Why Hiring IT Talent Is Harder Than Ever Before

If you're a small business leader or executive, you may be familiar with how challenging recruiting and retaining IT team members can be. More often than not, IT positions are expensive and difficult to fill.

However, starting in early 2021, the hiring dilemma for IT became even more difficult as a new term began to sweep the internet, “The Great Resignation.” Coined by Professor Anthony Klotz of Texas A&M University, the term represents an economic trend in which employees are voluntarily resigning from their jobs at a significantly higher rate than normal.

The Great Resignation has amplified the skills gap in the IT labour market meaning there are now more open IT positions than professionals to fill them.

The average cost of an IT resource is skyrocketing, and the turnover rate is at an all-time high.  

Information Specialist is one of the jobs with the fastest-growing demand, according to LinkedIn, and tech positions were among the top 10 roles across every country LinkedIn looked at in their recent analysis of The Fastest Growing Jobs Around the World.

Even if you can recruit IT talent, we’re approaching an inflection point where the cost of IT resources is so expensive that insourcing is beginning to make less and less sense. In 2021, salaries have risen in the Information and Communication Technology job sector; with cybersecurity roles leading the pack.

And now, we’ve reached a tipping point. We’ve hit a time where the cost and difficulty of recruiting IT resources, combined with the inevitable gaps in security posture created by a forced adjustment to hybrid work, leaves organizations vulnerable (not to mention, cyberattacks are at an all-time high).

Today's SMB IT environment is challenging. Now that so many more employees work remotely, file and data management, access management, and digital collaboration have become crucial functions—and they all need to be cloud- and mobile-compatible.  

If your IT resources felt pressure before, COVID-19 introduced a force multiplier effect as they had to deploy cloud-based collaboration services and allow employees outside the office to access corporate data. This quick adjustment to support a work-from-home environment had IT teams stretched to their limits; and realizing that their tech stack may not be operating as smoothly as they thought.