Hiring Tech Talent in Europe

Now? It’s a deluge of CVs, often AI-generated, with candidates who love their remote setup, while your company’s trying to encourage them to go back into the office. Add in the rapidly increasing cost of living and regular layoffs that make people feel jumpy and we have a hiring environment that makes everyone involved feel stressed.

So what to do? Other than run away and live on a deserted island with no WiFi and make friends with a turtle? (always my plan B)

Applications - from nada to never ending

Back in the day (like, 18 months ago), I’d put up a job ad and maybe get 30 applications and 25 of them would be kinda terrible. I mean “This job is a Lead SRE and the applicants can’t spell SRE.” terrible.

Yeah, that’s ancient history. Now you’re lucky if you get fewer than 200 applications for a single role and many of them are pretty decent!

You would think “how is that a problem? Put up an advert, choose from a wide selection of amazing people, hire someone”

On the agency side, it hasn’t really moved the dial because client expectations have sky-rocketed. Previously, if I sent in someone who had all the major skill requirements and was vaguely on budget, I’d be guaranteed to see my people invited to interview.

Now, they need to have all the bells and whistles. This is fine and all - I just have an intense people-pleasing complex so I hate telling people who are highly qualified that they’re not a fit for the role because the client is looking for someone who has spent 5 years in every company they’ve worked in or someone who can magically write their code test in the company’s own favourite syntax.

I mean, I get it - years ago, in Dublin the choice of burgers was either McDonald’s or SuperMacs but now you can choose from any number of gourmet burgers with truffle aioli and fancy cheese. People can now reject perfectly good burgers because they have access to endless topping options. (This analogy lost something along the way but ya know what I mean)

At the end of the day, you’re looking to hire one standard employee - not every hire needs to be grass-fed lamb burger with aioli and gorgonzola. Save the hyper pickiness for the really key hires.

What to do?

Your adverts can always be better but don’t stress too much. The woefully unsuitable people will always apply no matter what you do. I have an ad up at the moment that has (in bold)experience with technology X is essentialand most of my applicants still have zero experience with it. You can’t optimise for optimism.

What you can do is lean into referrals. If someone’s coming to you recommended, that’s already a win. Be careful here though - hiring primarily through referrals is an excellent way to end up with a homogeneous team, leaving you wondering where all the diversity of thought has gone.

Of course, a good recruitment agency is going to cut through the noise for you. Partnering with a lovely company like nineDots will mean we will process your applications for you. We’re excellent at ploughing through 500 applications and producing the 5 golden tickets with no fuss. We’ve done this for WorkHuman and Cloudsmith lately and they’ve been delighted with the results.

Even if you’re overwhelmed with applications - you still need to get back to everyone. There’s few things worse than that note on an advert saying something like “We anticipate a large volume of applications for this role so we will only respond to successful applicants”.

It might be a bit of an employers market right now but this will not always be the case. People will remember being treated badly when the market swings back the other way so don’t tarnish your reputation now - it takes longer than you think to polish it again.

ChatGPT: The New Recruiter’s Nightmare

Thanks to AI, we’re in the era of the ChatGPT-powered CV and cover letter. It’s easy peasy for candidates, stick job spec into OpenAI, produce one cover letter tailored for it.

For recruiters, it’s like reading the same well-written, but soulless, essay over and over. They all sound smart, but where’s therealperson? I’d rather 100 words written in a person’s real voice than 500 written by AI.

ChatGPT is a tool not a replacement. If ChatGPT can do everything you can do, do we need you?

I use it myself so I’m not saying people should never use AI. I use it to pick out the key technology in a spec or to explain things to me. (I’m sure my tech friends have noticed a decrease in the volume of stupid questions I’ve been asking them)

I used it for this article - I plugged in my outline and asked it what I might be missing. In a hilarious meta way, it told me to include ChatGPT as a factor.

But What To Do?

Ask them questions that require more than a generic response. Ask for cover letters “in your own voice”. It might just be me but I really hate that business speak that is endemic in cover letters.

“I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to contribute to your organization by leveraging my skills and expertise to drive impactful solutions.”

You want specifics. “Tell me about a time when…” questions will quickly expose if you’re dealing with an actual human who knows their stuff or someone who copy-pasted their entire application. It’s a game of cat and mouse, but you’re smarter than the bot, right?

