If you’re recruiting tech staff, money certainly talks. But it isn’t the only thing.
Compensation has been on the rise across industries, in light of the Great Resignation, but in the technology sector, especially, the pace has hit a fever pitch. Salaries for some key roles have surged by as much as 20 percent in the past two years. In particularly competitive markets, salaries can jump by 30 percent, compared with averages from 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing data from staffing firms and tech companies like AT&T and Cisco Systems.
That salaries are surging is only part of the struggle. Competition for workers has also become fierce. During the first quarter of 2022, U.S. employers posted 1.1 million tech jobs, up 43 percent year-over-year, according to data the information technology trade group CompTIA published in March.
But it’s not impossible to hire–even if you’re competing with giants. Recruiters for smaller tech firms that can’t offer the same financial benefits as larger corporations are increasingly playing up non-monetary incentives like career-growth opportunities and helping further a company’s social impact.
Homing in on your business’s impact can help. “Telling a story is very important,” Vijay Raghavan, executive vice president and CTO of the Alpharetta, Georgia-based analytics company LexisNexis Risk Solutions told Inc.com in February. “To attract talent, we want to be articulate about what kinds of problems we solve. If a candidate just wanted to make more money, that’s their prerogative–but we do get a lot of smart technologists who are more interested in what we actually do.”
Offering room to grow and develop other technical skills can also prove beneficial. A staggering 97 percent of employees in the tech industry say that strong training and upskilling programs are important to them in a prospective employer, according to a survey of 1,000 American workers released in September 2021 by the B2B digital software company Amdocs. You’ll have to keep compensation moderately competitive, but if you’ve reached your financial limit, knowledge is priceless.
