Tech Talent Landscape Worldwide: Numbers and Trends
To understand why the time to hire in tech industry is the way it is, let’s have a look at the number of tech specialists worldwide and the trends prevailing in the current IT staffing landscape.
According to publicly available resources, the total number of IT specialists was 26+ million in 2023 and is going to reach up to 29 million by 2027. Speaking about their presence by region, the numbers are the following:
- USA - 4,4M+
- Europe - 6,1M
- LATAM - 1M+
- APAC - 6,5M+
While these numbers do look impressive, the question might arise: why does it take so long to hire a developer if there are millions of specialists worldwide? The answer is that the right specialist would often have to meet multiple requirements including seniority level, salaries expectations, location, years of experience with particular technologies, expertise in a specific domain, etc.
For example, the highest demand is for middle-level specialists who possess the experience and skills necessary to drive projects forward efficiently while being more cost-effective than senior-level experts. One of the biggest challenges in tech staffing is finding qualified full-stack developers, who are in particularly high demand and short supply.
This shortage significantly impacts the average time to hire a developer. With the high demand and limited supply of middle-level specialists and full-stack developers, employers often face extended recruitment cycles. Combine this with the necessity to hire candidates in a particular geography without exceeding the budget, and the time to hire a software engineer could become much longer than the average.
If you face similar issues, Huntly is here to help you. With 2,000+ professional recruiters worldwide, we have access to 4,5M+ tech talent of different seniority levels in numerous regions and domains. When hiring with Huntly, our clients receive a quality candidate pipeline reducing the time and cost to hire a developer.
Average Time-to-hire a Software Engineer in 2024
According to the report I referred to at the very beginning, the average hiring process time in tech is 36 days. Let’s take a look at the way this number differs by tech positions, both in development and beyond it.
| Position | Number of days |
| Manual QA, Automation QA | 21 - 30 days |
| Front-end, Back-end, Full-stack, DevOps Engineer | 30 - 40 days |
| Product Designer, Product Manager, Product Owner | 30 - 40 days |
| C-level Position | 35 - 45 days |
Factors That Impact Time-to-hire a Tech Talent
Time to hire in tech sector can vary dramatically depending on several factors. Below are five main things that have the biggest influence.
Location
The more tech specialists there are in your hiring destination, the more chances you have to hire a necessary one faster. However, if you only hire local engineers and require them to work offline, you limit the available tech talent pool, even in the biggest tech hubs.
To have access to more specialists, consider remote hiring. Aimed at providing our clients with the best developers, Huntly can help you hire anywhere in the world, ensuring a 10X bigger pipeline than through traditional recruitment methods.
Company size
According to HackerRank’s Tech Recruiting Survey, small companies hire faster than big ones. This happens because bigger companies usually:
- get on average 4 times more applications for a single position;
- usually have more interview rounds with more stakeholders;
- are more bureaucratic than small ones.
Industry
Software engineers are now in demand not only in the IT industry. Every industry tends to digitalization, but not each attracts top tech talent.
According to the 2024 Stack Overflow Survey, software development remains the number one industry of tech specialists’ interest involving different directions like IoT, blockchain, gaming, FinTech, and SaaS development, etc. Meanwhile, insurance, energy, and computer system design industries close the list. Thus, if your business operates in one of the latter industries, recruiting the necessary specialist might take you longer because of developers’ lack of interest in a particular domain.
Another industry-related factor that impacts the time to hire a developer is the project type. For example, governmental and defense projects have a more thorough process of hiring technical talent than e-commerce or logistic ones. That’s because state projects often imply a lot of security constraints and require super reliable people. As a result, additional background checks and lie detector tests make the hiring process longer.
Company’s hiring process
The more complicated the hiring process, the more time you’ll spend on bringing a new developer on board. Some of the common mistakes employers make that slow down hiring in tech are poorly composed job descriptions and numerous interview rounds.
On the other hand, rushing the hiring process and focusing only on technical assessments can lead to hiring the wrong candidates and result in money loss, team frustration, and eventually, in longer time to hire the right specialist.
Recruitment method
When choosing among available methods of recruitment, you should know that each of them offers different timelines to meet your recruitment needs. In general, employers usually have two main options:
- Hire on their own leveraging internal resources.
- Hire via a recruitment agency.
When hiring on your own, you can cut down your recruitment costs dramatically. However, you’ll have to spend a lot of resources and time to find, recruit, and onboard an ideal candidate. So if you’re looking for ways to reduce the time-to-hire a tech specialist, you might want to consider other options.
Recruitment agencies promise fast results and a high-quality candidate pipeline, which might be an ideal solution for fast hiring. But the price bites. For hiring one tech specialist with a recruitment agency, you can spend $20-30K which is not always affordable. So where is that happy medium that allows you to hire quality specialists in a fast and cost-effective way? The answer is in the next section.
How to Shorten an Average Time-to-hire a Software Developer
A winning strategy to reduce the average time to hire a software engineer without breaking the bank can be to look for an alternative recruitment service provider, and this is where Huntly comes into play. When creating our platform, we aimed to strengthen the benefits of traditional recruitment methods while eliminating their flaws. As a result, we’ve built a solution that allows our clients to:
- broaden their hiring destinations and get access to a vast talent pool thanks to 2,000+ experienced Huntly recruiters;
- receive a quality candidate pipeline with an 80% yield ratio;
- set a recruiting price on their own, thus hiring top tech specialists in a cost-effective way.
What’s more important, our large community starts generating a pipeline within 72 hours after a job is posted. Another thing that speeds up the process is our 2-step candidate verification which saves our clients time on pre-screening interviews. All in all, the time to hire software development contractors with Huntly can be as short as 21 days, and this is the result we’ve shown with one of our clients, SalesAssist.
A sales-oriented startup, SalesAssist is run by the founders who gained their tech background when working at Facebook, NZXT, and Crunchyroll. They needed a Senior Mobile Developer from LATAM with expertise in React Native and TypeScript, experience in app deployments, debugging, testing, and remote collaboration. Taking into account the tech proficiency of the founders, the expectation for candidates was high. The task was also to find a developer who fit their mission-driven culture and whose compensation expectations fell within the LATAM market average.
Leveraging our tech recruitment network, we screened and presented 17 qualified candidates in two weeks. It took one more week on the client’s side to interview all the candidates and make their final choice. As a result, SalesAssist made an offer to a Huntly candidate who met both their technical and cultural requirements.
That said, if you need to hire a top tech specialist who will fit your tech, culture, and budget requirements, and do it cost-effectively, Huntly should become your reliable partner in reaching that goal!
