Return to Work Solutions for IT Contractors

After two years of pandemic-related remote work, a large financial institution is seeking to migrate both its full-time and contract work force to a hybrid model while minimizing attrition. This is particularly important for their IT-related work, which is based around a collaborative model.

Remote roles remain abundant in today’s marketplace, and the supply-demand imbalance for top talent is particularly acute in IT. Senior level resources can dictate their own terms in many cases and still receive multiple offers with high pay, near-100% remote work, flexible hours, and excellent benefits. 2022 has been the strongest candidate market for top talent in the past two decades, and it doesn’t appear to be softening in any significant way.

Table stakes for any supply-demand constrained market is compensation, and nothing can make up for below-market compensation. Accordingly, coming out of 2021, PTR Global proactively raised compensation across the board by 10%-15% for both IT talent and internal recruiters. We then added resources to our dedicated recruiting team to account for the higher volumes and additional recruiting effort that was required given market dynamics.

Next, we spent significant time educating hiring managers on the importance of selling their technology stacks to potential candidates. Sr. level candidates are significantly more interested in a cutting edge tech stack than an employer brand. In particular, sr. level candidates are highly focused on opportunities for mobile, java, and python development, angular and react frameworks, and cloud engineering.

Finally, we transitioned our team to a more cultivation-oriented style of recruiting. We adopted the practices of an internal company HR team by emphasizing the client’s overall business strategy, it’s work style, return-to-work rationale, and most importantly, its culture. While this required extra time, the improvements we experienced in our performance metrics were well worth the investment.

By investing in our candidates, recruiters, and service approach, we were able to achieve the #1 supplier ranking within our first year of client service. Even more impressively, we outperformed the next closest supplier by more than 20%, and achieved one of the highest candidate acceptance ratios in the program.