The engineering talent war is real. It has been for some time — but with a pandemic that pushed businesses in all industries to focus on e-commerce and virtual products and services, demand for skilled engineers skyrocketed.
In June, more than 365,000 tech jobs in the U.S. were vacant, with software developers, IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects among the most coveted workers by employers.
Yet, we are hiring 10 to 15 engineers a month, far above the industry average. What’s our secret?
First, it’s important to acknowledge that engineers — and most knowledge workers — have choice and bargaining power in today’s job market. An employer needs to not only respect that but take it as an opportunity to create a more attractive workplace — and remain agile long after the hiring tides change.
You can’t overlook the elephant in the room — money talks. Today, you can’t just offer the standard “competitive salary” — you must do better.
Overall, we have learned that It is much harder to hire top-tier talent than it is to generate revenue. This is one of our guiding principles, and we remind our team of that all the time. It’s incumbent upon everyone in the company to focus their energies on helping us find — and retain — great people. With this commitment in place, we know the rest will take care of itself.
Granted, we are fortunate that cryptocurrency and blockchain have a certain cachet and come with unique engineering needs that will keep the most ambitious engineers challenged and rewarded in their day-to-day work. However, we still had to make concerted efforts to appeal to today’s in-demand engineers. Here are a few ways we are winning the war for engineering talent.
Have a strong cash position
You can’t overlook the elephant in the room — money talks. Today, you can’t just offer the standard “competitive salary” — you must do better. We make sure our offers stand out and are hard to turn down. This approach is driven by our strong cash position (yes, we recognize our good fortune).
Ultimately, innovation is our lifeblood, so everything we do is measured with quality and speed before considering cost.
Review salaries at least every six months
We don’t review salaries annually; the industry is too fast-paced and competitive for that antiquated approach. At least every six months, we review salary bands across the organization relative to employee performance and market trends and adjust employee compensation on a more flexible, ad-hoc basis.
This helps build a meritocratic and less bureaucratic culture and ensures our team reaps the benefits commensurate with their work product.
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