How Blue House Gathers Five-Star IT Experts and Developers?
86% of organizations believe talent shortage is a key barrier to achieving business outcomes. In fact, the IT talent pool has been already stretched out to a breaking point - Informatics Europe estimates that the EU is currently experiencing an IT talent shortfall of up to 1 million. Companies worldwide have been trying to improve their recruitment processes to find the needed specialists drastically.
You may wonder how Blue House finds the top talent who join their IT community. Instead of emphasizing matching professionals with clients, we reversed the roles and decided to match projects to the members of our community. Blue House exists entirely to let its software developers and other IT experts use their full potential.
A positive side effect is that our clients can cooperate with highly motivated and skilled specialists who participate in the project because they want to, not because they have to. In this blog post, we'll show you what makes the Blue House IT community pretty unique and how you can take advantage of it.
Finding developers in times when they seem to be unicorns
The war for talent will become fiercer than ever - companies who do not secure the skills for future projects now will face significant difficulties in the future. According to IDC, by 2022, the financial impact of the IT skills gap will grow by 157% in comparison to 2019, hitting $775 billion worldwide, as a result of the delayed release of products/services, missed revenue, or increased costs. This number will only grow. (The Future of Work Report 2020).
Many companies struggle to find candidates with the highest potential to succeed in the role. Moreover, from our experience, we can say that the vast majority of good programmers and IT professionals are already hired. Of course, companies still have many possibilities: investing time and money into sourcing, advertising, improving hiring strategies, working with recruitment agencies, etc.
There are also job boards such as WeWorkRemotely, StackOverflow, Remotive.io, and others, where it is possible to find developers. The question is whether the found candidates will meet expectations and be worth spending so many resources on recruiting them? As an employer, you may try. At Blue House, we implemented a different strategy.
Chances that you easily and quickly find a senior developer or any other IT expert are pretty low. That's the reason why we have been focusing on referrals instead. It is the most important source of applicants for us. Not always a decent CV says a lot about a candidate. It happens that people who claim to know a lot, in reality, work less effectively and represent poorer code quality than those who have less experience on paper.
When an existing team member recommends another specialist, we know they have been working together and verified each other's skills on a project. The risk of losing trust and a positive image is a huge threat. That's why no one recommends a colleague just because they were a nice person - they recommend people who proved their skills in a specific role. As a result, we gather great specialists together. Our community scales slower, but as it grows in members, it still retains quality.
The community connections network makes no room for errors
When remote work entered as a new way of cooperating, it opened up many opportunities for companies and individuals. Professionals could find more well-paid jobs or work on projects that match their interests besides their living place. On the other hand, companies have started looking for specialists they couldn’t find in the country. However, finding the right specialists was and always will be a challenge for businesses.
As an employer, you still need to put a lot of effort into reaching the candidate and converting it into a job applicant or properly auditing their skills. 41% of companies admitted that a bad hire last year cost them at least $25K. Moreover, the demand for highly qualified IT professionals increases. As a result, there are more and more highly-paid jobs. Unfortunately, not so many people are qualified enough, but they apply anyway because of money.
If you do not have time for preparing technical assignments to test out their skills, take advantage of a result-proven Blue House community. As mentioned earlier, we base our community growth on referrals. However, we are also open to anybody who wants to join us. We verify the skills of potential team members in both cases anyway. The strength lies in the people we have in our community already.
Since we gather IT experts who represent varied skills and know different programming languages, software, and technologies, we can easily verify how advanced any new applicant is through them. Also, more than one community member has to approve the new person’s abilities to make sure nobody is biased.
People in our IT community also have room to get to know each other and exchange experiences. It helps us understand their personality traits and match them properly with projects and companies. People differ and only when working in the right environment they can show their full potential. Some prefer to work for startups, others for corporations. One can be a natural team leader while another is more effective while working as an individual. However, what connects us all is a passion for technology and being proactive.
Why does it matter to work with the best IT experts?
Many of us, as young people, have heard it is better to be the worst of the best than the best of the worst. Why? When you are surrounded by people more skilled than you, they motivate you to learn and grow. You naturally want to compete and improve to show you can be one of them. There is no motivation when you receive a prize without effort only because there is no real competition.
From this point of view, it matters for our IT community members to collaborate with professionals who share the same approach to self-development and who are overachievers. If you miss some knowledge, others will point you the way where you can find it. If you got so far and became a senior developer, IT is something you really wanted to pursue. As a result, you can choose from many projects and pick the one that suits your interests and gives you satisfaction with its development.
Working with the best should also matter to you as our client. When you get a chance to collaborate with one of our community members or a dedicated team, you will probably notice the difference from your earlier experience. Their quality of work impacts project development performance and reduces the amount of time the team would have to spend fixing bugs and errors. Do you know that fixing a bug takes 30 times longer than writing a line of code?
Working with the best and taking advantage of access to a community of IT experts and developers like ours really makes a difference. There was a time when shortly before Christmas, one of our clients needed a highly-skilled Lead Java Developer and Lead Front-end Developer. Typically, they would need to spend at least 8 weeks on finding and recruiting suitable candidates. Instead, they decided to collaborate with us. We delegated great professionals, and the entire process of matching took only 2 weeks.
Another example of a success story is when one of our Lead Front-end Developer started working for one of the leading providers of IT products and services as an outsourced specialist. His previous experience influenced his work efficiency - the onboarding process of a challenging project took him only 2 days. He also helped to build a Minimum Viable Product in just 2 months, while on average, it takes around 4 months.
Summing up
When Blue House was built, we pledged to put IT experts first and help them find projects they really like. We were tired of seeing how talented and experienced people were wasting their potential to work on tasks that didn’t require as much knowledge as they possessed. In turn, they were getting bored and burnt out.
We imagined Blue House as a connector between both sides and it turned out to be a solution that developers and clients actually needed - it works in favor of both of these sides. Want to join forces and build products, software, or service with professionals from the Blue House community? Reach out to us.
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