The State of IT Recruiting in Phoenix

There are a lot of hiring managers who are ready for 2022 to be over. For many, 2022 and 2021 felt like one long continuation of 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit. Think we’re kidding? Think about what we’ve seen in the last two years:

• COVID and Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs)
• Work from home
• Quite Quitting
• Burned out employees
• Furloughs and rehires
• The Great Resignation
• Unionization
• A looming recession

There’s probably more to add to the list, but there’s no need; IT hiring managers we have been working with have shared that they have been overwhelmed in the past six months. If you are recruiting in the tech space, there is pressure of having far too many jobs and not enough talent. Recruiting skilled IT workers is more than a full-time job, and IT hiring managers say they don’t have the time or tools to fill these roles. We don’t even need to cite statistics here; ask anyone in IT and they’ll confirm how hard it is to find tech talent.

To add insult to injury, we’re about to roll into a new year, where IT hiring trends are evolving in a way that will keep us on our toes. What 2023 tech recruitment trends should you be alert to in the New Year? How will these trends change your efforts to find IT resources? We have answers to help prepare you for what’s ahead in IT recruiting for Phoenix employers.

A Tech Recruiting Agency in Phoenix Shares 5 Recruitment Trends for 2023

Tech recruiting agencies in Phoenix always have an ear to the ground for the latest tech recruitment trends. Here are the top five IT hiring trends we see impacting the IT staffing industry next year.

#1 Improve Brand Recognition to Recruit Top Tech Talent

Ask any IT recruiter in Phoenix (or any other market, for that matter) how important it is to create strong brand recognition in your recruiting efforts. They’ll nod and tell you it is one of the top tech recruitment trends that isn’t going away anytime soon. The days of waiting for an IT candidate to apply for your job are over. Now, the best tech recruiters also engage in marketing their brand—and selling what it’s like to work in their organization.

Or, at least, they do if they want to attract talent. Global consultancy McKinsey suggests that your brand must embrace a candidate-first mentality, by focusing on the experience of the potential tech candidate. They suggest you “think like a recruit” to create a more positive experience with your employee brand. Building your brand requires:

• Ensuring a highly professional, intuitive, and automated candidate application process
• Making sure your existing engineers are part of the recruiting outreach and hiring process
• Participating in tech community events and specific curated sites for skill development, diversity, and technology innovation
• Promoting diversity in hiring
• Upskilling your existing workforce and emphasizing an environment of continuous learning
• Improve your onboarding process by creating effective mentorship programs to nurture new IT talent.

CIO Dive reports that nine out of every 10 IT workers are paying attention to the company brand when choosing their next employer. Is your brand harming or helping your recruiting process? The reality of tech recruiting today is that the candidate is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them. This tipping of the scales toward the candidate is the best argument in favor of responding to branding as an IT hiring trend.

#2 Offering Remote Work To Increase Retention in Tech

One of the biggest changes in tech recruitment trends over the past two years is that the IT workforce doesn’t want to commute to the office ever again. Tech workers have a taste of remote work now, and CIO Dive says, “The tech workforce isn’t budging.”

As far as IT hiring trends go, this one could seriously affect your ability to attract new job candidates. Dice just released a report saying 60% of IT workers rank remote work as the most desirable workplace setting. The report also shows that more than half of IT workers are saying they’re planning on leaving their jobs next year unless they are able to work remotely, and this is a tech recruitment trend that will hugely impact how you hire in 2023.

For example, in August 2022, Apple tried enticing their remote IT teams back to the office three days a week. Those tech teams said no—publicly and loudly. There are other examples, but CIO Dive says many employers are moving toward an in-office requirement. “That,” they say, “is one reason why so many tech workers anticipate changing employers.”

#3 Recruiting for Diversity in Tech

What do IT workers want? Diversity. When do they want it? Now.

Far from being a protest slogan, the data shows us that job candidates are willing to give up salary for a company that digs in on the diversity issue by hiring widely and well in this area. Your skilled tech workers understand the research that shows “diversity is a key driver of innovation and is a critical component of being successful on a global scale.” This is a big IT hiring trend for 2023 and will greatly affect your ability to attract highly skilled tech workers.

