CWJobs & Avanade tech hiring catch-up

The past year has been challenging for many industries and recruitment has been no exception. Lorna Sanders, CWJobs Team Leader, recently caught up with Richa Ranawat, Head of Talent Acquisition, and Magda Hoffman, Senior Technical Recruiter, at Avanade to learn more on their award winning tech hiring strategy, how they tackle diversity and inclusion, as well as filling hard-to-fill roles.

CWJobs’ own research finds that 55% of non-tech workers considering a career change would consider a tech role. Learning from industry peers with noteworthy tech hiring strategies helps in-house recruiters improve their own approaches to hiring.

With recent research from Universum revealing that women in tech have 20% lower salary expectations than men, advice focused on hard-to-fill roles, diversity and upcoming recruitment trends is particularly topical right now.

Improving tech hiring strategies

We spoke to Avanade about the state of the tech industry and how recruiters can improve their hiring practices. When asked what made the company’s hiring strategy stand out among other submissions, Magda said having an influence on stakeholders is important.

She said that in working within a small pool means that the company is committed to not taking the easy route. She said its approach to developing a hiring strategy is to diversify every role, from the job description, to the pipeline.

When asked what the main challenge will be for tech recruiters in 2021, Magda said she believes it will be meeting the demand for skills with limited talent. She said this will be particularly true for companies with a focus on driving diversity. The market has changed, and there’s a need for tech transformation, especially in the cloud security space.

The need for retraining programmes

When discussing retraining programmes to increase the flow of tech talent, Magda said that she recruits for infrastructure and security – two of the hardest areas. She said:

The pipeline needs to focus on education, even in the foreign market right now, which is hard…with Brexit. To increase the flow of tech talent for a niche role, employers need to be the ones creating the training programmes. They need to hire for passion and potential and think outside the box, rather than just investing in academics

What candidates look for in a tech role

CWJobs’ Confidence Index 2020 shows that tech professionals remain confident in the state of the industry. When asked about what candidates are looking for in a role, Magda said that candidate behaviour has changed over the last 12 months.

Experienced hires are looking for a competitive salary, whereas junior hires are looking for flexibility. As a company, Avanade makes sure that candidates can see what it does in terms of diversity, rather than just hearing about it.

Fueling the pipeline with diverse candidates

We also spoke with Richa Ranawat, Head of Talent Acquisition in Avanade. When asked about the strongest element of the company’s tech hiring strategy, she said it was a combination of elements. Avanade has always been concerned with collective action and she believes that the company’s three core pillars brought them here today.

The first key element is fuelling the pipeline with diverse candidates, followed by building both external and internal partnerships with employee resource groups, recruitment marketing and senior stakeholders.

Addressing Avanade’s third core pilar, Richa said that data and metrics are important in enabling the company to track itself against targets. She said it has helped the company to analyse areas and processes that need improving.

Opportunities in tech recruitment

We asked Richa what she thought were the top three opportunities in the current tech recruitment landscape. She said:

From a recruitment perspective, having everything virtual has presented a big opportunity…for events in particular. It has also provided networking opportunities and a way of inviting new hires into organisations, where they can learn more about the people behind the company.

Candidate relationship management systems are also a huge opportunity right now as engagement is more important than attraction.

Removing bias from the recruitment process

When speaking about diversity and what action Avanade has taken, Richa said that the company has made good progress. Training and education are essential as everybody needs to understand the importance of why diversity needs to be there. She said that education stakeholders and teams need to believe in it to make a difference.

Richa’s advice for other companies is to invest in tools that help remove biases. In addition,  targets are important and although it sounds metric-driven, actions speak louder than words. If a company can’t track what diversity looks like, it can’t improve it.

The appeal of the tech sector

We asked Richa why she thinks tech has such a strong appeal for people outside of the industry. She said that tech has become such an integral part of our lives, which make opportunities clearer. She iterated that people don’t need to come from a tech background to move into the industry.

At the beginning of the year, before coronavirus, CWJobs asked 1,000 UK tech workers how they felt about remote working and 49% said they would take a pay cut to be allowed to work from home. We asked Richa how she thinks flexible working will impact sourcing tech talent in the future. She said:

Engaging with tech talent will become a precursor to sourcing it. It will open up candidate pools where travel can be an issue. For example, travel can often be a hindrance to those in certain life stages, like parents for example. Remote working allows people to consider roles that they wouldn’t have applied for before Covid-19.