- July 13, 2022
I recently ran into my neighbor Mark, a lead software engineer at a FAANG company. Every day, recruiters from some of the hottest companies in the world inundate him with emails and voicemails. One company, he told me, had been calling him so much he resorted to blocking them.
It’s a candidate’s market the likes of which we’ve never seen. In 2021, 4.3 million people left their jobs — and 36 percent quit without having a new job lined up. Coupled with that is an extreme shortage of technical talent, which won’t just affect the tech sector but any industry that relies on tech (which is to say: every industry). In 2022, 64 percent of executives cite the shortage as the most significant barrier to adopting emerging technology. Only 4 percent said the same in 2020.
As HR leaders, we’re working against all odds to attract and retain a cohort of chronically cynical professionals who have worked through a pandemic, rampant burnout and a silent epidemic of loneliness. Their mental, physical and emotional resources have been taxed, tested or depleted.
Your employer brand is the lived experience you promise, and then deliver, for your candidates and employees. It spans every interaction from interview to exit (and beyond). It’s not just your EVP, mission statement or set of core values. It’s the extent to which you make good on them.
In this climate, companies with people-first employer brands understand candidates and employees have a new set of expectations for employers. And they move mountains to meet them. Those are the only companies that will survive the years to come.
Built In is in a unique position to offer insight into these expectations. Millions of professionals who work across disciplines in the tech industry visit BuiltIn.com monthly, and we frequently take their pulse.
In one recent survey, we asked professionals what mattered most to them when considering job prospects. Career growth, benefits and compensation were each important for more than half of respondents. Drilling down to specific benefits, about half listed remote work and 44 percent pointed to mental health and wellness programs.
Four things would impel them to leave a job: better pay, work-life balance, more upward mobility or a stronger culture.
DEI is also now a requisite for hiring and retention. In Built In’s 2022 report, “The State of DEI in Tech,” 58 percent of professionals said DEI is “very important” when seeking opportunities.
No employer can afford to ignore this — and yet, they do: In spite of the DEI promises many companies made in 2020, 30 percent of employees said their companies either don’t have any DEI programs or are making a “very poor effort.”
It’s easy to see the through-line. Each of these expectations require us as leaders to value our employees as whole humans with lives, futures and aspirations that extend well beyond their tenures with our companies. If we listen — and we must — we can hear the collective voice of workers everywhere, challenging us.
Compensation is more tied to employer branding than you’d think. I’d venture to guess you didn’t know the company prior to 2015. Today, a Google search for “Gravity” and “$70,000” yields 1.37 million hits.
In 2021, Price spoke about his compensation model with CBS News: “I feel like I’ve been shouting from the rooftops like, ‘This works, this works, everybody should do it!’”
Am I saying you need to pull a Dan Price to attract and retain top talent? No. But I am certain of this: Companies that seek to survive must create unequivocally human-centered, people-first employer brands.
To paraphrase the Robin Hood of tech himself: It works, it works, everybody should do it — and fast.
