The Tech Talent Acquisition Landscape 🗺️
A round-up of the various ways you can increase your engineering capacity today.
Hiring is one of the biggest challenges for engineering teams, and, for many, it feels broken.
When you think about it, in an ideal world, hiring somebody should take days at most. You put up a new opening, it gets matched with suitable candidates, you pick one, and it’s done.
Instead, it usually takes months, because of a combination of inefficient boards, unclear job posts, and overly long interviews.
To solve this problem, in recent years, alternative ways of acquiring and working with tech talent have emerged. These are typically:
Faster — it takes less time to bring in new talent, and
More flexible — the scope and duration of collaboration are potentially smaller.
Some of these ways are kind of new, while others have always been there — they just got gradually better and more widespread.
Part of this trend is enabled by the shift to remote work. Once offices are not a constraint anymore and people don’t have to get together daily, work naturally feels more transactional, which, in turn, opens up to more transactional ways of working together.
This piece draws a landscape of the available options for acquiring tech talent today, breaking them down on various qualities, and trying to figure out which are best based on your use cases.
To do this, I got some help from my friends at Cosmico, who have been working in this space for years and play a major role in it.
As a disclaimer, even though I partnered with them for this piece, I only wrote my unbiased opinion about the practices and services I covered, Cosmico included.
So here is the agenda for today:
5️⃣ The Five Modes — we explore traditional hiring, talent-as-a-service, agencies, contractors, and code-as-a-service
🏢 What’s best for companies — we consider the various options based on your needs. We talk about collaboration, agility, and scope.
🪴 What’s best for your career — we explore the other side. If you are an engineer, what’s best for your career? When should you consider one option vs the other?
Let’s dive in!
5️⃣ The Five Modes
There are five main modes you can use to acquire talent today. Let’s see them, from the most stable and long-term to the most flexible and transactional.
1) In-house talent
That’s regular hiring, where the final goal is embedding a new person into your team for the long term.
Hiring people is tough because it requires a sophisticated internal process, from sourcing candidates, to selecting them, to finally converting them through an offer. This is usually done by hiring managers, and/or engineering managers with hiring duties.
On the surface, this process just looks like interviewing people, but there is much more to it:
📊 Manage hiring channels — job boards, communities, referrals, and more. This includes keeping a pulse on the market and outreaching to candidates directly.
🔍 Screen candidates — to minimize the time wasted on interviewing bad candidates.
🥇 Deliver a great candidate experience — throughout the whole selection process, by managing the relationship with them, collecting feedback, and setting them up for success.
💬 Relay with the team — during the interview process, collecting their feedback and having decision meetings.
💸 Negotiate and close — make candidates accept the offer.
🔄 Improve the hiring process — collect feedback from all parties (candidates and the team); track KPIs, and make the process better over time.
That’s a lot of work.
Hiring well means mostly two things: 1) hiring the right people, and 2) hiring them fast. Whenever you cut corners on the hiring process, either quality or speed suffer — or both.
So, there are situations where this fails:
You fail to bring in quality people in a timely way, or
You find yourself with temporary/peripheral lines of work for which hiring new, full-time employees feels overly long and expensive.
Enter other modes of work 👇