With just under a million unfilled engineering positions last year, US companies have been struggling with the gap between available skills and open roles, especially for software development. According to the CompTIA’s analysis of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, released on June 3, 22,800 tech workers were added overall in May, with a total of 106,700 positions for the first five months of 2022. 

In this context, businesses battling with tech talent shortage are facing 2 main challenges:  

• Much more complex and time-consuming selection processes 
• Hefty rate increases when bidding for talent  

If this rings a bell on you, keep reading this article in order to understand this problem fully. You’ll also find three hacks that helped us achieve fast, cost-effective tech talent-hiring. 

What are the costs of hiring a developer? 

The demand for engineers is so high right now that salaries are rising dramatically. Leaders work extremely hard to provide the greatest deals and offer unique incentives that make their projects appealing to talent. 

Salaries 

Paying software engineers and developers is certainly one of the more expensive parts of the process. According to US news, the typical pay for software developers in 2021 was $110,140, over twice the national personal income average. 

Another key aspect of the cost increases that companies face when hiring engineers is related to the process.   

Hiring costs 

Besides wage increases, competition makes it harder to find skilled developers. This complicates the typical hiring steps, including:  

• Recruitment (in-house or external) 
• Interviews 
• Technical Assessments 
• Training 

As we can see in this detailed analysis from Codesubmit, hiring a full-time developer can go from $28,548 up to $35,685. These costs can vary depending on several variables and needs, with the recruitment method having the most significant impact.  

*We wrote an entire article on this topic for the specific case of Salesforce talent, but the hiring options for the rest of the software engineers’ searches are similar. You can read about it here. 

Hiring top talent who delivers high-value results at low-cost rates

Being aware of the tech talent shortage and hefty rate hikes, especially in such an unstable business climate, we have been leveraging our access to high-tech talent pools in locations with more affordable labor rates and our solid, Silicon Valley-level vetting process, to help our clients reduce costs without sacrificing speed and quality.  

To put it in a nutshell, we are ready to help you lower your overhead costs by 50% while still accessing to top 1% talent.  

Do you want to know how? These are our three hacks:  

Opening to alternative, highly-skilled talent markets 

We knew that there was high-quality talent in alternative job markets, which were considerably cheaper without resigning learning and professionalism. Biding for US talents was making the competition extremely hard, driving prices sky-high. 

From alternative regions to outsource to, Latin America can open up a new world of cost-effective resourcing options to beat talent shortages while benefiting from high-tech talent, seamless collaboration (full workday overlap with U.S. time zones), and exceptional language and cultural alignment.  

Identifying the right talent, on time, and for the long run 

Hiring in developing countries could have the risk of not recognizing highly-skilled talent, which is crucial to us.  

Therefore, we have designed our recruiting process based on building trust, training well-informed recruiters, and mainly, hiring certified talent and developing partnership programs with top players in the enterprise software market. 

We also test our engineers for personality, communication, problem-solving skills, creativity and live interactions. Oh, all that on top of proprietary technical skills tests and exams. 

Understanding talents’ needs 

We know we need to outstand from other companies in the eyes of our talent pipelines. For this reason, a big part of our effort is dedicated to understanding and fulfilling their needs and desires as they looked for a new job.   

Some of these features have made us put a big emphasis on:  

• Technical training 
• Certification programs 
• Long-term projects, with a clear career development path 
• People care 

This way, we could find, hire and retain the best talent for half the budget needed to hire directly in the US.  

If you are also interested in hiring top talent for half the budget in this moment of economic uncertainty, don’t hesitate to contact us.