Growing a business has many challenges. From answering to VCs to remaining agile while pursuing aggressive growth. From keeping an eye on and superseding competitors to hiring an amazing team to build what you need; there’s a lot to do. The struggle to hire engineers plays an increasingly challenging role in business growth.
Sometimes, the hardest part might often seem like the perfection of a MVP, proving product-market fit, or performing analysis as to what needs building next. But what happens when everything is running as planned, you’re ready to build your next product, but there aren’t the engineers available?
This is a problem many people in tech today face. They have an amazing idea they need and want to move forward with quickly, but need to hire engineers to get it done. The pandemic only accelerated digitization and competition so it’s not only about the great idea, but being able to execute faster than your competitors.
The difficulty is, getting a good engineer on board can take a long time. Sometimes even up to six months; but six months is way too long to wait for a growing business.
So what can tech companies, executives, and engineering leaders do to find the right engineers? Let’s first take a closer look at the problem, and then some of the solutions you can implement.
Why It’s So Hard to Hire Engineers
As we mentioned in a recent post, studies published by IBM and LinkedIn show that machine learning engineers and data scientists are the fastest growing and most difficult roles to fill. It takes the average company about five to six months.
And the need for this type of talent is only growing:
- The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics states the number of jobs requiring Data Science skills is expected to grow by 27.9 percent. This is a market size increase from $95.4 billion USD in 2021 to $322.9 billion USD by 2026.
- With over 88.3 percent growth in job postings, data engineering is one of the fastest-growing domains in technology.
The competition becomes extra fierce when businesses only focus on hiring talent from specific geographic areas. They fail to realize that looking for tech talent only in Silicon Valley or even the U.S. isn’t sustainable or necessary. That’s because today’s remote-first world means the best fit for the job likely doesn’t live within the vicinity of a company’s headquarters.
In fact, when Stripe announced that their fifth engineering hub would be remote in 2019, they cited the fact that they wanted to tap into the “99.74% of talented engineers living outside their metro areas” of San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore (their first four physical tech hubs) as the reason.
Hire the Expert Engineers You Need
So, how can you start to tap into this vast pool of tech talent around the world? It comes down to three core tenets: sourcing, scalability, and longevity.
Sourcing Talent
When it comes to sourcing talent, look to nearshoring to hire outside your local area. Put simply, nearshoring allows your business to get work done by people in neighboring countries rather than your own.
Why neighboring countries instead of those further away? Because you’ll get to skip the headaches of things like time-zone difficulties that come with working with remote, offshore service providers. Instead of having them “work while you sleep”, you’ll benefit from having your team “work while you work”. This increases communication windows and ensures you’re making the most of both your and their dedicated work time.
At Factored, we believe this real-time presence in your local time zone is essential. It makes remote engineering work for your business as productively as possible.
Scalability and Agility
If your killer product idea really is a star in the making, nearshoring allows you to scale your team as you grow. This provides you with talent on demand and the agility to adapt your team based on your shifting needs.
To keep your engineers motivated and stimulated, it’s important that you set them up for practical achievements, like remote success. You must also listen to their ambitions. In this way, you’ll ensure they’re happy in their present working environment but also show that you’re invested in their futures. Which brings us to the third tenet…
Longevity for Collaboration
It’s crucial to think of how best to keep your engineers motivated and on top of their game in the long term. First and foremost: Be mindful of continuous training and upskilling. Bright engineering minds will constantly be curious and pride themselves on keeping up-to-date with the latest developments in the industry.
Keeping abreast of this will motivate your engineers and ensure that the new skills they learn are applied within your business. The best way to keep an engineer in the job is to keep them intellectually stimulated in the projects they work on and through continuous learning initiatives.
Therefore, be overly-communicative with your team about what you’re doing to contribute to their long term career paths and how you want to help them with this. After all, if the key builders of your company leave—or are impossible to find in the first place—your business simply can’t grow.
The Bottom Line
Don’t forget that hiring well is a crucial piece of the business growth puzzle. Stagnant strategies won’t make the cut in today’s highly competitive job market, so think hard about what you bring to the table as an engineering employer.
Remember, you don’t have to figure out this hiring puzzle alone. We at Factored are here to help you grow your business with the right engineering talent.
Book a meeting with Factored to have engineers start building your product by Monday.
