Hiring strategies that work amidst The Great Resignation.
It’s never been easy for founders and talent acquisition teams to hire top developers, and it hasn’t gotten any easier in 2021 either. Emily Chang, in a recent Bloomberg Technology report quoted that there are 7 workers for every 10 jobs overall. As a result, recruiters often struggle to ensure successful conversions from candidates to employees.
Here are excerpts of the conversation we had with Nishant Das, Global Head of Talent at Coinswitch, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, about converting great candidates to employees. While some employers struggle to hire top tech talent, there have been employers who have found innovative ways to hire top tech talent using tech hiring stack 2.0. Nishant has led such organizations in the past. Over the course of his career, he has been at a talent leader at Directi, Zeta, Bank of America, Fractal Analytics, and now Coinswitch – all of whom have innovative approaches to hiring technical talent.
Host, Mudit Srivastava:
Nowadays, developers usually have a half-dozen offers on the table before we contact them. Employers will almost certainly face an array of challenges when onboarding talent, which many recruiters may not have experienced. Under this problem statement, what methods and strategies do you believe work for businesses of various sizes?
Guest Speaker, Nishant Das:
I think it is anybody’s problem these days, and yes, 2021 is a year where we have seen this unprecedented change in the industry, “The Great Resignation,” as they call it.
The question is, first of all, the question is pretty broad. So to answer that, we’re talking about an entire Talent Acquisition Playbook out here. This year, there has been a tremendous amount of churn, which has happened in the industry. It is necessary to understand what has happened – why there has been a significant move, and why they need to move back.
For the entire workforce during the pandemic, the overall work hours are significantly extended. In terms of productivity, people have become more productive, but many of them have reached a point of fatigue at the end of the day. They have felt that maybe a certain amount of change would help them feel better. As a talent leader and an industry professional, I think it is necessary to understand what has been critical drivers for people in terms of whatever rules that they are part of. For instance, why did someone choose to be a developer and what they’re doing and things similar to this? It has been necessary to be even more critical in this period to focus on basics.
Everything in the linear process is as essential as it was at any given time. So yes, the opportunities are multiple. But I think because the options have increased and there is a significant amount of churn, we will not solve it with volume in terms of talent acquisition.
For example, if you’re trying to scale up your teams and usually in talent acquisition, we typically call these data points acceptance rates, decline ratio, and stuff like that; there is only a point where you can go by hacking metrics. The solution is not going to be with respect to volume. The answer is going to be by concentrating on the core basics.
For example, you want to hire the top talent in the industry, we’re constantly in a mode to interview to understand if talent is suitable for the organization. But we very rarely try to answer why the organization is the right choice for the individual in their career.
This conversation needs to occur at every stage of the hiring process; it’s crucial. It is a different aspect, whether it works or it doesn’t work. But at every step of the conversation, when a recruiter picks the call to have a conversation, they need to go beyond screening and give a much larger view of what the organization is trying to solve.
We are in a fantastic stage in the industry where we are looking at multiple problem statements; we have numerous tech organizations and multiple startups looking at various problem statements. It’s something that wasn’t existing half a decade back. But we pretty much have use-cases and businesses around multiple use-cases and problem statements. And it’s probably the best time to grow and build. And it is even necessary to discuss the larger picture as to what somebody can get if they become a part of it. So yeah, I think this should be the more prominent theme.
If somebody chooses to work a few years of their life with an organization, there should be a significant amount of purpose attached to it than just a change. And the more we define the purpose at every stage of an interaction with an individual, the more sense it makes. Irrespective that it’s not going to be necessary thereon, it may feel that it may become like a natural process, that you don’t need to have 12 offers to choose one. The only way is to if you have a great vision and a great problem statement, and it needs to be discussed very well.
Host, Mudit Srivastava:
What do you believe is that the vision statement and the organization’s purpose sometimes end up being locked at the founders’ level? And how do you translate that across the organization and the ecosystems out there? Because, if the developers do not know it, they may not even start a conversation with your recruiters.
Guest Speaker, Nishant Das:
It’s about realizing first that this is a messaging that needs to be consistent across. Talent Acquisition Professionals need to have a significant understanding of the business they are into at any given point in time. The vision statement gives an excellent picture, and it is necessary for the individuals.
Founders themselves have a specific responsibility to ensure that the right message is spread across the organization. How would you describe your overall goal, your North Star, and your moonshot? How will our organization look in five to ten years? And what we are doing at this point gives people a sense of what they will be doing and how it is connected with their goal. It is the very natural human aspect of connecting yourself to something bigger. And that’s, that’s by far the most essential aspect of this the innate need for human beings.
If you know that is an important aspect, why not have a communication framework, which allows you to do it. And it’s not very difficult to such a communication framework. It could be a team meeting, a town hall, a team huddle, or it could be inviting a few other functions into your team huddles to see what the product function is looking at in the next few months to the year.
So that gives an excellent picture is necessary for the individuals who are part of that conversation to pick up essential elements. Also, have conversations around this. Make interviews and assessments more contextual, where you’re talking about some of these elements. It’s not just a recruiter’s responsibility; everybody should shoulder it in the interviewing process, whether it’s a developer, senior developer, architect, or engineering manager who may be there in the process.
I’m talking about primarily tech function to talk about some of the problem statements that the organization would be taking on taking up and what’s great about it, answer that question.
The other element is that an interviewing process at any given point in time may work or may not work in terms of selecting the individual. Still, it is necessary to treat the individual as an employee of the organization and share information and talk about some of the organization’s overall goals in detail. Have peer-level conversations, and only if you can bring in a peer level comfort in your conversations would the other person get comfortable asking you more questions? Any good interviewing process is also a subset, so how many relevant questions were discussed in that conversation between the interviewer and the candidate.
These are some of the necessary elements. We need to keep in mind is that everybody is a partner in the process and start reading of people as existing employees in terms of, if not all, some of them have the more significant, more critical, or more complex problem statements that the organization is facing and what they could be related with, or what they could be working on.
Conclusion
While hiring top notch technical employees is a macroscopic to be solved by an organization the practices shared above are from Nishant’s experience of what works despite a stiff talent war. At Skillspace.ai, we’re contributing our bit by helping companies evaluate top-notch talent through seamless end-to-end technical assessments. If you’d like access to the platform to try it yourself, you can sign up for a free trial here.
Watch the entire Hiring Diaries episode with Nishant Das from Coinswitch.
In our 1-hour conversation during this episode of Hiring Diaries we discussed several agendas including –
- Role of assessments platform as Growth Lever in Technology Hiring
- Reducing Churn in Technology Hiring Funnels
- Recruiting trends in technology for India Inc in 2022
- Candidate Screening Strategies at Different Scales
- Delivering memorable candidate experiences
- Plus much more.
To check out the entire episode, visit here – skillspace.ai/hiring-diaries-201/.