Remote Work vs. Return to the Office: The Cage Match

Tech workers have gotten real cozy with their home setups, wearing pjs all day and never having to make awkward small talk at the office coffee machine. And now, you’ve got companies who are saying, “Come back to the office, or else!”

Realistically, if you’re demanding everyone return to the office full-time, you’d better be ready to wave goodbye to a not insignificant portion of your workforce. A lot of people - up to 60% of employees in tech, depending on the survey you're looking at prefer remote work. My own experience in recruitment tells me that 2 days a week in office is about the maximum people will tolerate.

Also - a lot of people moved to more rural locations during Covid. They've bought houses and set up their lives outside of the cities. It's hard for them to make a 2+ hour commute into an office, especially when they feel they are more productive working remotely.

What to do?

If you’re absolutely sold on the idea that in-office work is the only way to go, you need to sell it hard. More carrot, less stick.

Career growth, team culture, in-person mentoring, a really good lunch. I was in LinkedIn recently for a meeting and their in-house restaurant is amazing. If I worked there, I’d definitely be happier about going to the office if it meant I got fresh vegan risotto for lunch.

I’ve heard of companies that are restricting promotions to employees that are in office or hybrid - that’s way too much stick!

The Cost of Living is ludicrous, So Don’t Expect a Move

In my early days of recruitment, it was easy to get people to relocate. Tech workers would pack up and move across Europe for solid dev job., That’s not happening much anymore, thanks to skyrocketing rents and batshit housing prices. Why would anyone want to move from their reasonably affordable city to London, where you pay a fortune to live in a shoebox?

What to do?

If you want talent from other countries, you’d better offer a hefty relocation package. The old “we’ll cover your moving costs” just doesn’t cut it when the cost of living is pushing people to the brink. I know that people in tech earn a lot more than people in other sectors but depending on what country one is moving from, you can effectively be losing money. Salaries don’t differ a huge amount across Europe any more but the price of rent in Ireland compared to Italy is significant.

Alternatively, lean into the remote life. Most of Europe is only 1 hour away from each other in terms of time-zones. If you are fine with someone working remotely within the same country - another country isn't that much different. People will still be only a few hours away from the office with a quick plane ride. There are dozens of services available who will help you set up an Employer of Record in any given country. Try it! It might work well for you!

Shareholders First, Employees .. sometime.

Let’s talk about layoffs. We can’t ignore the massive elephant in the room.

We’re in an era where companies are obsessed with driving profits for shareholders, which unfortunately means layoffs have become an almost routine part of the business cycle. For tech workers, this constant instability breeds anxiety. They’ve seen their friends get cut when profits dip, and now they’re wondering when it’ll be their turn. In my techy circles, it's almost seen as inevitable. This leads to your employees really not caring about you. Why should they put their blood, sweat, and tears into a company that will cut them lose as soon as the graph goes down?

What to do?

So how do you get people to trust you? Simple: transparency. Give the information you have. If you’re an Engineering Manager, you have some amount of visibility of the company’s future plans. Tell people what you know (and are allowed to tell). There’s obviously no way you can predict what the economy will do in the future but you can tell people what part this position plays for the goals of the company.

If you’re a start-up, be open about your funding and plans for growth. BE really transparent about culture and workload too - you don’t want to hire someone who expects a chill work-life balance only to find themselves in a scrappy 12 hour a day situation.

Be empathetic too - if someone has experienced a layoff, it’s perfectly normal for them to be nervous. Even if they haven’t, it’s hard not to be anxious when every time you open a tech news website, headlines are screaming “redundancy aaaaaa” at you. It is not unreasonable for a job applicant to ask questions about the future of the company.

Conclusions, if any.

The tech hiring market in Europe has changed a lot in the past 18 months and if you’re not ready to adapt, you’re in trouble. The flood of applications, AI-generated nonsense, the battle over remote work, rising living costs, and constant layoffs have turned what used to be a familiar process into something that is changing month to month.

To keep up, you have to listen to candidates, to your hiring managers, to recruiters - keep an eye on industry news!

Remember that we're all people - we have lots of things going on in our lives outside of our jobs. Applying for a job and interviewing is one of the most stressful things people will ever do - if people behave a bit weirdly, it's probably because they are stressed out of their gourd!

So be nice.

If you want to know anything about what is happening in hiring right now, be sure to ask us at nineDots. We have our collective fingers on the pulse, we talk to everyone, and we know what is going on!