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In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses in all sectors have taken a hit and have been forced to adopt new measures to stay afloat.

It’s no longer viable to ignore digital transformation since it has become all but essential for businesses to continue to thrive in the current climate. This comes at a time when the demand for tech talent is at an all-time high, with IT-based skills coming at a premium.

This may seem like a direct result of the pandemic, but the reality is that the tech skills shortage has been an issue for several years now. The research backs this up, showing that as many as 73% of CEO’s back in 2015 had expressed concerns over the shortage of talent, and this figure has slowly grown over the years. As such, the pandemic didn’t cause the issue; it just made it more apparent. 

The tech talent shortage is a concern for many small to medium-sized businesses, especially when large corporations snap up top talent by flexing their financial muscles. 

The Tech Talent Crisis

As a result of customer demand for convenience through digitalization, and the lack of talent in related fields, we find ourselves in the midst of a tech talent crisis.

It makes sense: if customers are able to receive groceries directly to their door, pay for goods online with a single click, and do just about everything they need from the comfort of their own homes, why would they want to go back to how things used to be done?

The rise of remote work and a hybrid work schedule has the potential to wreak havoc on small tech startups and medium-sized businesses in the industry since it’s hard to keep up. With the pandemic looming for the foreseeable future, the only way forward is to adapt.

What does this mean for you?

Well, unfortunately, it means that employees from the largest tech firms now have all the power in their hands. Whereas before their skills were well compensated only at the very top of the pyramid, now they’re faced with a wealth of options as tech companies up and down the country vie for them.

The average tech employee these days can have his cake and eat it too. Not only can talented tech workers demand a competitive salary, but they can also find a job with a work schedule that perfectly matches their lifestyle and offers flexible remote work.

How to Find the Best Tech Talent

If you want to secure the best tech talent out there, you’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.

Sliding a piece of paper across the table with a large sum of money will no longer cut it.

You have to show that you can offer the employee a level of flexibility that they can’t find elsewhere.

Not everyone makes career decisions with dollar signs in their eyes, and if you can come up with a remote work schedule that allows employees complete control over how they work, then it’s an offer that’s hard for anyone to refuse.

There are other options, though, so don’t fret if the thought of offering your employees complete independence makes you nervous.

Here are some of the best strategies to adopt if you want to land the best IT talent:

Upskilling

One of the simplest ways to address the dearth of tech talent in the job market is to establish upskilling campaigns within your company.

With the right amount of investment, you can effectively retrain your current workforce which could eliminate the need to outsource or onboard more workers. Teaching subjects such as software engineering and machine learning can help produce more in-house tech talent, though of course this strategy will take a lot of time and resources.

Staff Augmentation

A term you may have heard from your time in the tech industry, staff augmentation is a strategy of external outsourcing which aims to fill positions in your company with the right candidates.

The primary benefit of the augmentation process is that it can relieve you of the burden of seeking out and onboarding top talent. Find the right partner and they will take control of the whole augmentation process from recruitment to interviewing, so that you’re free to focus your attention on other aspects of the business.

Nearshore Outsourcing

Nearshore outsourcing is all about expanding your operations to include a workforce in a nearby country.

If you’re struggling to hire local talent, outsourcing your search to a nearby country could be the perfect solution to bolster the workforce. This approach works well for a lot of companies because workflow shouldn’t be disrupted with faster integration, and similar time zones.

Contractors

Contractors, or freelance workers, represent an excellent resource for tech companies affected by the tech talent shortage.

With all the flexibility that remote work brings, it’s no surprise that some of the best IT workers have decided to go solo and set up their own businesses. As such, it’s a good idea to dip into the global freelance market from time to time to see if you can find solutions to your tech problems abroad.

The one caveat here is that hiring freelance workers is usually just a temporary solution, not a long-term one. Plus, North America isn’t the only part of the world to suffer from a tech talent crisis, so it may still be tricky to find the right talent for the job.

Find a Recruitment Partner

Sometimes, although the plan to acquire top tech talent is clear, the process can be complicated.

You might decide that a freelancer is the right solution, but don’t know how to find the best contractors. Or maybe you decide to go down the route of nearshore outsourcing, but again, you’re not sure how to go about it or where to set up your external team.

