With some job positions empty for a longer period of time the question arises – do we have enough developers on the market? The answer is… well, complicated. 

According to the latest labor statistics it’s estimated that companies worldwide lack 40mln of skilled talents and in the next 10 years that number will be doubled. That might bring losses of $8.4 trillion in revenue. The assumption is that the number of developers is too low and it’s impossible to find the perfect candidate. The problem looks way more complicated, however, with the first question – does the typical recruitment process still make sense?

Possibly not. If taken into consideration that many candidates are judged based on a standard CV, we can safely assume that some talents are lost in the process, since they do not have standard education, diploma or credentials. We do not know how many candidates are rejected on the first stage of the recruitment process, when HR employees quickly go through piles of applications. For a long time we believed that  it’s the candidate who should prepare their CV the best they can, yet – it is still to be discovered what is the connection between making an eye-catching CV and the actual skill needed for the job. 

Skill assessments may be a much more effective way to check if the candidate is meeting our internal needs. But will it fix the problem of talent shortage? Probably not, since some workers prefer to work as freelancers or they are not interested in staying in one company or one project for a longer period of time anyways. Developers are already relatively well-paid so the issue cannot be resolved by increasing the salaries, especially if the pay rise comes with specific needs that do not really serve any purpose in the actual work.

Trying to give additional duties to current employees might also not be the best idea, since it leads to burnout and comes with a backslash. Over 30% of respondents surveyed by Indeed have admitted that those practices were one of the factors that made them change the job completely.

One of the things that can be done is limiting the number of hours that developers waste on maintenance. It was estimated that more than 17 hours per week are used on dealing with bad code, errors, debugging  or modifying – so things that either should be automated or done by another set of workers (possibly in-trainings). 

Another issue is management and prioritization of tasks, which, according to 45% of surveyed specialists, is responsible for delays and lowering productivity altogether.  When asked what negatively impacts workers morale, 81% pointed to work overload, 79% to change of priorities resulting in wasted time and not being given enough time to fulfill the task on a satisfactory level and 78% pointed to dealing with legacy systems.

Good news is, that if you don’t know how or you don’t want to change your recruitment system or you are not entirely sure how to effectively manage your existing teams, there IS an alternative available. There are some companies on the market which provide advanced team extensions, so basically they will lease you their group of well managed developers, who can perform the process for you without you having to worry how to obtain the final goal.

And that might be the song of the future, but with the developer (and not the sky) being your limit and your biggest potential simultaneously.

Author: Leszek Warzecha, Digital Marketing Specialist at ITSG Global