In today’s digital age, growth in the Internet of Things and 5G communications are driving business models to become increasingly reliant on the Cloud to function. As a result organisations are stepping up their investment in the Cloud to ensure they can harness leading-edge technologies that will drive their business forward. And as Cloud adoption increases, so too will competition for individuals with this skillset to lead adoption and integration.

However, moving towards the Cloud doesn’t just require specialists. These days, many technologists’ roles involve the Cloud – but they use it, rather than build or maintain it. These individuals may not require specialist knowledge about the inner workings of the Cloud, but they do need continual reskilling and upskilling to ensure they harness and integrate these technologies in the most efficient and safe manner.

With this in in mind, it’s important for organisations to take a long-term view of how they can stay ahead of the competition and secure the relevant skills their business needs, making the acquisition of Cloud skills a strategically important matter.

Here are a number of things to consider when recruiting and retaining talent for your organisation:

• Be willing to offer attractive remuneration. Consider what impact saving a few pounds on your recruitment costs may have on your organisation’s transformative intentions from both an attraction and retention standpoint. Efforts to save on a pay packet may hamper your organisation’s ability to secure individuals that can drive substantial business value.

• Provide an opportunity to upskill. Not all Cloud experts are motivated by money alone. Contractors will also be attracted to organisations that provide them with an opportunity to upgrade their existing skillsets. Cloud projects that focus on the latest technology such as the Internet of Things and Edge Computing will most appeal to talent.

• Cross train your staff. There shouldn’t be a motivation issue, given that entering the Cloud skills market currently has no downsides. Transferable skills include SQL and MySQL, software quality assurance and project management.

• Consider outsourcing. In the extreme, this may mean outsourcing your complete IT function. Or it could mean selectively outsourcing elements, so that you retain overall control. Consider new ways of working with your suppliers, such that the relationship evolves into a partnership where risk and reward are shared.

• Embrace diversity. According to Microsoft, 80% percent of IT roles in the UK are occupied by males. However, research has shown that gender balanced teams better adhere to project schedules, incur lower costs and achieve higher performance ratings. Addressing this imbalance will help to fix the Cloud skills bottleneck and in turn improve the overall economy.

• Hire for Learnability. Today, employability is less about what people already know, but more about their capacity to learn and their desire and ability to continually develop in-demand skills. In turn, this will enable your employees to remain innovative and responsive to emerging trends.

• Remove unnecessary qualifications barriers. As the accepted view of what good education looks like changes, so too must the requirements of new hires. With that in mind, it’s a good opportunity to reassess your qualification criteria. Does it really matter whether your Cloud specialist went to University if they have all the necessary training?

• Consider hiring untapped talent. Training schemes such as AWS re:Start are working to help organisations give military veterans experience in IT roles, providing individuals with relevant Cloud based foundation training and allowing them to show their potential to learn and progress in the space.

• Find talent with the right skills mix. Don’t just focus on finding talent that understand Cloud technology and systems. They also need the soft skills required to solve problems, communicate and collaborate. The right blend of hard and soft skills will be increasingly valuable to your organisation.

Regardless of whether you’re employing Cloud specialists or technologists with Cloud skills, employers have an important role to play in ensuring their skills remain relevant. Since Cloud adoption is only set to increase in the years ahead, we can expect the war for talent with the right skills to continue to intensify.

If you need support with attracting the right Cloud talent for your organisation, then please get in touch.

Demand for Cloud talent is soaring, as employers recognise that they need to recruit specialists to lead Cloud adoption and integration. Since Cloud adoption is only set to increase in the years ahead, we can expect the war for talent to further intensify. In a market like this, it’s important that organisations take a long-term view of how they will stay ahead of the competition and secure the skills their business will need.

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If you’re a hiring manager recruiting for specialist IT talent, you’ll know that it’s a tough market to find the right candidates for your organisation. This is a problem for organisations of all sizes, but affects large businesses the most, with organisations of 250+ across the globe facing more than twice as much difficulty filling roles as micro organisations. 67% report hiring challenges and nearly a quarter say they’re having more difficulty now than a year ago.

The reasons behind this struggle are varied, but 35% highlight a lack of applicants as one of the biggest challenges, and 14% say candidates are expecting more than businesses are prepared to pay.

In order to attract the right talent, businesses should start to remove barriers and plan for a different approach to the talent pipeline:

Remove unnecessary qualifications barriers

A high percentage of organisations have traditionally required a university degree or specific GCSE’s as a basic requirement for all roles. But as the accepted view of what a good education looks like changes, so too must the requirements for new hires.

With that in mind, now is a good time to reassess your qualification criteria. For example, does it really matter whether your Cyber Security specialist went to University if they have all the necessary IT and Cyber Security training?

This isn’t about recruiting less qualified talent – it’s about opening up your talent pool to avoid missing an often overlooked set of candidates.

Look at alternative talent pools

Reviewing your existing team demographics, age range and diversity, are there any groups which are missing? 41% of organisations in the UK are looking to target different talent pools to those they have traditionally recruited from, focusing on widening the breadth and depth of individuals they’re drawing from.

As well as giving you access to previously untapped talent pools, increasing the range of backgrounds your talent comes from can help to improve employee performance, encourage creativity and drive innovation.

To help avoid subconscious bias when looking to increase the diversity of your team, it’s worth considering a blind CV approach – removing a range of details where appropriate to the role; from the candidate’s name, to academic and education details, to their criminal record.

Upskill your existing talent

For many of the roles you’re looking to recruit for, it’s possible that you may already have the talent you need sat right under your nose. With skills development being one of the highest ranked drivers for employees in the workforce, assessing individuals for existing capabilities and transferable skills could be a winning combination – helping to retrain your existing talent and upskill them to plug skills gaps and retain them in your business for longer.

Over half of businesses globally are investing in learning platforms and development tools to build their talent pipeline, up from just 20% in 2014. It’s clear that businesses in the UK are already taking this approach seriously, with 80% of large organisations providing additional training and development for existing staff.

This approach can also apply to looking externally for talent. Whilst it will require some investment in time and training, looking for transferable skills and learnability in a candidate can help you to access otherwise untapped talent. For example, training schemes such as AWS re:Start are working to help organisations give military veterans experience in IT roles, providing individuals with the relevant Cloud based foundation training and allowing them to show their potential to learn and progress in the space.

Improve pay and/or benefits

Pay and benefits continue to be one of the key motivators for talent, particularly for specialist roles in areas such as IT. If your organisation is competing with other businesses with strong employer brands for the same talent, then a relatively quick fix is to compare your salaries with those offered by the competition, increasing the salaries if necessary and marketing this as your USP to potential candidates.

It’s also worth looking at whether the benefits that you’re offering appeal to alternative talent pools. Which incentives could you offer to target specific groups of individuals that you’re not currently reaching? With 32% of organisations looking to improve benefits like increased holiday and new joiner and well-being incentives, this is certainly becoming a popular option.

Hiring a new starter can be a long and expensive process, so it pays to get the right person onboard first time. From psychometric tests, 360s and interviews, to new generation tools like big data scraping, social network analysis and gamification, organisations need to move away from biased intuition, to data based decision making.

If you need help in attracting the right IT talent to your organisation, get in touch today.