Most companies take a reactive approach when it comes to recruiting. This means that when someone leaves their company, business owners and recruiters panic, throw an ad up online and rush to find someone to fill the position ASAP. This is a mistake.

What are the chances that the perfect candidate has left their former position without already having a job lined up? Expecting to hire an incredible applicant based on the stars aligning is at best naive, and at worst ignorant. This is especially true for software developers, who are often in the middle of large projects and unlikely to leave their current company while they’re mid-project. Plus, you probably don’t want to hire a developer who would leave their previous company high and dry while working on a big project.

The answer? A proactive approach. This means thinking long-term about the needs of your business. How will your business look in six months? Is it likely that at least one of your developers will take maternity or paternity leave, head overseas on an OE or quit in favour of a new company? Probably.

Playing catch-up and being forced to hire quickly in order to fill a position and take pressure off of remaining staff is simply bad for business. You need the best people for the job, and the best people usually aren’t searching through ads on seek.com.au or elsewhere, and are instead moving directly from one position or company to another.

Proactively find the best people in the business

In order to streamline your recruitment and ensure that you hire the best person for the job every time, you’ll need to spend some time thinking about the goals and needs of your business. Are you focusing on expansion? Will you need a new developer or two in the next 6-12 months? And how can you ensure that this position is quickly filled with someone who will work well with your team, positively impact your bottom line, and treat your clients like VIPs?

Scaling is the key to success in any business, but too many start-ups and established businesses struggle with either hiring too many people at the wrong time or overwhelming and overburdening existing staff members as they compensate for the huge disparity between business demand and people on the ground.

Unfortunately, the majority of business owners discover the importance of effectively scaling their recruitment needs far too late. When customer satisfaction begins to fall, existing staff are stressed out, and you’re frantically trying to find the perfect person for that open position, your business can become like a revolving door, making recruiting far too backed up trying to replace staff to strategically search for new developers.

Unless this cycle is broken, it can hugely impact business growth over the long term.

Often business owners and recruiters find themselves stuck in this “reactive” mode for such a long time that this state of constantly playing catch-up becomes the new normal mode of operation. And since IT and software development is currently facing a huge skills shortage, (something that is likely to continue for many years as fewer people take STEM subjects at high school and university), there simply aren’t enough qualified applicants available to choose from.

Recruiters who are switching from a reactive to proactive approach are focused on building talent pools in order to stay ahead of their needs and the future talent acquisition trends in their industries.

We’ll be revealing how you can build these talent pools and find and nurture developers in our next article, so if you’re hoping to take a proactive approach to recruiting developers for your business, follow us on LinkedIn and sign up for email updates.