Survey: Tech candidates turn away from murky job opportunities

Dive Brief:

Almost 80% of professional and student developers polled in HackerRank's 2019 Developer Skills Report said lack of clarity regarding a job opening sours them on potential employers. Other top concerns included lack of follow up and work cultures that do not align with the job seeker's values.
HackerRank said 2018 "was the year of taking action"; 58% of those surveyed said they took action after becoming concerned with their organizations over, for example, issues of privacy misuse and censorship. About 40% of developers surveyed said they took their concerns to company leadership, and 23% said they quit or began looking for other employment because of their concerns.
Immigration policies negatively affected 4 in 10 developers in 2018, the report found. Nearly 1 in 5 said they were denied a U.S. work visa after applying for one. A quarter of developers said "U.S. immigration policies discouraged them or others they knew from applying to jobs in the country."

Dive Insight:

Employers need workers with tech skills; according to a survey from Modis and General Assembly, 80% of decision makers said they think there is a talent gap in the engineering and technology industries. That said, employers will want to ensure the candidate experience they offer to job seekers is as attractive as possible.

Companies tend to fail to personalize the candidate experience or neglect to communicate their employee value proposition, according to the annual State of TRM report.

Job seekers' frustration with tech culture may translate to their willingness to act on their concerns about their employers. "We're in this age of people speaking their voices," Trisha Degg, VP, talent programs and operations at the Illinois Technology Association, previously told HR Dive in an interview. "People are speaking out more than they ever have in the past. In the dot-com boom, the exposure the common person had was less because you couldn't go online and share."

It may not come as a surprise, then, that HackerRank categorized 2018 as a year of activism; employees at high-profile companies like Google made their demands known through walkouts and protests.

It follows that corporate social responsibility is top of mind for workers and employers alike; employees seek meaning in their jobs, and employers can market their do-good initiatives to attract more workers.