Are you leveraging the right avenues? Are you diluting efforts with ineffective methods? Are you including social media in your search? These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself.

Take a Magnet to That Haystack

According to Staffing Industry Analysts, old-fashioned referrals are still ranked as the top method temporary workers use to learn about their staffing agency. This is sound advice: Referrals usually yield higher-quality candidates — people generally won’t refer anyone who might poorly reflect on them. Referrals are budget-friendly, too. In fact, even if you launch a formal referral program, they tend to be very cost-effective.

However, traditional online job boards still offer the largest reach for the lowest cost. This is evident on a global level: CareerBuilder reports that world-wide expansion for job boards and the race for large companies to create a global footprint are on the rise. Another trend we are seeing in this area is a shift toward specialized job boards such as the Dice brands, which focus on technology, finance and energy.

If you are going to use the job boards — and you should — make sure you post in more than one place: this increases visibility along with the likelihood that a job search engine will find your post.

On the other side of the spectrum, are job fairs — remember those? There’s a reason why these are on the decline: They often fare poorly in an ROI analysis after weighing how much manpower winds up being spent on unqualified candidates. The classifieds are another traditional resource that is rapidly diminishing. The Newspaper Association of America reports that expenditures on newspaper classified advertising slid 71 percent between 2000 and 2010.

Visiting schools, on the other hand, turns out to be a good approach— especially for hard-to-find skills such as newer programming languages. As a matter of fact, we are seeing many companies recruit engineers and computer science majors with hefty signing bonuses before they have even graduated

But don’t let a minimal budget stop you. One of the most effective things you can include in your search is also one of the most affordable: social media. LinkedIn hosts more than 100 million members, while Facebook hosts more than 500 million active users — that’s a big audience, and it’s accessible by simply creating a Facebook page or LinkedIn account.

Social media has the added advantage of putting you in front of the right kind of people, too: Technology candidates are more likely than the average person to interact through social media. It also helps you reach otherwise hard-to-find passive candidates, as LinkedIn users can post a profile without having to announce they are looking for a job.

Just remember a few quick rules:

These are techniques that we at Talent have seen work with clients. We are happy to connect with you to discuss your IT talent needs.