Fortune says diversity in your tech workforce has “increasing relevance to workforce strategy, digital transformation, and social responsibility.” Some of the benefits of this tech recruiting trend include:

• When product or IT engineering teams are diverse, they create a more user-friendly product. Having a design and development team rich with different backgrounds, ethnicities, skills, and even political or religious affiliations means that the product you’re building will naturally reflect a wide ranging target customer audience.
• There are labor market benefits to diversification. You’ll have an easier time attracting skilled IT talent to your workforce. Studies show diverse teams are more innovative, produce more, and have higher revenue than teams who lack these characteristics.
• The moral imperative of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives should be obvious. If it isn’t, you will find it hard to bring on fresh new IT skilled workers, particularly from the younger generation.

#4 Greater Demand for Skilled IT Talent

Tech just experienced some highly public layoffs from the big names: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and more. Over a few weeks leading into November, close to 25,000 technologists were laid off as companies prepared for a rocky 2023 economy. How will this affect the perennial IT hiring trend that calls for tech staffing shortages?

Digiday says this is a market correction that will potentially enable smaller companies to pick up tech talent. While big Silicon Valley companies created salary inflation for skilled tech workers, the backlash is here. Some executives compare these layoffs to the dotcom bubble that hit us in 2000 and predict that IT workers may have to take salary cuts to continue to work in smaller, non-Silicon Valley companies.

Forbes calls it “a White Collar Recession.”

Does this mean there’s still a tech talent shortage? The Register reports, “Big tech’s discarded techies won’t sate the job market.” With an ecomony regularly showing 10 million open jobs, the need for tech workers isn’t expected to decline; just redistribute. Korn Ferry calls it “The $8.5 trillion talent shortage.” The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggests that not only will we be hard pressed to find IT workers in 2023—we’ll have to work a lot harder to keep them.

#5 Using an IT Recruiter in Phoenix To Develop a Data-Driven Recruiting Strategy

Recruiting is increasingly a numbers game. It is perhaps ironic that one of the top IT hiring trends for 2023 is an increasing need and reliance on IT in the form of big data to help us make actionable and strategic recruiting and hiring decisions. Hiring teams can use data to:

• Screen candidates more effectively by using interviews and resumes to create a well-rounded candidate persona as well as develop better screening questions.
• Identify initiatives that work—and those that don’t. What is your return on investment in the various channels you use for recruiting marketing? What job boards yield the best candidates? How is your referral program working? Data can answer all of these questions.
• To improve and speed up time to hire. Data analytics can spot workflow inefficiencies and bottlenecks. It can show that you fail to retain workers after you hire them. Data can suggest automation points that improve the candidate experience.
• Data can reflect your successes and failures in the area of diversity recruiting. What are the demographics of the candidates you interview and hire?

Hire Top IT Talent in 2023 With a Minority Certified Tech Recruiting Agency in Phoenix

Prosum is the leading tech recruiting agency in Phoenix, specializing in helping you find those needle-in-a-haystack candidates to fill your IT roles. Our talent team of Phoenix IT recruiters are standing by to work elbow-to-elbow with your overburdened HR teams to give them the resources they need to prepare for these, and other IT hiring trends.

Prosum understands the benefits of supplier diversity programs because we live in this world every day. We are a certified MBE business through the Southern California Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC). Our team emphasizes and implements diversity best practices in our efforts to find top IT talent for our clients. We meet all of the requirements of most supplier diversity programs, including being minority-owned, managed, and controlled. In addition, we have several initiatives to engage candidates from diverse populations in the technology field. These hidden pockets of talent are often hard to find for general service staffing organizations without the extensive tech networks of the Prosum team.

This year, give your HR teams the give of a recruiting partnership with Prosum. We can help alleviate the burnout associated with finding and managing the human resources processes associated with hiring IT staff.

Contact Prosum’s IT recruiters in Phoenix today.