By Chelsea Babin

If your organization is prioritizing tech hiring and building a bench of technologists more in the second half of 2017, you’re not alone. According to Dice’s semi-annual survey, 73% of hiring managers plan on hiring more IT professionals in the second half of the year. Because of this increase, up five percentage points from November 2016, the industry trend of lengthy hiring processes and inability to find qualified candidates will get worse before it gets better.

While the shrinking pool of available technical talent isn’t as much of a challenge for companies looking to hire entry-level employees, 56% of hiring managers plan to hire candidates with 6-10 years of experience and almost as many are looking for candidates with 10-plus years of experience. These highly skilled, highly sought after technical professionals will be hard to woo without major salary increases and bonuses that improve their work-live balance.

However, there seems to be a solution to this talent crunch that many employers are still overlooking. In order to avoid pulling from a picked-over talent pool of extremely experienced candidates, why not look to a pool of candidates with slightly less experience than is ideal and offer in-house training, tuition reimbursement, or other paid training initiatives to get them up to speed? According to Bob Melk, the President of Dice, “In the fast-moving tech industry, skill gaps are common and employers are often challenged to find candidates with the latest proficiencies. Professionals are increasingly seeking out new training opportunities and experience like Hackathons to ensure they’re up-to-date.” Technical professionals spend a lot of their free time staying up to date with the latest technologies and learning new skills. Therefore, a benefit that will really entice the-best-of-the-best technical professionals is the opportunity to learn on the job and grow their skills to fit the ideal candidate mold.

As demand for technical professionals with over 6 years of experience continues to increase through the second half of 2017, employers who offer training incentives and learning opportunities will have an easier time finding candidates who are willing to continuously learn, grow, and improve their skills. The employers who are unwilling to offer those benefits will need to drastically increase salaries and other work-life balance improving benefits, and they may still be in for a lengthy hiring process. According to 38% of Dice survey respondents, the time to fill open tech positions continues to lengthen due primarily to the inability to find qualified candidates. The adage, “hire for attitude, train for skill” is an important one to keep in mind during such competitive, lengthy hiring processes.