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As the tech industry faces an increasingly urgent talent shortage, more and more employers are poaching talented workers from their competitors. It’s no different than continuing to fish in a small pond: there simply aren’t enough fish, so theft of hard-to-find skill sets and experience has become the primary strategy for hundreds of thousands.
For many hiring managers, this has led to a no-holds-barred ethos when it comes to finding the tech talent they need. Some companies are paying candidates just to show up for an interview. And, with work-from-home as the new normal, big companies can compete with small local businesses to hire tech workers in the most competitive and low-cost markets. Many tech workers now face national competition — and even global markets — for their services, making the competition even tougher.
Few employers feel this way more than technology service providers. Tens of thousands of companies offer services in every major technology stack and every industry. And dozens of giant systems integrators like Infosys, Accenture, Wipro, PwC and Deloitte offer every technology solution for every imaginable business product, process and problem. These companies employ millions of skilled technology workers to work on behalf of clients.
Nowadays, increasingly, talent-hungry clients seek to hunt for that talent themselves. Unfortunately, the biggest, most established service providers make it clear to customers that it’s a scam. Literally, That means those smaller companies are at the mercy of bigger fish looking for their talent, no matter what their contracts look like.
For technology service providers, poaching is a problem in their model, something they want to squash if they can. But sometimes when there are bugs everywhere, the right answer isn’t constant squashing, but opening a bug museum, charging admission, and making lots of money.
This is an approach few service providers have taken. Optimum Healthcare IT, a healthcare consulting and staffing firm (and portfolio company Asaka), works with hospitals and healthcare systems on electronic health record systems such as Epic and other technology stacks such as ERP and ServiceNow. Healthcare IT platforms face a particularly acute skills shortage, with few training programs or pathways available. Optimum itself has seen several high-performing consultants leave the firm to work for clients. But last year, Optimum decided enough was enough and embarked on a new lease-train-deployment route to see if it could simultaneously address their own and their customers’ talent shortages.
Here’s how the program, known as Optimum CareerPath, works: Optimum hires new and recent graduates from college partners like the University of North Florida and the University of Colorado Denver who are qualified for healthcare IT, but don’t yet have the relevant technology stack skills or experience. Excellent then manages in a fascinating exercise training program. After successful completion of the training program, interns are assigned to client projects. After a year or two, clients are expected to hire the new talent, not just hire it.
In CareerPath’s first year, 100 interns completed the program and were assigned to hospital, health care system and provider clients. That’s 100 new, trained and certified tech workers in a talent-starved ecosystem. Two-thirds of these come from communities historically underrepresented in the tech industry. Best plans to bring CareerPath to thousands of new mentors each year.
By building a healthcare IT talent engine, Optimum can flip the script on talent hunter error. Encouraging clients to hire CareerPath talent is now a feature of Optimum’s model and a major point of differentiation when competing for contracts with other service providers. Optimum CEO Jason Jarrett said, “Leading with CareerPath has opened the door to dozens of new clients looking for a new pipeline of healthcare IT talent. A bonus, he says, is “no need to negotiate contracts with clients that prevent them from taking our talent. Because that’s the whole point of the CareerPath model.”
Optimum isn’t the only firm experimenting with this model. FDM Group and Rivacher, software development staffing companies, have scaled thousands of deployments annually with a hire-train deployment approach. In April, the same IT staffing firm acquired SkillStorm, a small hire-train deployment business called Talent Path. Business is booming with a growing tech talent gap.
With a job market that shows no signs of easing anytime soon, technology service providers may want to rethink their approach. Rather than zealously trying to retain existing talent and continue to fish in the same small pond, a better strategy may be to invest in and build a new talent engine and turn the problem of tech talent attrition into behavior.
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