In cases such as these, your best bet might just be to find a recruitment partner who can assume control of the talent hunt to ensure you end up with the employee/s you need. Intersog offers digital recruitment solutions for your IT talent needs, with dedicated development teams and high-performing software that can assist your search for the best tech talent.

As companies and organizations discover the benefits of remote work, they also discover the limitations of current work-from-home practices.

This article will discuss a strategic technology trend that solves these limitations and is bound to become a standard for many organizations: Anywhere operations.

What are anywhere operations?

Anywhere operation is an organizational model that allows IT companies to fully operate remotely while supporting customer service, enabling employees, and managing the deployment of products/services from anywhere in the world.

This is possible thanks to cloud technology and a decentralized infrastructure independent of one location, server, firewall, etc.

The anywhere operations model might sound like work from home; however, it goes beyond its capabilities. Work from home allows companies to continue operations without the need for employees to be at the office. 

And while it is undoubtedly a functional model for some businesses, it presents limitations for many organizations, especially IT companies.

This is where anywhere operations come in to solve the management limitations of work from home. It can be considered as the next step of work from home. 

The anywhere operations model utilizes new management solutions and a decentralized infrastructure to allow IT companies to be genuinely independent of physical location.

What are the differences between anywhere operations and work from home?

It’s important to fully understand the differences between these two models to successfully implement an anywhere operations strategy. 

So, let’s take a look at some characteristics that set anywhere operations apart from work from home:

These differences are also some of the benefits of this operational model. We will explore them further in the following section.

Benefits of anywhere operations

Thanks to the constant development of new technologies and software, the world of IT and tech companies advance faster than any other industry. 

This presents CTOs with the challenge of staying up to date with new advancements to support the company’s growth while managing the high costs of upgrading and maintaining an IT infrastructure. 

Anywhere operations reduce costs of aging hardware, improves employee and customer experience, and give companies access to a broad talent pool of experts ready to join the team. 

Let’s take a closer look at these benefits:

Customer Support

Anywhere operations are not just for employees. It also allows companies to offer better customer experiences. One example of this is customer service. 

Providing the best customer service has always been a challenge. Every year the quality standard gets higher, and customers get used to that. If there is no advancement in a company’s customer service, then they get left behind no matter how good the product is.

In fact, 33% of Americans report they will consider switching companies after a single instance of poor service. With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why $62 billion are lost annually by U.S. companies due to poor customer service. 

Anywhere operations allow companies to solve this issue by giving them the capability to employ workers in different time zones. Thanks to the decentralized infrastructure, workers can collaborate and share information as if they were in an office together and offer quick customer service at any time. 

Now customers don’t have to wait until the next day to get a solution for their problems.

Collaboration and productivity

The COVID-19 pandemic rushed companies into a work-from-home modality, and many of them adapted well to this change. Mainly because of remote work tools and because eventually, they would go back to the office. 

They thought of work from home as a temporary solution because they know these tools have limitations.

Limitations that are solved by anywhere operations. This model lets employees access company data and systems at any moment from any device, boosting collaboration and productivity. 

In addition, anywhere operations empower employees by allowing them to work in their own schedule while achieving the company goals. It’s not surprising that 77% of telecommuters report being more productive than in an office.

Secure remote access

We’ve mentioned secure remote access before, but what does that mean? It means that people in an organization can access any relevant data from any device at any moment from anywhere in the world with protection protocols against cyber threats. 

Some examples of cybersecurity strategies that work with anywhere operations are multifactor and password-less authentication, Zero Trust Network Access, and Secure Access Service Edge.

Having secure remote access is a priority for any remote work, and cloud infrastructure is the only way to achieve it.

Disaster recovery

Another thing that secure remote access helps with is disaster recovery (DR). Many external factors can impede a business from running properly. Factors like natural disasters or even the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many unprepared companies to change into a work-from-home modality. Resulting in disruption of business. 

With the cloud infrastructure of anywhere operations, a DR plan becomes simpler. Since physical factors don’t affect and everything is remotely accessible, businesses can continue operating smoothly.

Automation

Another benefit of having a decentralized cloud infrastructure is that it allows the automation of various processes. Companies worldwide are automating as many processes as possible because they have figured out that employees spend a lot of time on repetitive manual tasks. 

