Innovative Ways to Win the War for Top Talent in a Competitive Market

The employee turnover rate in the tech industry stands at around 13 percent, more than in any other business sector. Regarding layoffs, the figures are just as disheartening, increasing 10-fold from 2021 to 2022. In 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, there were about 263,000 layoffs in the tech sector, which comes to 720 layoffs for every day of the year. That figure has since risen to about 780 per day.

Employee attrition is costing organizations a lot in terms of time, money, and other resources. According to Gallup, replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 50 percent to 200 percent of their annual salary. It doesn’t help that the talent gap in the tech sphere is growing, and top-tier tech talent is at a premium, which means that companies all over the world are fighting over a relatively thinning pool of quality talent.

How do you win in this battle for top tech talent, and how do you prevent your talent from leaving so you don’t have to replace them? I’ve listed a few strategies to help you win the struggle for tech talent while enjoying significant employee retention rates.

Prioritize your brand and culture

While offering competitive rates and employee benefits is good, that’s not all developers and other tech employees are looking for. A Glassdoor survey showed that more than 75 percent of employees consider an organization’s culture before applying for a job, while 56 percent stated that they prioritized company culture over salary.

The first step to attracting the kind of talent you want is to be a brand that is appealing to begin with. You can tell if your organization exudes this feeling by assessing your employees. Are they excited and committed to their work? Do they understand and exemplify the company’s values and mission?

Create policies and workplace structures that promote honest and transparent communications between employees and management. Promote customized work schedules that allow employees the fluidity of a healthy work-life balance as much as possible. Address their feedback quickly and respectfully, celebrate their wins, and create a program to recognize and reward them. How these are implemented will vary between companies, but it’s an excellent way to nourish employee morale and foster a positive workplace.

Build your own job board

Generic job boards are useless and have given way to niche job aggregators, but you can build your own job board to take it a step further. 

There are several benefits to building your job board. With a third-party job board, you’re limited in how you can present your business and the opportunities you provide. You can take the reins and limitations off with a company job board.

You can tailor your job roles as specifically as you want them to attract the best possible candidates. This allows you to take your time to present your company in the best possible light.

With technological advances, developing a job board no longer has to be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. There are many no-code programming alternatives on the market today, including options tailored specifically for job boards.

One such company is JBoard, a no-code job board design platform that launched in 2020. JBoard was created to extend a fully no-code building experience to brands and companies so they can build their recruiting platforms. The award-winning job board software has in-built search engine optimization, job aggregation functionalities, unlimited customization capabilities, a built-in blogging platform, and job scraping features. 

Recruit internally

Let’s say you need a senior data engineer. Offer the role to someone on your team who most fits the bill in terms of talent, expertise, and experience.

If you find that they fit the role but still need to adopt a few skills to get over the edge, create a training program to help them upskill. This approach significantly boosts employee loyalty and retention rates, and recruiting internally costs nothing. That’s a ton of time and money saved.

A close second to this approach would be to launch an employee referral program. Word of mouth is a powerful recruitment tool, especially if it’s coming from someone who embodies the organization’s values. This way, any candidate referred by an employee is already pre-vetted and has a greater chance of being the right fit for your company. These referrals are cheaper and faster to recruit and onboard and also have a higher retention rate.

There are countless other ways that companies can position themselves to stand out from the noise and reach the right talent in unique ways. Whatever path you choose to take, commit to it, and it will pay off.