After a year of pandemic-related job losses in the U.S., talking about the vast talent gap in our domestic tech industry might seem out of place. The reality is that the pandemic drove demand for digital customer experiences and products in an unprecedented way. In retail, for example, McKinsey reported that e-commerce skyrocketed to account for 33% of all retail sales in July 2020, far exceeding previous predictions that it would take until 2024 to achieve 24% of retail sales — a feverish pace that equated to more gains in 6 months than in the previous ten years. As these digital trends stay with us, the talent gap will be exacerbated as competition for engineers, UX designers, and other tech workers increases. Companies of all sizes need to have a multi-pronged talent strategy that reduces their risk and enables them to be ambitious and realize their digital transformation agenda at the pace the world is now demanding. This means that talent considerations must stretch beyond new hires; companies must develop internal continuous education programs for existing teams.
Remote-work first versus remote-work friendly.
Remote hiring refers to offshore talent or a specific employee arrangement; a team wanted to hire a candidate based in Los Angeles. They might extend an offer knowing they wouldn’t have a formal office space. These remote employees faced similar frustrations and challenges — conversations around the office that they would miss, sometimes people would forget to add a Zoom link, or documentation wasn’t great and remote individuals would miss essential details. In the last year or so, many companies have transformed their teams to be remote-first out of necessity and, in doing so, have expanded their horizons geographically in terms of where they might recruit.
Thinking outside physical office locations for talent acquisition opens up substantial new talent pools, particularly outside the U.S., where the tech talent gap is severe. For example, next-door neighbor Mexico graduates over 130,000 computer science graduates annually, easily dwarfing the estimated 65,000 graduates in the U.S. In the recent past, nearshore or offshore employees would struggle to participate in an office culture that wasn’t remote-friendly (let alone remote-first). Partnering with teams in Mexico, a country with many English speakers, excellent computer science programs, and compatible time zones, should feel substantially less risky than before. Our collective new attitude (and accidental remote work experiment from COVID) should mean that we will be more aware of isolated individuals and teams even when we return to physical offices.
Hire for potential & train for expertise.
Education is the secret weapon of many large and fast-growing companies. This has certainly been true for my company Wizeline — our teams were able to hire more than 300 employees in a single month in 2020 due to our well-structured new-hire education programs. While training over 10K students last year via our free community-based Wizeline Academy programs, one of our most impactful talent programs has been paid apprenticeships. Apprenticeship programs (and paid internships) provide a structure for assessing prospective candidates while providing targeted education to level up any missing skillsets. We primarily leverage paid training programs for our hardest-to-hire roles, like data engineering. We searched for candidates with just a few years of engineering experience but were motivated to gain expertise in a new field.
Before converting to a full-time role, apprentices follow a structured path that includes mentorship, coursework, and real work experience. I was proud to see that these programs added predictability to how we were hired and enabled us to significantly impact our local communities. For example, our Site Reliability Engineering apprenticeship program had gender parity, with 12 out of 24 participants identifying as women. Beyond capacity and scale, continuous education is critical for companies that want to keep their workforce responsive to disruption or change. Launching reskilling programs can encourage flexibility between departments and allow upward mobility for more junior employees, which should positively affect retention and likely also employee satisfaction.
Commit to creating more opportunities for more people.
Low or no-cost education programs can be a powerful tool for bringing more opportunities to underrepresented groups and expanding your hiring pool simultaneously. Encourage your teams to commit seriously to making education programs equitable and set goals for broadening access. Diversity and inclusion initiatives can be great opportunities to involve your customers and partners. Last fall, Wizeline partnered with Amazon Web Services to provide 398 free cloud certifications (from more than 2,000 applications) for women in Latin America. By comparison, Wizeline certified 150 employees last year in cloud programs. More than doubling that figure for women in our community was only financially and logistically possible with enthusiastic support.
The tech industry moves quickly, and the shortage of technical talent is not new. However, the last year has taught us that companies can be adaptable to new ways of working. Many leaders have shifted their mindset around office culture, physical locations, flexible and remote work, and new employee onboarding. Companies can diversify their talent pools by taking a hard look at their education offering internally and for prospects and aligning it with the skill sets they need most. Developing and executing a layered tech talent strategy is hard work, but the increasingly digital world will need all of us to stay on our toes and think creatively.
