Recession and Big Tech layoffs are the hottest topics running in the business world right now. 

Google sacked 12,000 employees last month and for Microsoft, this number rounds down to 10,000. And the list of companies firing employees keeps getting longer with every passing day. Also, apart from the layoffs, many big companies have also paused their hiring in this time of economic uncertainties.

But does it mean no jobs in the tech industry anymore?

No.

The layoff trend and hiring freezes are only one side of the coin. While on the one hand, big companies are cutting off their workforces, the digital transformation party is far from over on the other. 

But how are the layoffs good for the IT services anyway? Let’s find out.

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Every company, big or small, is digitizing it's business faster, especially after the pandemic. They’re becoming more tech-savvy and need more advanced IT services than ever. This means that IT service firms will continue looking for quality tech talents to fulfill their needs. 

The silver linings for IT & staffing firms, amidst layoffs & hiring freeze, are:

• tech service demand is on the surge
• a significant push to the gig economy

Gig economy is a recruitment model where companies hire contractors instead of full-time employees. But to leverage this opportunity amidst an uncertain market, companies must change their approach to hiring. 

Modern IT service demands mostly include highly niched skills such as machine learning, cloud computing, etc. Moreover, they need specialized services only for specific projects.

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While hiring case-to-case or contractual employees, your hiring targets and objectives change significantly. Neither the matchmaking approach (hiring full-time employees) nor the compensation bidding will work due to the small budgets.

1. Constantly changing work scopes

New clients and new projects amplify the demand for new sets of skills every now and then. Moreover, such skill requirements might be occasional, and hiring the experts on a temporary basis will suit better for your business. In such cases, you need to constantly look out for contractual workers to fulfill your hiring needs. 

2. Tighter deadlines

One of the critical USPs that small to medium IT companies provide is the “faster turnaround time”. This leaves them with tighter client deadlines and piled-up work in hand. To fill this gap immediately, they need their hiring speed much faster than usual.

3. Smaller budgets

Smaller IT firms are usually tight on budgets also. They can’t go out of their way while bidding the compensation with the potential employees. Thus, constant hiring the contractual workers is the best-suited option for them. It gives them more budget flexibility as well as saves the cost to the company majorly.

4. Niche experts= More quality work

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Though you can make your in-house employees learn new skills, they might not match the quality of an expert. Thus, hiring contractors or freelancers who already have hands-on experience in the field will do more justice to your client’s requirements. Hence, hiring on a case-to-case basis makes sense for IT companies in the modern world.

IT companies need to make (and maintain) their hiring process faster and more effective to meet their never-ending hiring requirements. To ensure this, they must look into the internal factors affecting their hiring process more than the external ones.

• External factors in a hiring process: Trying more and more hiring platforms, always searching for a larger pool of potential candidates, etc.
• Internal factors in a hiring process: Actions and results at different intervals in the hiring process, team collaboration, etc.

To fix the elements that are slowing down your hiring process, you need to find them out first. You can build fresh learning models to understand how you’re proceeding at every step of your hiring process. 

Make your new hiring approach based on these three pillars:

1) Make task-based progress - Make your hiring less confusing. Break down your hiring process with new hiring requirements into small achievable tasks. Create a solid hiring pipeline and tick off the tasks done and move on to the next ones. 

2) Track your hiring process diligently - Track and log everything in your hiring journey. Keep a detailed record of Action Vs Outcome for every step in your hiring. Utilize this data to make a more effective hiring strategy the next time. 

3) Ensure transparency throughout - Make everything transparent in your hiring. Visualize the entire hiring engine and moving parts clearly and make it accessible to your teammates. Make sure everyone is on the same page, collaborate well, and avoid any double work.

You can track and manage your hiring on spreadsheets or on excel. But tracking actions, outcomes, and step-wise progress on a spreadsheet gets chaotic with time.

This is where HiringMaster comes in.

HiringMaster is a hiring management tool that helps you operate your hiring as project management by simplifying the process into actionable tasks. You can track, collaborate, and visualise your hiring in real time, keeping away from messy spreadsheets. 

HiringMaster is a visual hiring tool to help you simplify & speed up hiring. record and track all your hiring activity in real time, so that you can identify bottlenecks, prioritise tasks and get everyone on the same page

High demand for IT services is somehow offsetting the impacts of layoffs and the hiring freeze. If you’re into hiring for IT business, you must change your approach to hiring talents as soon as possible. A better hiring approach will give you a competitive edge & help you fulfill your hiring targets faster and more impactfully.

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