Tech Professionals: Why Is Hiring Increasingly Difficult?

I remember a conversation, more than 10 years ago, with a friend, a JAVA programmer: “you had to learn to program”, he said, “it is an area that is growing quickly, whoever enters now will do very well”, he reinforced. This conversation was already a harbinger of this great change that we are following in the market today, and technology professionals are the main protagonists.

With the arrival of new languages, frameworks, databases and, above all, with technology becoming increasingly indispensable and accessible, the search for technology professionals has exploded. Professions that recently did not exist have become extremely valuable to companies. And now we're not just talking about developers/programmers, we now have a huge range of new professions in the technology area: UI/UX, Data, DevOps/SRE, QA, Cloud, mobile... new technologies are emerging, it only tends to increase.

Large companies are voracious in the search for the most qualified technology professionals. And it's not just big companies that are after these professionals, companies of all sizes are looking for technological solutions for their businesses. But disputing these professionals with large companies is not simple. The power of attraction of large tech companies and their success as an employer brand gives them a big advantage when it comes to attracting the best talent. Small and medium-sized companies, even investing in employer branding, do not get the attraction necessary to compete with the big players, because employer branding is good, but it is not for everyone.

How are companies dealing with the problem?

And as in any situation of supply versus demand, to attract and retain these professionals, companies began to considerably increase their monthly income. So, a technology professional started to have his salary readjusted with the same speed that messages from recruiters arrived in his LinkedIn inbox. The situation seemed to be resolved. Companies saw this cost of constantly updating their technology teams as an investment and managed to keep their tech teams at a high level. At the other end, technology professionals were satisfied, earning well, and were still highly sought after in the market. But some changes made this scenario untenable.

What has change?

With remote work being adopted on a large scale around the world and the weakening of our currency, the geographic barrier has become increasingly insignificant. Companies from developed countries are increasingly harassing qualified professionals from South America, and now this competition has started to become more complicated. If it was already difficult to dispute these professionals with the most desirable companies in the national market, which paid their salaries in reais, the dispute with companies that pay in Dollars or Euros is completely unequal.

In addition, while the search for tech professionals only increases, the training of new professionals does not keep up with market demand. According to Brasscom (the Brazilian Association of Information and Communication Technology Companies), by 2024, more than 400,000 vacancies will be created in the technology area, while Brazil trains less than 50,000 professionals per year. In other words, the trend is for this scenario to become more chaotic in the coming years for national companies.

There is no easy solution to this problem, nor is there any expectation of improvement in the short term.

The growing difficulty in finding these professionals has a direct impact on the recruitment market. Today, a tech recruiter goes through a process similar to what technology professionals go through, with market harassment and salary appreciation. That is why it is so necessary to increase the attractiveness of companies and implement changes in the way these professionals are sought.

The need for an entirely new approach to recruiting tech professionals is glaring. The job posting model for hiring these professionals has become very little relevant, as these professionals are bombarded daily by offers of opportunities. Investing in partnerships and testing new recruitment models is essential for the moment we are witnessing and, even more, for the scenario that is designed for the future.

Insight 99Hunters:

Based on an internal survey that we conducted with 99Hunters clients, a recruitment strategy, which has been adopted by some medium and large companies, is to dispense with the language skill (for vacancies that do not require proficiency), in addition, to increase the chances of being hired, also avoid losing this professional to opportunities outside Brazil.