One of the biggest issues that is impacting the IT industry right now is talent crunch. There are millions of unfilled jobs with not enough skilled IT professionals to fill in those open positions. This huge imbalance between supply and demand for top IT Hidden Talent has made the situation even worse as IT professionals are more valuable than ever before.
Businesses are ready to pay the top dollars to hire them. This puts large scale enterprises at an advantage as their huge budgets allow it. Sadly, small and mid size businesses are suffering greatly due to it. The great resignation has made the problem even worse as more and more IT professionals are quitting their jobs so they can switch to a better alternative.
Some are also calling it a day because of work related stress and employee burnout. Even senior IT professionals who have spent decades working in an IT industry are either planning to retire early or switch careers mid way. All these factors are contributing to a labor shortage crisis in tech. So how can you get over this issue? By finding and training hidden talent internally and preparing them to take on new roiles.
Instead of looking towards external sources for hiring new IT talent, you are better off making the most of internal IT talent especially in today’s IT job market. In this article, you will learn about six effective ways to find hidden talent inside your organization.
6 Effective Ways To Identify Hidden Talent In Your Organization
Here are six tired and tested ways to identify hidden talent in your organization.
Look at Leadership Potential
Your goal should be to prepare future leaders, not just employees. For this, you should keep an eye on the leadership potential of your internal IT staff. Who can take up leadership roles in the future? Candidates who have the potential to lead your IT team in the future should be given priority as the future success of your organization rests on their shoulders.
Look at their drive to learn and improve. If a candidate possesses all these qualities, you should hire them. Even if they lack something in terms of skills, you can train them and polish their skills. Sometimes, even those with different backgrounds can have successful careers in IT and we are already seeing many examples of that in today’s IT industry.
Organize Bootcamps
One of the best ways to train your existing IT talent is to organize bootcamps. They can not only provide learning opportunities to your employees but can also help you fill those unfilled IT roles. For instance, you can easily train them on how to manage cheap dedicated server hosting. Make sure you hire a trainer that specializes in what they are teaching. Your boot camps should not go beyond the six month mark as the participants could lose interest if it lingers too much.
Keep it anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for best results. Individuals graduating out of these boot camps should be encouraged to take up new roles in a different domain and showcase their skills that they have learned.
Launch Career Changing Programs
Career changing program can play an important role in reducing your organization’s employee turnover rate. It motivates your existing IT team members to stay instead of switching jobs. More importantly, it provides them an opportunity to showcase their talents in a completely different domain. Employees who love to take on challenges love this.
Instead of just throwing an employee into alien territory, you should first fully train them. Tell them about the challenges they will encounter in a new role such as managing a VPS server in Brazil and what steps they can take to overcome those challenges. Some employees relish the challenge and would appreciate taking up different roles in different departments throughout their stay with your company. You need to find those employees and include them in your career changing programs. Employees value new challenges as they can quickly get bored with their repetitive daily routines.
Take Advantage of Internal Sources
A non IT employee can also have the potential to deliver exceptional results for your IT team but their hidden talents are usually ignored because they don’t belong to the IT department. When you are hunting for IT talents internally, you need to keep an eye on non IT staff as well. You never know some of them could possess exceptional IT knowledge. You can benefit from their capabilities.
This also sends a message to your employees that you value them and are more worried about their career progression and skill development than just your own profit. When employees see that, they are less likely to switch jobs and stay with your organization for a long time.
Harness the Power of Passion
Probably the most important driver that encourages employees to learn new skills is passion. If an employee is passionate about technology such as cheap dedicated hosting even if they belong to some other department, they are more likely to succeed at IT. Their career progression and ability to learn new skills will be much better as compared to an IT staff who hates working in IT.
Even when passionate employees find themselves stuck, this passion will drive them to get over the roadblock which is hampering their progress. That is why it is imperative that you know what your employees are passionate about.
Find and Maximize Your Internal Skill Pool
As more and more millennials enter the workforce, the tech landscape is about to go through a paradigm shift. These millennials don’t like to get stuck in an organization chart doing the same thing day in and day out. They are looking for freedom and career growth opportunities.
Creating an internal skill marketplace will create an environment of healthy competition. This is great as every employee tries to match the other in terms of skills instead of job role. Not only that, an internal skill pool can eliminate hiring bias and encourage workplace diversity.
Do you leverage internal talent or hire externally to fill in new roles? Share it with us in the comments section below.
