Technology skills are what help companies drive success in the digital world. Source: Shutterstock

Technology skills are what help companies drive success in the digital world. Source: Shutterstock

Gartner says companies need to work harder to attract tech skills

ORGANIZATIONS that care about the pace of their digital transformation know that they need the right tech skills to succeed.

However, given the talent gap in the market, are businesses really working on making themselves more attractive to potential employees? Gartner doesn’t believe so.

According to a recent forecast, the analyst firm noted that although sourcing and attracting the right talent is a top priority for CEOs, 62 percent of chief human resources officers (CHROs) it surveyed claimed that their organization’s talent attraction strategy is not aligned with their future workforce needs.

“Talent is often the differentiator between the organizations that thrive and those that struggle. Our research shows that 29 percent of critical roles remain vacant after five months,” said Gartner HR Practice VP James Atkinson.

Key talent, of course, in most cases relates to technology-related roles — and are critical to the organization’s digital transformation efforts.

“Many organizations are chasing the same critical talent. Gartner TalentNeuron [a proprietary talent intelligence portal created by the analyst firm] data shows that 49 percent of all job postings by S&P 100 companies in 2018 were for just 39 roles,” said Gartner HR Practice Group VP Alex Johnston.

“More than one-quarter of those critical roles are in technology functions, and the demand for them extends to virtually every industry.”

Analysis using Gartner TalentNeuron, which produced the Gartner Talent IQ Index 2019, revealed that organizations must focus on three facets to effectively attract better talent — including those with tech skills:

# 1 | Employment branding

Gartner advised companies to avoid focusing on the quantity of career-related posts, and instead, focus on creating content for social media and other platforms that provided information that candidates were actually looking for.

Topics that the analyst firm has suggested include diversity, corporate culture, as well as professional development.

Overall, organizations that really connect with audiences when posting social media content about careers are those that show glimpses into the lives of what actual employees do, go behind the scenes on projects to show the size of opportunities and the flow of projects within a business, among other things.

# 2 | Job-offer competitiveness

“To appeal to candidates, the best job postings speak directly to what employees want by considering the five categories of the Employee Value Proposition (EVP): Rewards, Opportunity, Organization, People, and Work.”

Gartner advises companies to spend time understanding the EVP that really matters to the candidate pool that they’re keen to attract. Doing so can reduce the time to fill the role by up to nine days.

# 3 | Candidate experience

The analyst firm believes that tech professionals look for diversity & inclusion (D&I) and a modern work experience, which is why companies need to focus on sharing their values and beliefs with candidates and employees via their website, social media, and other platforms.

Of the organizations that Gartner reviews, only 38 percent had a D&I statement from a senior leader on their career website and only 6 percent have adopted mobile recruiting application technology. Obviously, this needs to change. Now.

“Organizations that aren’t able to attract the talent they need across functions and geographies will find it difficult to drive business outcomes and maintain competitive advantage.

“The companies most successful at recruiting and hiring harness the ability to dig deep into the talent pool and reach candidates via employment branding, job offer competitiveness and candidate experience,” concluded Atkinson.