How to Position Your Organization as a Technical Talent Hotspot

Attracting, retaining and developing technical talent is one of the most difficult yet critical tasks for businesses today, regardless of the industry. Here, we outline the best practices for successfully fostering technical talent and prioritizing strategic talent management over the long-term.

Today, every business can be considered a technology business, because success across nearly every industry is at least partially dependent on the productivity of the technical employees within an organization. It’s therefore critical that HR leaders understand how to best manage the talent lifecycle within technical roles. This includes understanding the best ways to work with technical employees and potential employees during hiring, retention, development and succession, especially considering recent estimates, which indicate that it costs between four and six months of an employee’s salary to replace them in the event of a turnover.

When HR leaders successfully manage technical talent, they can position their organization as a “technical talent hotspot”, i.e. a company that’s able to develop deep candidate pools for every open position to hire the strongest, brightest and most qualified candidates. This is particularly crucial given the timely and ever-widening skills gap. 60 per cent of U.S. employersOpens a new window are struggling to fill job vacancies within 12 weeks, with knowledge-intensive industries, like technology, emerging as some of the hardest hit. By 2030, the global talent shortage could reach over 85 million people, costing businesses trillions of dollars in lost economic opportunity.

Best Practices

To successfully foster technical talent today and over the long-term, HR leaders and their organizations should adhere to the following three best practices:

1. Offer clear career path options: By offering formal (or even informal, albeit clear) career strategies across an organization, employees can continue to grow their skills, gain experience, increase their compensation and recognition, and have greater impact. Make sure your organization is optimized to allow for any technical role to transition into a managerial position, for instance. Orient any talent managementOpens a new window processes towards such a transition (e.g. evaluation systems and succession planning processes should identify and classify management potential) and align any rewards and/or benefits around it as well (e.g. compensation bands should shift upwards and benefits should expand when an employee reaches management level).

   That said, it’s important to remember that not all technical employees aspire to be managers. Many prefer to stay on the frontline to not lose touch with cutting-edge technology and keep coding. These employees still deserve advancement and recognition (and all the corresponding benefits and opportunities), so alternate career path strategies should also be made available. Whether it’s for a managerial or alternate career path, however, ensure that the steps required go beyond the surface and are meaningful to both employees and the larger organization.
    

2. Provide performance-adjacent solutions: Most technical employees operate in “solve mode”, meaning they learn in-the-moment to address common problems, such as debugging code, identifying the reason a system has crashed or modifying a program to meet a new demand. These employees tend to rely on communities of other technical professionals or online repositories (e.g. Stack Overflow and GitHub) to solve such problems, so it’s important to provide them with performance-adjacent solutions to empower them not only to learn and develop new skills, but also to master existing ones through applied learning. 

   Seek out performance-adjacent solutions that enable frictionless access to a vast body of content and experiences and ensure that all content and experiences are optimized for precision search and easily consumable for learning in-the-moment. Also, note that any performance-adjacent solution needs to be highly relevant, continuously updated and always ahead of the ever-changing technological landscape in order to be useful. Whenever possible, such solutions should also offer resources that enable sharing to support the development of a technical community, as this can lead to the creation of repeatable designs and save individuals and their organizations significant time and energy.
    

3. Optimize your technology stack: Technology is advancing at an alarming rate, and technical employees recognize that they need to keep up in order to retain the value of their skills and ensure career progression. As a result, your organization’s technology stack will likely play a part in their decision to join, stay and seek development at your company. To be as attractive as possible to both potential and existing technical hires, provide opportunities for employees to work with the latest programs and on the latest consumer technologies. In today’s hyper-competitive technical talent marketplace, it’s imperative that your organization demonstrates its commitment to growth by refusing to settle for outdated technologies.

   Understandably, though, not every organization can afford to implement each hot, new technology trend. Thankfully, there are other ways to keep technical employees satisfied and engaged. For instance, consider providing them some flexibility on the projects they work on, perhaps by allowing an employee to temporarily shadow a role they’re interested in. It can also be beneficial to provide technical talent the opportunity to dedicate some portion of their work week to projects that are of particular interest to them. When implemented correctly, such initiatives can catalyze innovation and instill high levels of engagement from your workforce.                              

At the end of the day, strategic talent management for either technical talent or non-technical talent comes down to carefully understanding what motivates employees. Even if it’s not possible to evaluate career paths on an individual basis across the entire organization, train your leadership team to focus their attention on rethinking the paths their employees are on and prioritizing any modifications that could result in the most impact. Most importantly, work to maintain a constant awareness of the differences among functional groups across your organization and ensure all processes are designed in a manner that works best for each department.