Top Challenges with Staffing and Managing Engineering Teams

How long does it take for your business to recruit and onboard a new software developer? The ugly truth is that it’s probably close to two months, according to our recent report regarding the 2022 State of Tech Staffing.  

To gather the data for this survey, 200 senior tech leaders in the US were asked to share data insights on the difficulties surrounding staffing and managing engineering teams. The results show the impact from a growing skills gap, of which the related talent shortages are currently the largest on record.

68% of teams spend more than a month on recruiting each software developer

On average, it takes 7.5 weeks to recruit a software developer. It can be tough to screen for highly technical roles, and even simple elements of recruitment like creating job descriptions or setting assessments can be a moving target in such a fast-paced industry. It takes weeks of discussion and compromise between HR, Product and Technical teams to get a list of appropriate skills and capabilities, but new ‘must-haves’ keep emerging in the market.

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To make things more complicated, these new skills aren’t replacing the old ones. Today, engineering teams need a wider range of abilities than ever before, making it harder than ever to find candidates who check all the boxes.

For example, when survey respondents were asked to name the software development languages that they predominantly use in their business environments, there was no clear winner among the seven options. Regarding the most used programming language, 55% say that they are mostly using Python. However, Kotlin, react and .NET are also used by close to 40% of organizations.

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If you consider the secondary languages that tech leaders use, you’ll see that all seven options are used by the majority of businesses, with an average of 9% considering using these languages in the future – showing that all of these are viable choices aren’t going to become obsolete any time soon.

Now multiply this challenge by all the necessary skills for engineering teams, and it’s easy to see why it’s so tough to hire for open vacancies, and why in 68% of cases it takes more than a month to onboard a new developer.

More than 20% of these developers need to be replaced

With so much time and effort invested in the recruitment process for engineering teams, retaining talent and avoiding employee churn is even more important. However, in 20% of cases, developers are replaced. Only 6% of companies say that they never have to replace their engineering talent after hiring, and 68% are replacing more than 10% of their tech hires overall. This puts hiring managers right back at square one.

The current paradigm has to change

It’s clear that today’s tech teams need a smart solution for reducing the time it takes to onboard top-quality talent, and for ensuring protection when new hires don’t work out over time. Without a shift to a new way of imagining hiring for today’s workforce, teams are increasingly short of the skilled employees they need, and this has a direct impact on business continuity, productivity, time to market, and bottom line.

Outsourcing is one business strategy that is rising in popularity, with a projected 70% increase in outsourcing for software development talent between 2022 and 2023.

Outsourcing alone isn’t enough. Today’s businesses need to consider their outsourcing strategy with the top challenges in mind – time to recruit, and the challenge of replacing staff without having an impact on business continuity.

At Commit, our Cloud of People solution is built to meet the challenges of pent-up supply and demand that is causing constraints for today’s tech teams. Organizations need easier access to talent pools full of readily available candidates who have multi-disciplinary expertise and a wide range of skills and abilities. If the hire isn’t a good fit – managers need to be able to flexibly change from one worker to another, without a gap of weeks or even months before the position is re-filled.

Leaning on a global outsourcing pool has added benefits, such as the ability to hire quickly and on-demand to fill a specific gap, whether that’s a data analyst, a QA expert or even a team lead, scaling down the team when a project is complete, and effectively only paying for what you use. With diverse options for offshore talent centers, you can find quality talent fast – and know you always have a replacement when necessary.

Ready to see how it works for yourself? Call us with any questions – we have answers.