Anyone who has ever thought of developing a software project has had to face one of the greatest critical issues of recent decades: finding available developers.
I have personally lived through the technical consulting industry and over the years I have had the chance to deal directly with the difficulties of recruiting IT resources. In this article I will address this problem, keenly felt by startups and larger companies alike, explaining how the Startup Studio model can mitigate it (at least in a project’s initial phase) and outlining some strategies for successfully engaging technical talent.
The problem
The ICT sector currently counts more than 730,000 companies in Europe: they are the ones sustaining the digitalisation of processes in European countries, as well as supporting companies across every sector in their technological transformation.
The demand for digital skills, however, continues to exceed supply. 53% of European companies say they have great difficulty finding available IT profiles. The costs companies bear to search for and select these profiles are enormous. The process, from identifying to contracting each single candidate, can last as long as 21 days.
As you can easily imagine, the innovation ecosystem is among those most affected by this issue. Generally, the most innovative projects rest on niche technologies often known only to a restricted circle of professionals, who are even harder to reach.
The sheer quantity of languages and technologies is in fact among the causes of the difficulty in finding specialised staff. Recruiting an IT expert is not enough: they must have vertical expertise in one or more specific skills.
Scouting tech talent: traditional startup vs startup studio
The problem of recruiting developers and IT talent is felt even more keenly by startups. Although software startups can offer a developer the unique, compelling prospect of building something completely new from scratch, they often have more limited resources and a smaller network than more structured companies, which can offer the candidate more certainty.
Moreover, the startup’s founder may not have the right skills to define their IT needs precisely, or to recognise the right profile on the market.
For a traditional SaaS startup, which necessarily has to build the tech team before it can start developing its product, finding the right developers quickly is of fundamental importance. If you cannot find suitable people, you cannot start developing. If you do not develop, you do not have a product.
The startup studio model manages to mitigate this problem in several ways.
First of all, the startup studio already has its own tech team with the right skills to manage the project’s initial phase, identify the technical requirements, develop a prototype and create a development roadmap.
The business model itself then leads startup studios to be constantly on the lookout for new talent and to feed a network of professionals.
The startup studio therefore starts with an advantage over the traditional startup. In an early phase, this advantage can make the difference to the startup’s very survival. The startup created in a Startup Studio can in fact concentrate on product development from the very start and only later worry about finding the talent to grow its product or services, thus leaving the tech team provided by the Startup Studio free to work on the next new startup, and so on.
Moreover, starting from a business idea that has already passed the first validation milestones, it is able to offer the candidate developer a bit more certainty than many traditional startups.
This does not mean the shortage of available tech talent is not a problem for Startup Studios. Quite the opposite. But the difference lies in the “when”. Sooner or later, the startup born in a startup studio too finds itself facing the same difficulties as any other company trying to compete for talented developers in a competitive market.
On closer inspection, then, the startup studio is able to postpone the problem to a later phase, but not to avoid it.
Strategies for engaging technical talent
In response to the growing demand for IT professionals, numerous portals have been born that allow you to search for freelance developers to engage. One aspect to keep in mind is that, in most cases, there is no process verifying the skills users declare on their profile.
Today’s companies recruit their developers through direct contact on LinkedIn, or by publishing job offers on the various job board portals. Very often, though, these tools prove ineffective. The company finds itself having to pay upfront to publish the job offers, with no guarantee of receiving on-target applications. An alternative, but certainly more expensive, solution is to rely on headhunting firms.
In recent years, more and more companies have been relying on IT Partners to develop their projects, engaging specialised external suppliers able to guide them in technology choices and accompany them in developing the application. In 2020 alone, the outsourcing market grew more than 17%, generating a business volume of over 66 billion.
One of the advantages of outsourcing is the possibility of delegating part of the work to other companies or professionals, in order to concentrate more on your own core business, and thus having a more flexible cost structure (outsourcing turns a fixed cost into a variable one).
To find the right partner there is no need for exhausting searches that often lead nowhere. There are dedicated platforms, such as TimeFlow, acting as an advanced point of contact between the companies looking for developers and the IT Partners registered on them. By exploiting technologies based on artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, these platforms manage to fully automate the process of searching for and selecting the ideal IT partner.
Compared to other solutions, these dedicated platforms have the advantage not only of reducing search times but also of quickly identifying the people best suited to each project, making it possible to reach business goals in the shortest possible time while staying agile, until the conditions exist to consolidate an internal core team.
Startup Bakery is the Italian startup studio specialised in creating B2B SaaS companies with Artificial Intelligence. We offer aspiring Co-Founders the opportunity to develop a business idea. We create investment opportunities for Professional Investors. We help companies in their innovation process.