I remember about 25 years ago, in my first job searches, when the newspaper was the main means for publishing and searching for job ads. I ran through the pages of the newspaper with a highlighter in my hand and marked the offers that I found interesting. The next step was to print enough resumes (or photocopy them) and send them to the addresses listed in the ads. What comes next has changed, but not so much. Recruiters review resumes and call on candidates they want to incorporate into their selection processes.
Today, curricula are still widely used, but the means have changed. Most professionals have their resumes on LinkedIn and/or various job pages (plus a copy in Word somewhere on their hard drive).
Recruiters today have tools like job websites where they can quickly post jobs or search for profiles, or search for them on social networks like LinkedIn. Recruiters can use online tools such as Evalart to evaluate online candidates and optimize their selection processes. There are many tools on the market to manage the process itself.
So what will IT recruitment be like in the next decade?
Companies depend more and more on technology, so the demand for IT professionals can only increase. Even the smallest company is desperately looking for IT professionals for a number of reasons. Software for every activity of the company, the website, networks and communications, mobile applications and in general, the internet of things. The demand is growing faster than the supply of IT professionals, which means that the gap will become wider and wider.
Cloud-based developers
Concepts such as outsourcing and offshoring are nothing new, but a trend that is increasingly gaining strength is freelance work. Online platforms allow hiring professionals anywhere and technology increasingly facilitates the communication of teams scattered around the world. As the gap between supply and demand widens, companies will have to turn to developers from emerging countries with lower costs. Recruiters will literally have to search the entire world for the best talent and build teams that can be very geographically distributed. This must somehow be balanced with the trend that recognizes that physically placed teams have much better performance, so the technology will be offering more and more alternatives so that geographically dispersed teams can work almost as if they were together (high quality videoconferencing, collaboration tools, etc.)
The importance of your “recruiting brand”
The imbalance between supply and demand will increasingly tip the balance, turning the IT labor market into a favorable market for professionals and unfavorable for those who hire. To complicate matters even more for IT recruiters, technologies are becoming increasingly complex and, therefore, only the most talented are up to today’s challenges. Twenty years ago, a company needed a programmer who knew a language (and that language was everything). Today they must know more than one and each has dozens of frameworks, applications have multiple layers and must be integrated with an incredible variety of external systems.
Because of this, the most talented resources will not be selected, they will be the ones to select and the role of the recruiter will be largely a marketing job to attract the best talent. This of course will be easier if the company is recognized as a good place to work, with interesting benefits and challenges for the professional. This is where recruiting brand becomes so important. Companies must work on developing a powerful recruiting brand that sells the culture and all the benefits that the company will deliver to the candidate if hired. When we talk about benefits here, it is not just about the end of the year bonus, it is about everything that makes it attractive to work there. For example, a company recognized as highly innovative, a leader in an area of technology where a talented professional feels they can develop their full potential.
Big data in recruitment
If the curriculum had a couple of pages of information, in a decade recruiters will have much more information at their disposal. By analyzing large volumes of information, it will be possible to automatically identify candidates with the greatest potential. Just as today this is done to analyze a person who asks for a credit, in a decade it will be possible to determine by all your history in the network if you are a professional with greater probabilities of offering the best return to the hiring company. Big data analysis will have a lot of information to generate complex models. What the candidate posts in social networks, what people they have in their networks, in which companies they worked, what their rotation patterns say and the companies where they work, who recommends them in social networks, the hours they post and many things that I cannot even imagine now but that the big data analysis could determine that they have predictive power over the expected performance of a candidate.
The future always ends up being different from what one expected, but it is clear that recruitment is not the same as it was 20 years ago and neither will it be 20 years from now.