By Chelsea Babin

The New Year just began but 2019 is bringing the baggage of 2018 and other years past with it when it comes to the challenges facing the IT hiring process. This notoriously lengthy, costly hiring process is weighed down by a few factors that companies can’t really change—more open positions than available talent, ever-increasing compensation standards, etc.—but these 3 major challenges can be overcome if you know what to look out for.

1. Students Learning the Wrong Code and Frameworks: HackerRank conducted a study of student developers and found that, while most companies need technical professionals with JavaScript, C#, Ruby, Go, Swift, and Scala that isn’t what is being learned in school. Instead, most undergrad and graduate programs place a heavy emphasis on C, C++, Python, and Java. This leaves a lot of the learning to MOOCs, online tutorials, and coding sites. If your organization wants to find the right talent, offering in house training may be the key to help bridge the gap. Additionally, you can offer some allotted time for coding lessons at work, tuition reimbursement, or subscriptions to online learning platforms that can get your junior level employees up to date on the latest technologies.

2. Bad Code Demanding Too Much of Your Employees’ Time: A recent study from Stripe found that bad code elimination takes up 17 hours per week for the average developer. If these technical professionals are working a standard 40 hour work week, that means they’re spending almost half of their time debugging, refactoring, and generally maintaining their code base. Because of this, Stripe asserts that bad code and technical debt costs the world some $85 billion annually and it could be costing your company too. Plus, when you load up technical professionals with too much maintenance, they can’t spend as much time innovating. These innovative technical professionals are looking for a company that has a handle on their bad code and technical debt and, if yours doesn’t, it may be challenging to find the right talent you need to fill your open positions.

3. Too Few Remote Opportunities: According to a study from HackerRank, 80% of tech pros say they want to work remotely. Unfortunately, according to a recent study from Owl Labs, only 56% of companies allow their staff to work remotely. Why the great divide over remote work? Technical professionals are eager for the improved work-life balance and autonomy that remote work brings, and the 56% of companies that do allow it often save money and have happier, more productive employees. The hesitation seems to lie in the fear of change or the unknown but, if companies are struggling to attract the right technical talent, offering remote working opportunities may be the solution to attract the 80% of tech pros who want it to their open positions.

Bridging the education gap, getting a handle on your company’s bad code problem, and offering more remote opportunities can help you overcome some of the major challenges facing the IT hiring process in 2019 and attract the right talent to your organization easily.