Faced with a shortage of good candidates and the frantic pace of new digital projects, HR departments often find it difficult to keep up with IT departments’ expectations. Specialized recruitment firms can provide significant support. Their main asset? An intimate knowledge of the business and IT issues.
To overcome the difficulties of sourcing the right skills and qualified profiles in IT, IT departments need to sharpen their weapons. They are forced to organize themselves better and better in a dynamic, highly volatile market marked by shortages.
A shortage of profiles in small and medium-sized companies, but also in large companies
Because in the IT professions, the shortage of candidates remains a trademark. As new IT-driven projects multiply in all organizations, recruitment has become a hot topic for the IT department.
40% of profiles trained abroad
Among the causes? Engineering education in the first place. In France, it is insufficient to meet market demand. It is estimated that 30% to 40% of the people working in these jobs have been trained abroad.
Another difficulty is that skills are difficult to find in structures that know how to retain this coveted resource. The best profiles are sucked up by CAC 40 companies or GAFAs. And like all companies, large corporations are experiencing a shortage of IT talent. Obviously, it is clearer for SMEs and ETIs.
HR lagging behind
In spite of this, HR is often unaware of the specific tension in the IT market. Human Resources often suffer from a difficulty in adapting to the acceleration of the recruitment process for these specific professions.
The pace of transformation in HR departments is sometimes incompatible with the acceleration of recruitment processes.
The volatility of the market is such that it is not uncommon for a recruitment process to be completed in two days for IT profiles. HR often adds unnecessary constraints to already complex recruitment processes. Thus, they sometimes impose maximum ages, target degree categories, rigorous curriculum requirements and rigid salary scales. These grids sometimes close off any capacity for negotiation, increasing the difficulty of building teams.
Tensions at all levels.
Project manager, incident manager, deputy CIO, network engineer, telecom engineers… the tension in recruitment is found in all positions concerning production infrastructures and digital transformation. At each level of the hierarchy, candidates often find themselves in a position to influence the selection process and conduct the negotiation themselves. Candidates desert and discussions fail in the face of a salary scale that is out of step with the reality of the IT market.
Avoiding overbidding on wages
For certain skills – such as digital transformation, cloud, change management, IOT, big data, and anything related to information system performance – the bidding for salaries has become a must. Companies are then forced to revise their salary scales specifically for these profiles… when they can afford it! For jobs related to application platforms, production, operations, support or help-desk, market pressure also exists, even if it is less strong.
How to attract and retain talent?
Clearly, human resources must take care of the promises made by the company to make the best candidates want to join it. These promises include well-being at work, support in salary development, internal training, the ability to develop the person each year… The training of human resources, their capacity to innovate and to question the existing, must be integrated into an agility circuit.
The specialized recruitment firm, an essential partner in IT.
In this context, a specialist recruitment firm brings to HR an intimate knowledge of the IT sourcing market. It allows to accelerate the adaptation of the company to the requirements of the market and thus to considerably increase the chances of success of a recruitment. This is particularly true in the phases where a candidate must be convinced of the relevance of the position to his or her career path. The firm limits the considerable loss of energy generated by the choice of a bad salary scale, or the integration of ill-suited profiles.
The recruitment firm has a detailed knowledge of the salary level at which the position should be positioned. He knows perfectly well the skills pools for each profession. The consultant of a recruitment firm knows how to define precisely the value creation that a candidate will bring to an IT team. His role is to identify the candidates who will be able to bring about the changes expected by the company.
Expertise on salaries and identifying the right profiles
A recruitment firm also has a broad vision of the possible IT diversification paths, thanks to its knowledge of the projects underway among the main players in the sector and its specialized business expertise. The IT recruitment firm supports the IT department in its strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors, or to maintain its lead. Building the right teams to enable clients to differentiate themselves, or stay ahead of their competitors, is the main mission of an IT recruitment firm.
[nz_highlight color=”rgb(89,92,127)”]Lucernys’ IT recruitment business represents one third of its activity.
This activity is divided into 3 offers:
– recruitment of business experts.
– long-term management services across the entire IT spectrum.
– Consulting function on the recruitment part, by accompanying the choice of the person, from the technician to the CIO.
Lucernys assists its clients in selecting candidates who will be able to initiate the expected transformations. At Lucernys, the consulting role is strongly anchored in the recruitment missions. It also works because of the close working relationship with the consulting directors and the mission directors who have an intimate knowledge of their account. The most recurrent requests concern the positions of deputy CIO, network manager, infrastructure manager, architecture manager, cloud architects, IS architects…
The physical meeting is essential before making contact with the customer. Seeing the person in a normal speaking condition allows us to identify possible weak signals.
Lucernys meets nearly 1400 candidates each year who come to enrich the CV-library.[/nz_highlight]
