2022 Tech Hiring Trends: What Engineering and Talent Leaders Need to Know as the Tech Talent Market Shifts from Startups to Enterprise

According to new research from Karat and The Harris Poll, the top technical hiring leaders interview more, prioritize speed, and benefit from diversity, equity, and inclusion investments.

Karat, the world’s largest interviewing company, released its 2022 Tech Hiring Trends report to help companies continue to hire strong technical talent while navigating the rapidly changing economic landscape. The report is based on a survey conducted by The Harris Poll of 556 engineering and talent leaders across industries including tech, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and banking.

Included in the report is a deep look at how technical hiring has changed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also identifies key competitive differentiators that hiring leaders can learn from as economic volatility once again transforms the tech hiring landscape.

“For the past two years, abundant capital and flexible work served as rocket fuel for tech startups. Now, the recent economic volatility is steering top talent back to larger companies that are able to demonstrate stability,” said Jeffrey Spector, Karat co-founder and president. “The organizations that are able to quickly improve and ramp up their hiring machines now that they are in the driver’s seat are going to have a huge competitive talent advantage moving forward.”

The study reveals that, as trends like flexible work and the Great Resignation drove greater employee mobility, tech hiring leaders focused on three key hiring process improvements to hit their business targets:

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• They increased compensation and accelerated the hiring process to close the best candidates more quickly.
• They maximized sourcing improvements by interviewing more candidates for each open role, which could be enabled by remote interviews, tech, and interviewing partners.
• They invested in making their hiring processes more inclusive, which correlated with better hiring outcomes overall.

These hiring transformations took hold during a very candidate-friendly employment market. And while the organizations hiring the most software engineers may be changing, the principles about what works in hiring top tech talent are not.

Building an elastic hiring process that is ready to flex up and down with market conditions and doesn’t tax existing employees is another important change organizations are making to adapt. Tech leaders are aware of the strain that increased interview volume puts on their teams, especially as they’re being stretched thin and asked to do more with less. One way tech leaders are creating more hiring flexibility is by using cloud interviewing. For example, the survey revealed that more than three-quarters of the tech leaders surveyed agreed that it was effective to rely on interviewing partners (76% of engineering leaders and 78% of talent leaders), and that number was even higher for top-performing tech leaders (82% of top performing engineering leaders and 81% of top-performing talent leaders).

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“The biggest advantage a cloud interviewing partner offers is the opportunity to interview across US and India,” noted Joseph Sirosh, chief technology officer at Compass. “It allows us to schedule interviews at a time convenient to our candidates, and preserve great candidate experience in that initial interaction, and it allows us to process the pipeline a lot faster.”

A strong focus on inclusive hiring was another key differentiator, with the top performing engineering leaders twice as likely to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their process compared to lower performers (67% vs 33%). Cat Miller, chief technology officer at Flatiron Health, an independent Roche affiliate, shared how having elastic interviewing capacity was a key driver of her company’s DEI efforts.

“It’s really important to give all candidates an opportunity to show off their strengths because even the best resume doesn’t really tell you the potential of a person,” shared Miller. “When we only have so many interviews we can give and need to hit a certain number of hires, it’s easy to fall back into screening exactly the people you know you’ve hired before. Having increased capacity lets us bring in more types of folks that we might not have been able to interview before and increase diversity across a lot of angles.”

In addition to providing a blueprint for how well-positioned companies can win the race for talent today, the report also shares insights about the process updates companies can make during a hiring slowdown.

“The smartest companies are going to take time during any market slowdown to improve and diversify their hiring processes,” added Spector. “It is clear that candidates value fast, efficient, and inclusive hiring. Using any pause or hiring break to reorient the process to those expectations with the best practices outlined in this report will serve every company well moving forward.

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