HR pros know the difficulties of recruiting top-notch talent for any position in an organization, but filling IT or dev positions might be the most challenging of all.
Pat Schoof, vice president of human resources at Udemy, an online learning and teaching marketplace based in San Francisco says, “The most profound challenge that the HR departments of small- and medium-sized tech companies face,” Schoof said, “is discerning whether the candidates are more intrigued by the allure of large companies like the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters of the world, vs. moderately-sized organizations like Udemy, where their impact could be more profound.”
With increased competition for a small pool of talented individuals, rising salary requirements, benefits, and other perks have created a bidding war between large and small business alike.
Schoof said websites like Salary.com do a disservice to young people who are new to the job market.
“While they believe this research is doing their due diligence, they end up approaching the job opportunity with false expectations about salary,” she said. “Young people also often have misguided expectations about time off—it is never a good idea to expectantly ask about vacation time when just starting a new job. Millennials, members of Gen X, and baby boomers all have vastly different expectations about job compensation and work demands.”
So just as 2014 created a crunch in the HR profession for IT employees, 2015 only shows that trend increasing. Good luck out there.