How the Great Resignation made tech recruitment even more challenging, The Great Resignation has left tech workers wanting more out of work than big pay cheques and ping pong tables.
The Great Resignation has hit the tech industry. Workers across all sectors are increasingly leaving their jobs due to a combination of unsatisfactory wages, lack of recognition, and the absence of work progression, as well as failure by their employers to recognise the new normal of offering remote or hybrid working.
Tech professionals progressively demand the same benefits as their peers in other industries and, given the way the labour market looks, they are likely to get it.
What is the Great Resignation?
The Big Quit is intimately related to Covid-19. At the start of the pandemic, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. People expected unemployment to soar as businesses were forced to send employees home to weather out the pandemic.
However, something odd started to happen at the start of 2021. Despite the pandemic still raging across the world and social distancing restrictions still being enforced, people began to quit en masse. In July, job vacancies in the UK soared to an all-time high of over one million jobs being advertised. As of January 2022, 64% of Londoners are considering handing in their notice.
There were several reasons behind the seemingly sudden exodus of workers. The primary one was a backlog of people who would’ve left their jobs earlier if the coronavirus hadn’t wreaked havoc across the world, burnouts, and people deciding to do something different with their lives as contributing factors to the change.
What does this mean for the tech industry?
Unsurprisingly, these trends are echoed in the tech industry where workers on both sides of the Atlantic have left old employers, While there has always been a skills shortage in the tech sector, the same factors that have exacerbated the Great Resignation have also sent shock waves through the tech industry.
To be put blatantly despite tech workers not having quit to the same extent as other sectors, demand for their skills is at a record height. That means employers have their work cut out for them when it comes to sourcing talent.
What do tech workers want?
Tech workers have always been in demand. Consequently, businesses have often attempted to lure them in with lavish benefits. For a few years, visiting start-ups and Big Tech campuses meant having to sidestep ping pong tables, nurseries, and free beer taps. However, that’s not all software engineers and other tech workers want these days.
If employers want to source high-quality talent, they should look into the factors that caused the Great Resignation. For starters, that means they should compensate tech workers fairly for their services. In February, Big Tech firms like Amazon, Pinterest, Intel, and PayPal all acknowledged they could risk losing talent to competitors who offer more appealing job benefits, such as remote or hybrid work, according to securities filings.
With the skyrocketing demand for tech workers, employers should expect to only rope in workers at a premium – and not just in the big cities. With more companies offering either remote or hybrid working, tech workers are not as geologically locked in as they once were, and neither are their salaries.
On the flip side, this means employers can also access talent in new markets where they haven’t looked before.
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