Bridging Your Talent Gap — New Ways to Fill Tech Roles.

Every company is now a tech company — at least that’s what a current estimate of nearly 1 million job openings for software developers seems to suggest. Organizations are spending countless resources trying to stay competitive by building out their development teams.

Industries such as banking, media, insurance, healthcare, government, the military, higher education, and many more are competing to hire new developers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for developers is expected to grow 13% by 2028 with the increasing need for innovative software applications.

Finding applicants to fill the developer seats, however, is proving difficult. According to a 2019 report from iCIMS, a recruitment software provider, employers hired only 60% of their required tech talent in the U.S. over the last three years. The central problem is that employers find it increasingly difficult to find qualified tech candidates.

Companies are now spending more time and resources on competitive recruiting. According to another 2019 report from iCIMS, it took companies an average of 66 days to fill a tech role. These tech role shortages are proving expensive. Roughly $680 in revenue is lost each day per vacancy — totaling about $45,000 over those 66 days.

To avoid revenue loss, get products to market faster, and find ways to innovate and accelerate the entire development process, companies need to either hire quicker or focus on amplifying their current team’s output.

How Companies Are Currently Solving the Problem

With the shortage of talent growing, some companies have looked into other solutions. One approach that companies take to bridge the talent gap is to retrain current employees through internal training and mobility programs.

These initiatives allow companies to invest in the future of their employees while building a strong community internally. Educating current employees to fill anticipated technical openings enables the company to nurture specific skills to match the employee to the desired role.

Unfortunately, programs like this are mostly reserved for large corporations with the resources and time needed to pull something like this off. Creating in-house programs to upskill employees would be impractical for most organizations trying to fill the gap quickly.

This is where software as a service, or SaaS, comes into play. These out-of-the-box software solutions are sold by companies as a cookie-cutter way to address tech and business challenges. While these provide a temporary solution, these offerings often fall short. Companies find that their unique business process demands can quickly outgrow the SaaS tool, causing a need for customization. The subscription fees and cost for customized additions can put tremendous pressure on budgets.

Finding the perfect candidate or upskilling your existing development team may not be practical for all organizations, and the SaaS model is filled with hidden costs that stack up quickly. At what point does it make sense to consider a tailored solution that matches your specific business needs?

No-Code Platforms Bridging the Gap

Another way to solve these problems is by employing a No-Code development platform. No-code platforms empower your entire IT and business staff to create perfect enterprise-quality software solutions using drag-and-drop visual interfaces, without hand-coding.

No-code tools increase your productivity with a lesser experienced staff by reducing your team’s dependence on a broad set of diverse tools that increase development complexity. This gives IT leaders the flexibility to be more creative with their teams’ make-up and reduces the pressure of finding that perfect, full-stack developer or over-burdening their star players.

No-Code and some Low-Code development platforms allow any employee to become a developer by promoting sound programming principles. With guardrails that ensure proper development practices, these platforms provide an easy to understand common language between teams. This creates a more transparent development cycle within organizations, enabling strong cross-discipline collaboration and shortening software development timelines.

Strengthening communication between IT and Business and shortening development time is a critical catalyst for innovation. Successful delivery relies on employees working together to achieve one goal. This fosters an atmosphere of cooperation throughout the entire organization, where the creation of transformative solutions is not contained to independent silos, but a united and cross-discipline effort.

By adopting true no-code platforms and closing your skill gap, you can focus on delivering the products that help you innovate and stay competitive.