As the tech industry faces an increasingly urgent talent shortage, a growing number of employers have taken to poaching talented workers from their competitors. It’s not like constantly fishing in a small pond: there simply aren’t enough fish, so for hundreds of hard-to-find skills and experience sets, stealth becomes the primary strategy.
For many hiring managers, this has led to a new whatever-it-takes, no-holds-barred ethos when it comes to finding the tech talent they need. Some companies pay candidates just to show up for interviews. And, in the new normal of work-from-home, the biggest companies can compete with small, local businesses to hire tech workers in the most coveted and lowest-cost markets. Many tech employees now benefit from national competition — or even an international market — for their services, making competition even more intense.
Few employers feel this more than technology service providers. Tens of thousands of companies offer services in every major tech stack and in every industry. And dozens of giant system integrators like Infosys, Accenture, Wipro, PwC, and Deloitte offer every technology solution for every imaginable product, process, and business problem. These companies employ millions of trained tech workers and put them to work on behalf of clients.
Today, their talent-starved clients seek to poach that talent themselves. Unfortunately, the largest, most established service providers make it clear to clients that poaching is prohibited, which means those small companies are often at the mercy of bigger fish who desperately need their talent, regardless of what their contracts may say.
For tech service providers, poaching is a bug in their model, something they want to squash if they can. But sometimes when there are bugs everywhere, the right answer is not to constantly squeeze, but instead to open a bug museum, charge admission, and make a lot of money.
This is the route taken by some service providers. Optimum Healthcare IT, a healthcare consulting and staffing firm (and Achieve portfolio company), works with hospitals and healthcare systems on electronic health record systems like Epic, and on other tech stacks like ERP and ServiceNow. Their work addresses a particularly acute talent shortage, as there are few training programs or pathways specific to healthcare IT platforms. Optimum has seen firsthand many high-performing consultants leave the firm to work for clients. But last year, Optimum decided enough was enough and launched a new hire-train-deploy pathway to see if it was possible to solve their own talent shortage and their clients’ at the same time.
Here’s how the program, known as Optimum CareerPath, works: Optimum hires new and recent graduates from college partners like the University of North Florida and the University of Colorado Denver who have a knack for healthcare IT, but no relevant tech stack skills or experience yet. Optimum runs them through an engaging apprenticeship training program. Following successful completion of the training program, apprentices are staffed on client projects. After a year or two, clients are not only allowed to hire new talent, they are expected to.
In CareerPath’s first year, 100 apprentices completed the program and were hired by hospital staff, health care systems, and provider clients. That’s 100 new, trained, and certified tech workers in a talent-start ecosystem. Two-thirds of them are from communities that are underrepresented in the tech industry. CareerPath best plans to scale to thousands of new consultants each year.
By building a healthcare IT talent engine, Optimum can flip the script on the talent poaching bug. Encouraging its clients to hire CareerPath talent is now a feature of Optimum’s model, and a significant point of difference when competing for contracts against other service providers. According to Optimum CEO Jason Jarrett, “leading CareerPath has opened the door to dozens of potential new clients looking for a pipeline for new healthcare IT talent.” A bonus, he added, “is not having to talk to clients about contracts that prohibit them from hiring our talent. Because that’s the whole point of the CareerPath model.”
Optimum is not the only organization testing this model. FDM Group and Revature, software developer staffing companies, scale thousands of placements each year with a hire-train-deploy strategy. In April, a similar IT staffing company, SkillStorm, acquired a smaller hire-train-deploy business called Talent Path. With a growing tech talent gap, business is booming.
With a labor market showing no sign of easing anytime soon, tech service providers may want to rethink their strategy. Instead of diligently trying to protect the talent they have and continue fishing in the same small pond, a better approach could be to invest and build a new talent engine and make the technology talent loss bug a feature .