How To Build A High-Performing IT Team

Building a skilled IT team can be a challenge. You’ll often require a diverse range of talent acquisition strategies to attract the candidates you need across all levels of seniority, and this is before you’ve explored the different benefits and competitive salaries that professionals with skills in different tech stacks demand. This is why it’s important that your entire leadership team are aligned with their goals for this team and understand what they need to do to attract and retain IT talent. 

IT specialists are high-performing candidates, often looking for chances to make a difference in their workplace by facilitating and helping to implement efficiency and process improvements. Due to this, it’s important that your IT team works well together, which will help to drive future business innovation. 

In this guide, we’ll explore how you can build a skilled IT team, focusing on the role that technology leadership plays in attracting IT specialists. Alongside this, we’ll discuss how you can optimise your IT talent acquisition strategies to attract top talent from across your sector, and what initiatives to utilise to ensure that you’re able to retain these employees once they’re on board.

If you’re still interested in the complexities of recruiting a specialist IT team after reading this article, read our guide to the 10 ways IT recruitment differs from other industries for more sector-specific insights from our expert consultants.

The Role Technology Leadership Plays in Attracting IT Specialists

So, what role can technology leadership play when it comes to attracting IT talent? 

First and foremost is to embed within your IT teams and gain insights directly from your employees on the ground. Industry leaders such as ASDA’s Claire Tempest, who attended our recent Sourcing and Social roundtable in May, highlighted the importance of senior leadership working in close partnership with their current IT experts to understand not only their needs and frustrations, but to gain valuable information on the positive aspects of their roles, too.

With two in five employees leaving jobs due to bad management, it’s important to ensure that your leadership team are all working towards the same goal when it comes to this question, especially since hiring mistakes are becoming costlier. Inspiring technology leadership is vital when it comes to marketing your business to both passive and active job seekers. 

Your senior staff should live your company values and employee value proposition, taking opportunities to champion it through not only their day-to-day duties, but via platforms such as LinkedIn, too. By giving staff guidelines on the content they can share on your social media and marketing pages, and encouraging them to share their knowledge, you can begin to build a reputation as a thought leader within your sector.

Building a strong brand is one of your most crucial talent acquisition strategies since it can serve to differentiate you from your competitors within the sector and highlight the opportunities for career growth and professional development that IT specialists are looking for. Your technology leadership team are important in forming and promoting a positive and compelling image of your organisation. 

At the same time, your leadership team are well-placed to communicate with staff and understand the benefits and compensation that they consider to be competitive within the industry. 

For instance, within the tech sector, team members are most likely to prioritise remuneration, work-life balance, and flexible conditions such as hybrid and remote work as the top three benefits they’re looking for in a role in 2023. Leveraging the access your leadership team has to employees means that you can keep abreast of any changes in demands as they occur, allowing you to provide candidates with a competitive job offer following the application and interview processes.

Simultaneously, your technology leadership team can enquire as to any issues which relate to morale within your existing IT team, meaning that you can head off any problems before they lead to staff turnover. As an example, your current IT specialists may need help to handle their current workload, which can highlight that you might need to address urgent issues by utilising IT contractors until you’ve had a chance to re-assess internal processes or recruit permanent staff. 

In the age of the digital skills gap—with 29% of SMEs noting skills shortages pose a high risk to their business activities—your technology leadership also plays a crucial role in talent retention. These skilled professionals have likely been in similar positions to the staff you’re looking to hire for your IT team, meaning that they can conduct 1-2-1s, identify training and coaching needs, and provide the detailed feedback that high-performing employees demand from the businesses they work for.

Nailing Your IT Talent Acquisition Strategies: 5 Top Tips

Now that we know why your technology leadership needs to be aligned on their goals for the IT team you’re looking to build, it’s time for us to explore our five top tips for tailoring your talent acquisition strategies to enable you to attract the high-performing, talented IT specialists you require to scale your business. 

• Embrace a skills-based approach to hiring. Instead of focusing on the standardised tasks and responsibilities required in the vacancies you’re recruiting for—that is, focusing closely on the “job” itself to the detriment of all else—consider shifting your emphasis towards a skills-based approach to hiring. 

This model places competencies at the centre of the hiring process, with major organisations such as Unilever seeing success by transitioning to a recruitment strategy that sees each role as a cluster of skills, rather than merely a list of tasks.

• Leverage data in your recruitment process. Whether you’re a tech-forward rising star or a traditional enterprise, utilising analytics to tailor your recruitment process, engage candidates, and streamline the sourcing, screening, and assessment of candidates should be a priority. 

