A recruiter reached out to me with this message a few months ago-
The highlighted part in the mail is what struck me. It made me rethink if I was really making an impact in my current role.
Seems familiar?
In recruitment, talent poaching (if it works out) could mean nirvana for your competitor but a nightmare for you. Though your employee’s loyalty is an admirable quality, recruiters need to be cognizant of the fact that most professionals are always on the lookout for better opportunities.
This trend is most evident among technologists. Thanks to the tech talent crunch, tech recruiters most times end up getting the raw end of the deal. Proof: we ran a recent survey for technologists and 88% said they are actively or passively looking for opportunities.
Also, several court decisions are quickly changing the landscape of competition laws in the United States. Take the mecca of tech, Silicon Valley, for example. Recent California court rulings have invalidated common employee non-solicit provisions. These cases have big implications, both for seasoned organizations looking to preserve their talent pool as well as startups looking to attract the best talent from competitors. Clearly it’s open season for poaching talent in the Silicon Valley
And it’s not just California. This is evident all across the country with even biggies like JP Morgan quoting that they are poaching Google tech whizzes for their new equity trading bot.
Did you know that an average organization in the United States spends 24 days on the interview process alone? It’s great to invest the time and effort to bring in the right candidate but what if your competition hires that same employee a year later?
Though talent poaching is difficult to avoid in today’s tech landscape, there are ways you can prevent it from happening.
Here’s how you can outsmart your competitors from poaching your all-star tech team-
First, let’s look at why technologists shift jobs. A Glassdoor survey asked 1,400 software engineers this critical question: What are the top reasons you would leave your job?
These are the top 5 –
Now let’s look at the following out-of-the-box ideas to address them:
Did you know that the companies with the highest employee morale and productivity pay a mix of salary and incentives? Though compensating technologists with a handsome salary almost, always works, there are some cool ways you can do this without a raise.
Provide autonomy and purpose
Most employees want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and one way of letting this happen is to help them see the kind of impact they are making to the business or product line. Developers should be given a chance to make decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them. The biggest gratification any developer can get is knowing that their code is changing the world.
Developer autonomy at Etsy – the online arts and crafts marketplace
Etsy employs a service-oriented architecture with a continuous delivery process and a feedback loop of 21 minutes. This means engineers need to deploy code every 25 minutes, which, in turn means developers have all the freedom to keep the wheels turning.
Source – Optimizing for developer happiness
What are they doing right?
Read more on the autonomy given to developers at Etsy
Develop a community
Get to know your developers as people.When you show genuine interest in your employees, they’ll do their best not to let you down. One great way to bond is to build a community so developers feel connected to each other and not just the business. Some ways you can build a community at work are as follows:
A poster of the latest internal hackathon at HackerEarth
Provide perks and privileges
Work-life quality is extremely important to some developers. Providing privileges like flexible schedules and work-from-home days as well as perks like opportunities to spend time on passion projects ensure that they find their workdays pleasurable and rewarding. This in turn boosts productivity, which can directly impact your organization’s bottom line
Perks and privileges at Basecamp
Basecamp develops web-based project management and CRM tools. Apart from being featured as one of the top paying companies for developers, Basecamp’s key focus is to keep employees happy and healthy. Few ways Basecamp keeps their developers happy are:
Here is the full list of the perks and privileges at Basecamp that you can provide developers at your organization too.
Engage your employees in the incentive process
What if the perks and privileges you offer do not motivate your employees? It is good to have an open discussion on the kind of perks developers enjoy. You can collect this information over a survey or a feedback discussion.
Once you have this info, you can set about making clear goals for them to achieve. This way, they are driven to deliver their best and it directly communicates the value for employee contributions.
Transparency at Buffer
If possible, you could go the Buffer way and keep things transparent for your employees. Most times, developers move either because they aren’t paid enough and their peers earn more in other organizations. Buffer is one of the most transparent companies out there to the extent that you can find out exactly how much anyone on the Buffer team earns.
And it’s not only the salary that they are transparent about. From the books they’re reading to their Equity formula, they have them all open for public access. View Buffer’s transparency dashboard here.
A snapshot of Buffer’s Diversity Dashboard
Employees are your company’s most important assets. Investing in a developers growth could lead to increased job satisfaction levels and better retention. According to a report by Training Magazine, companies in the US spend an average of $4.5 Billion on training and development programs for employees. Make sure you are not missing out on doing this.
According to Monster, here’s a list of programs offered by companies with some awesome training and development programs:
Developers look for work that challenges them. It is not surprising that 58% of them said they would switch jobs if they do not like the work. Do the following to make sure your developers love coming to work every single day:
Provide creative freedom
It is important to give developers the space to operate. Imagine how you would feel to work on the same tasks that are not challenging enough, day after day? You either end up getting complacent or bored or both, and that is when you start thinking of working elsewhere.
Denying developers a chance to follow an instinct that they are hired for could be counter-productive. Since they thrive on solving complex problems, providing them with creative freedom can help your developers contribute much more every single day.
Creative freedom at Valve
Valve is a video game developer, publisher, and distribution company which has developed video games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, and many others.
This is Valve’s take on creative freedom – “When you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.”
An illustration from the Valve Employee handbook to show the variety of roles employees handle in the first 6 months
Here’s what Valve does to ensure creative freedom for its developers: –
When a developer doesn’t know how to tackle a problem, it is not only a setback to your business but also acts as a source of discouragement. Proactively empowering your employees to be masters in their field will not only give them a much needed confidence boost but also enable peer learning.
At HackerEarth, our developers make use of our tech assessment platform to evaluate themselves. Here’s how we do it:
The HR team then works with the developers to see what courses they could sign up for to help them be the best at what they do. Our developers also use free websites such as Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, PVTuts, and FreeCodeChamp to upskill themselves.
Developers love working for companies that embrace their individuality. Our own developers range from being nerdy and quirky to downright eccentric. Most developers tend to stick on to a particular organization when they feel valued and recognized. A great company culture is equally important to a business because developers are most likely to enjoy their time at the workplace when they fit in with the culture.
These are 8 powerful signs of a great company culture:
Engineering culture at Netflix
This company which has epitomized binge-watching is also known for its amazing engineering culture. Freedom and responsibility are at the core of Netflix’s business strategy and believes that its culture helps it achieve excellence.
These are the 7 aspects of Netflix’s culture:
Netflix staff at Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California (Photo: GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP/Getty Images)
In fact, I could write an entire article about the fascinating insights on Netflix’s culture but for now you can check Netflix’s slideshow for more info.
Remote work is one of the benefits that most developers look for in a job. Most companies are adapting to a remote-first work culture which means you can build your development team around a workflow that embraces the concept of remote work, whether or not your employees are remote.
Remote working at GitLab
GitLab provides a full DevOps tool for the entire software development cycle— from project planning and source code management to CI/CD, monitoring, and security. GitLab calls itself a remote-first company and gives its employees a lot of freedom in the way they work.
Here are GitLab’s tips on working remotely:
The CEO’s house in Utrecht, Netherlands
Read more about GitLab’s remote stories
You could move one step further and even make your entire hiring process remote. Read more in our remote hiring E-book.
I hope this list helps you retain your tech team for a long long time, and the next time you think of the word ‘poach’ is only at breakfast :).
Jokes apart, I would really like to know if you’ve tried any of these at work. Feel free to share your experiences and drop me a mail on soumya.c@hackerearth.com. Have a great day!
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