Tech-enabled solutions for hiring talent in a remote-first, distributed workplace

Lachlan de Crespigny, Co-Founder, Revelo

Finding the right software developer can be daunting and time-consuming, with tech recruitment presenting distinct challenges that set it apart from recruitment for non-technical roles. The growing tech talent shortage has made this even more difficult in recent years. 

Globalization and the democratization of technology have seen companies around the world increase the need for tech roles, but this explosion in demand isn’t being met with sufficient supply. At the same time, the rise of remote work has given unprecedented leverage for tech talent to demand hybrid or fully remote setups from companies looking to hire. 

Several recent studies on the subject of remote hiring by The Ladders, Gartner, Revelo and others, provide insights into the tech industry’s remote market landscape to better understand the challenges of acquiring tech talent and access to new tech-enabled solutions in remote hiring. One significant finding of Revelo’s survey was that 74% of respondents were already hiring remotely, with 53% somewhat or very open to hiring remote talent outside the US. However, only 12% of the respondents were using specialized remote hiring platforms that are tech-enabled and streamline the access to global talent pools, while taking care of the complexity of managing the talent such as payroll, benefits, taxes and compliance.

Companies, today, can benefit significantly from specialized solutions tailored towards remote hiring and turnkey processes for sourcing, hiring and managing hard-to-find software developers easily. Most currently-used approaches to recruiting, such as internal recruitment teams, and traditional recruitment and staffing agencies, cannot provide this due to their lack of understanding of how best to tap into global talent pools. Yet, there is exceptional talent everywhere. For example, just south of the U.S., Latin America is a region of 600 million people that live within the same time zones as the United States and possess exceptional tech talent. According to Statista, Brazil is among the top 10 countries, and Mexico is among the top 15, in the world in terms of the number of Unicorns it has spawned. This is a great indicator of the quality of tech talent not only in Brazil but throughout Latin America. 

“A changing paradigm of the tech workplace requires a talent recruitment solution that is tailored towards it in order to extract its full potential”

The new breed of tech-enabled remote hiring platforms offers not only access to pre-vetted global talent pools, but also services including managing payroll, candidate benefits, taxes, and local compliance. Offering remote work is essential in today’s marketplace and, ultimately, it will only continue to benefit both employees and companies. The more companies and talent become familiar with the dynamics of how remote hiring works most effectively, the wider the door to large new pools of qualified talent will open.

Another important aspect of remote talent platforms is their knowledge of the global talent pools where they source candidates. Imagine trying to hire talent from a country you’ve never worked in or have little or no context of the tech talent coming from there. How would you gauge the quality of the talent, the schools they’ve attended or the companies they’ve worked for in the past? Having a deep understanding of these critical factors that go into the process of pre-vetting candidates is a key to building trust in the talent that companies are hiring.

A changing paradigm of the tech workplace requires a talent recruitment solution that is tailored towards it to extract its full potential.