Predictive analytics offer employers the ability to understand how a professional will perform in their future role, minimising the risk of a bad hire. With 76% of applicants believing that companies illustrate how they value their employees through their hiring practices, it’s vital that to ensure that the candidate experience is positive to connect with the best IT specialists. 

• A strong employee referral programme can pay dividends. IT contractors and permanent employees are nothing if not driven to improve their skills, especially given the speed at which technological innovation moves in 2023. As a result, they’re likely to be members of communities—both virtual and in-person—that have allowed them to expand their professional networks and gain new competencies. 

By encouraging your current IT employees to refer qualified candidates, you can gain access to higher-quality talent and complete the recruitment cycle more quickly. Offering incentives such as cash bonuses, additional annual leave, or career development opportunities can help to ensure that your employees take the referral programme seriously.

• Relationships with educational institutions offer a ready-made talent pipeline. Collaborating with local universities, colleges, or coding boot camps can help you to connect with fresh talent and offer opportunities for early-career professionals to take their first steps in the IT sector. 

Not only will this offer you the pick of the most talented candidates by providing internships and mentoring—or taking part in career fairs to identify future hires—but you’ll also be building your reputation as a supportive, nurturing employer within the industry.

• Your employer brand matters. Leveraging the social media channels where your recruitment demographic spends their time is important when it comes to making sure your name and positive reputation are known amongst candidates. 

It may require some in-depth research into the demographics that your IT team will comprise, but tailoring your marketing strategy to engage with that community via LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit or GitHub can help you to showcase your organisational culture, values, or impactful projects, building brand availability that will mean candidates consider you when they’re ready to take that next step in their career.

Whilst these innovative talent acquisition strategies require more effort than simply posting a series of vacancies to a job board, they can certainly supercharge your ability to attract those IT specialists that can have a positive impact on your business, enhancing your productivity and profitability through the latest technical skills. 

Ensuring You Can Retain the Talent in Your IT Team

Once you’ve built your skilled IT team, you need to know how to retain them. This is arguably more difficult to accomplish than acquiring these IT specialists in the first place, since it will require regular communication with your technology leadership to ensure that you’re still offering a competitive EVP, providing remuneration, benefits, learning and development, and career advancement opportunities that your talent requires to feel fulfilled and thrive within the workplace. 

There are several ways you can retain your new hires and inspire company loyalty, but some increasingly impactful methods are detailed below.

• Providing Opportunities for Continuous Professional Development 

IT contractors and specialists are always looking for opportunities to gain new skills and competencies, from cutting-edge tech stacks to interpersonal “soft” abilities such as communication, negotiation, and presentation skills. As a result, you’ll want to make certain that you’re providing your employees with the enriching training activities they need to keep your business innovative. 

This has been successfully implemented by tech-forward organisations such as Atlassian, who implemented what they referred to as “20% time”, encouraging their IT specialists to choose their own projects to complete during 20% of their weekly hours, typically spread amongst their other development opportunities. 

Whilst the company found it difficult to encourage its developers to focus 20% of their hours on professional development and personal projects due to the responsibilities of their day-to-day work, they did find that those IT specialists that took part in the experiment were proud of the work they did—with 48 projects completed within a year of the 20% time initiative beginning.

• Supporting Work-Life Balance And Implementing Flexible Policies

Employees are now more aware than ever of the damage that poor well-being and burnout can do to productivity and profitability, which is why promoting work-life balance is so essential to any organisation looking to build an IT team in 2023. 

Allowing your employees to work remotely or set their own hours can show that you’re willing to prioritise their health, setting you apart from competing companies that are looking to attract the IT specialists that you’ve invested in onboarding and training. 

Flexible work policies empower employees to manage their personal commitments whilst still delivering on work requirements, enhancing overall job satisfaction at the same time as you reduce your overall staff turnover. 

Buffer, a fully-remote company offering social media management software to over 75,000 clients, has effectively implemented this strategy across the 15 nations that their employees come from, offering a number of additional perks to facilitate this emphasis on work-life balance, such as a $500 allowance for setting up a home office or for funding a table at a co-working space. With 98% of their employees responding that they’d like to continue to work remotely for the rest of their careers, clearly, this focus on harmonising work and life is making a positive impact.

• Fostering A Culture Of Innovation And Knowledge-Sharing 

Creating a culture of innovation and knowledge-sharing is, luckily, something that your IT team will naturally lean towards. IT specialists are always looking to experiment and share the latest technologies with their peers, which means that as long as you’re fostering an open and supportive environment, staff will feel confident to contribute their ideas and drive innovation within the organisation. 

