Software Solutions For The Great Talent Reckoning

With pay and hiring freezes proliferating across the sector, tech workers can no longer bank on ever-growing salaries.

Neither can they expect a windfall any time soon, with the number of public listings and other exits slowing amid market uncertainty; nobody wants to go public while valuations are sliding. KPMG said in its latest overview that consumer tech has been the worst affected by this cooling-off.

With 20,000 people laid off by startups and tech companies in August alone, tech’s younger workers are now experiencing the feeling of job insecurity for the first time. Meanwhile, hybrid work has upended traditional ways of managing staff.

It is a time of flux, and therefore a time of opportunity.

We spy a chance here for startups to keep talent engaged for the long-term, as businesses weather the downturn. But to do so, they will have to look beyond the incentives of salary alone.

Increasingly, software is offering easier ways to do this. Maybe that’s through tools like Humaans, which let managers stay effortlessly on top of who’s new to the company, who’s leaving, and who has a birthday or work anniversary coming up. It’s a simple way of making staff feel valued with a data-led approach.

Or it could begin at the recruitment stage. Hiring is expensive, so reducing turnover wherever possible is a must, and the best way to do that is to find someone who is the right fit from the get-go. Hiring intelligence platform HiPeople does this by collecting a wide range of insights on candidates and improving the quality of hiring decisions.

We have also invested in learning, payments, and AI startups that we think could play a part in the future of work. But what we don’t yet know is what exactly that future will look like.

The debate over WFH versus the office feels far from settled, with Apple’s return-to-work order this month [September] resurfacing the same arguments all over again across the industry. How do you keep all colleagues happy and engaged when half of them want the flexibility of staying at home, while others, especially those with less experience, want face-to-face contact with co-workers?

And what about the ‘nice-to-haves’, the perks that for a long time were a hallmark of tech? From free breakfasts and gyms to off-sites and ping-pong tables, how important are these things really? These could become deciding factors for some talent if pay growth slows. But it’s just as likely they could become irrelevant for employees who would rather trade in their perks - and, in some cases, even part of their pay - to be remote full-time.

With everything about the jobs market and future of work still shifting, we want to hear new ideas for how HR software tools can help, from businesses that are able to adapt to whatever the future throws at us.

Sound like you? Get in touch!