3 actions to survive the “The great resignation” on your IT company

With so many innovations around us, it is difficult to understand how fast our entire world is changing, and it’s in these details that we tend to get lost.

The Great Resignation, often referred to as “the Big Quit” or “the Great Reshuffle,” is a current economic trend in which a significant number of workers have left their positions willingly. As expected, this phenomenon was triggered and had its beginnings with Covid-19. 

Regional socio-economic factors such as rising inflation and its related cost of living, mixed with old-style values of old-style employers such as limited opportunities for growth, hostile work environments, and lack of benefits, boost it. Although it is usually understood as a phenomenon that is linked to the IT industry, sectors such as healthcare, hospitality, and education were also impacted due to common dissatisfaction factors.

The advantages of working from home have been discovered by candidates, who appreciate not having to endure long, stressful commutes, having more time for themselves, and being essential to start their own businesses (reduced available workforce).

In addition, the fact that both employers and employees understood that people can be just as productive from home, opened up the game for work opportunities regardless of geographic and even, in some cases, time zone differences.

This context has led to conflicting issues at the time companies hire new people. Candidates are now in control of the job market. This can be difficult for some companies to accept, who are used to having a stronger grip on the hiring process. However, the candidate asks why he should work for your company specifically, given that he has multiple offers on the table.

And this generates a lot of dissatisfaction in traditional companies, which tend to have two major common failures: lack of trust and over-control of employees’ tasks.

To ease these frictions, it is worth reviewing the following market statistics that will help those who need to be flexible. 

These percentages help us un stand how 4.25 million people quit in January 2022, while in February 4.35 million people did so.

To explain and understand the current situation from a problem-solving perspective, let’s use the SPIN method to detail what we are facing as a market in this IT industry. 

Situation

• Right now there are more jobs than workers available. 
• The IT Sector is at “full employment”
• Candidates have multiple opportunities
• Shelf life extremely short 
• Salary demands have risen significantly
• Work from home is desired and feasible with many IT jobs

Problem

• Client projects have budgets, and the new salary demands put clients at odds with the market
• The traditional hiring process is much slower than candidate shelf life
• Lack of client adaptability produces a domino effect of departures
• Projects deadline missed, budgets busted

Implication

• Client innovation work-from-home system
• Opportunities missed
• Revenues decrease
• Company stress

Need Payoff 

What do we need to do to fix this?

Expedite and revamp your hiring process to meet what the market demands!

We recommend the following 3 actions in your company to improve and create a better candidates flow:

• Be more flexible: More trust, less control, more work from home or hybrid options.
• A shortened recruitment process: Faster and simpler recruitment process.
• More benefits: stay/pay bonuses, perks, wage increases

No doubt, the use of these methods and sticking to the rules until results are achieved will help streamline processes. With that we feel comfortable doing the next questions.

Have you felt any impact as a result of the Great Resignation?

Have you lost anyone in your company you were not expecting to lose?  

Are there any individuals that will impact your company if they leave? 

This is a very relevant topic for us at Lithium, an IT Staffing company that helps tech companies in the US to scale their teams with nearshore IT talent from Latam. Every time we approach a new client we are very clear about the expected process, in order to reach results filling their open positions.

Our value proposition is based in two important factors: 

Matching

The main factor for a successful candidate to be accepted by our client is the correct match with the expected technical skills and social skills that are aligned with the company tech stack and culture.

Timing

Once we introduce a new candidate to our client we have an open window of 2-3 weeks in order to advance in the process with our client and confirm the hiring. If our client process takes longer than that, the chances to lose the candidate is very high, because they always have more than one opportunity on the table.

Conclusion & Takeaways

In the technology staffing industry, it’s not uncommon to hear stories about poor hiring practices at many client companies. The Great Resignation has made these problems worse, resulting in longer times to fill open positions, missed deadlines, increased costs, and more job openings.

For this reason, being agile in the recruitment process and being aligned with the candidates’ expectations are vital in the current times of talent shortage.