Many businesses have aimed to break down internal siloes and facilitate cross-team mentorship and communication by fostering an internal culture of innovation, with perhaps the most significant example of this being the multinational tech corporation IBM. Understanding that their IT specialists, engineers, and scientists are at the heart of their success, IBM’s technology leadership have supported their staff as they collaborate with organisations such as Samsung on pioneering work in semiconductors, and the Cleveland Clinic on advanced pathogen research. 

Allowing employees to be led by their passions whilst still remaining commercially conscious fosters creativity, enhances employee engagement, and creates a sense of ownership. Promoting staff retention and employee satisfaction in this way can not only reduce the cost of having to repeat the hiring exercise but can also lead to improved productivity and profitability as your IT team discovers technologies that can streamline internal processes and save time which can be devoted to the product or service. 

• Regularly Analysing The Market To Ensure You’re Offering Competitive Compensation And Benefits Packages 

Competitive compensation and benefits rank as the number one concern for IT specialists, particularly within the current cost-of-living crisis. As a result of this lack of benchmarking against industry standards, employers that aren’t aware of market conditions and regularly review the salaries being offered by their competitors are not only at risk of failing to attract new talent but of struggling to retain their existing IT team. 

Ensuring that you’re offering competitive compensation helps your employees to feel as though they are valued for the work they do and rewarded for their complex contributions toward projects. This impact is two-fold since building a reputation as an employer that rewards talent will also see you receive more applications from talented, committed, and enthusiastic candidates. 

Adobe, the multinational publisher of creative and commercial software solutions, has regularly topped lists of corporations with employees most satisfied with their pay, equity, and additional benefits, with the company regularly paying the highest salaries within the field to their IT specialists—as well as providing a raft of benefits for families and female employees, such as assistance with childcare costs.

• Cultivating A Strong Sense Of Purpose Through The Work You Do

With 30% of the workforce set to consist of Gen Z candidates by 2030, and 26% of those candidates looking to derive a sense of meaning from their day-to-day duties, helping your employees to cultivate a clear understanding of the impact and purpose of their tasks can help to engage staff and drive talent retention efforts. 

In what is perhaps now a well-known example, Salesforce—a provider of cloud-based software solutions across the marketing, sales, eCommerce, and analytics sectors—was designed from the ground up with a focus on not only profitability but philanthropy. This led to the development of their 1-1-1 model, which allowed the company and its leadership to donate 1% of their equity, 1% of their product, and 1% of employees’ time back to the charities that matter to them. 

As a result, this 1-1-1 model also inspired the creation and founding of Pledge 1%, an organisation which sought to cement corporate social responsibility at the heart of every IT organisation. 

This model has helped to connect employees’ work with a larger purpose within society, instilling a sense of pride and company loyalty—with staff taking greater ownership of their work beyond the usual motivators of monetary rewards.

These innovative methods help to keep employees engaged and motivated, whilst still prioritising their needs in such a way as to keep them productive and profitable. Creating a supportive and fulfilling work environment by offering opportunities for growth, flexibility, and a sense of purpose are crucial to enhancing retention rates in the modern workplace. 

Wrapping Up

Building a skilled IT team requires you to ensure that your technology leadership are aligned with their goals. A cohesive, long-term vision which promotes your principled, purpose-driven employer brand and EVP is crucial to modern talent acquisition strategies. At the same time, you can’t focus solely on attracting candidates—you also need to make certain that you’re reducing the risk of staff turnover by providing your IT specialists with the opportunity for continuous professional development, a robust work-life balance, and a culture of innovation and compensation. 

Tailoring your talent acquisition strategies in this way can help you to embrace innovative recruitment models such as skills-based approaches to hiring, and leveraging data on your target employee demographics to ensure that hiring efforts are personalised and impactful. At the same time, by cultivating an environment in which a strong sense of purpose can motivate all staff, you’re also likely to enhance overall productivity, profitability, and satisfaction amongst the members of your IT team. 

Supporting You to Build a Bespoke IT Team

At Fruition, our consultants are passionately dedicated to ensuring that market-leading organisations can source the talent they need to scale their activities and make an impact. No matter how complicated the requirements of the role or project, we can help you to build your IT team, with bespoke high-volume staffing and executive search solutions that can help you to remain competitive. Contact us to discover how our recruitment services can connect you with the IT contractors or specialists you need.