These tasks can become frustrating and even lead to human errors. Automation eliminates that factor. A company can automate transactions, approvals, and workflows, among other processes, to free employees from manual tasks that only waste time. 

In addition, companies are also able to automate product and service deployment. Automation in combination with AI is a great tool to let your employees spend their time solving complex issues instead of doing mundane tasks.

Cost efficiency

Migrating from the current system to a cloud-based, anywhere operations model can seem like an expensive project. However, in the short and long term, it is cost-effective.

What really is expensive is hardware. The costs of upgrading and maintaining an aging IT infrastructure are much more expensive. Now add the fact that as the IT equipment ages, its performance drops considerably. This is due to the fact that software is based on current technology, giving hardware a short lifespan. 

Since you don’t have to worry about these costs, anywhere operations end up being a lower-cost alternative. 

Talent

One of the biggest limitations for businesses that are not using an anywhere operations model is talent acquisition. For a person to be hired, they don’t only need the proper qualifications, but they also need to live in the same city as the office. This fact reduces the talent pool significantly. 

While this might sound like a problem work from home solves, it still has limitations compared to anywhere operations. 

Oftentimes, a work-from-home role still requires that the employee is near the office for many reasons. Usually, this is the case for companies who had to adapt to this modality due to the pandemic, which is still location-dependent. 

With anywhere operations, workers should be able to literally be anywhere and still be able to access relevant information for their work. 

Companies that apply this strategy successfully have no geographical limitations for hiring. They can focus on building the right team and not worry about relocation or sponsorships. 

A great way for organizations to handle talent acquisition once they are free of geographical limitations is through nearshore staff augmentation. 

We will tell you more in the next section.

What is nearshore staff augmentation?

You might have heard this term in recent years, especially as IT companies are starting to employ remote work modalities more and more. 

So, what exactly is staff augmentation?

Staff augmentation is an outsourcing strategy that allows companies to hire tech talent from anywhere in the world and manage them directly as your team. They can be hired for the short or long term, depending on the company’s goals.

With this in mind, nearshore staff augmentation means the same thing, but the company chooses candidates in neighboring countries. The purpose of doing this is that neighboring countries expand the talent pool while having similar time zones and language.

This might sound similar to project outsourcing; however, the main difference is the following:

Staff augmentation firms handle everything from recruiting, hiring, and training to management. Allowing companies to quickly add skilled talent to the current team and work directly for the CTO or manager.

This talent acquisition strategy is great when you want to add skilled tech professionals quickly to your team.

Benefits of nearshore staff augmentation

Now, let’s explore the specific benefits of building your IT team through nearshore staff augmentation. Some of the benefits include:

Over to you…

An anywhere operations model provides a modern solution to many challenges IT companies face nowadays. And while it might sound easier to stay with the current management model, in the long run, it might make your company get left behind. 

According to Gartner, by the end of 2023, 40% of organizations will have applied anywhere operations. Will your company be one of them?

Over the last decade, the demand for IT talent has multiplied across the world and specifically across North America. With the rise of new technologies and solutions, companies of all sizes and industries focus their HR efforts on attracting and retaining the best tech talent to support their growth.

But these new emerging technologies require particular resources to create, maintain and optimize the products and solutions. There is a high demand for specialized tech talent, and unfortunately, there’s also a skill shortage. 

A study conducted during 2019 by ManpowerGroup revealed that 54% of global companies reported skills shortage; this represents the highest talent shortage in over ten years. Employers said the highest deficits in the U.S. (69%), Mexico (52%), Italy (47%), and Spain (41%). So now, more than ever, great technical talent is hard to find, competitive to hire, and expensive.

Many technology leaders believe that the challenges that this shortage brings could set the industry back. This has made companies look for alternative options to scale their engineering and development teams, filling the gaps that aren’t allowing them to be productive and deliver everything they require in time.

The nearshore opportunity

As companies of all sizes continue to expand their operations, the opportunity to work with talented engineers, developers, project managers, and IT specialists in Latin America has never been more significant. The nearshore model has become an excellent opportunity for companies to expand and grow their teams.

A Gartner study outlines why LATAM has become such an attractive place for North American companies to take their operations. The proximity, time zone compatibility, cultural similarities, and access to multilingual talent are just some of the reasons why these multinational companies are building their remote teams with Latin American talent.

What is a nearshore model?

Nearshore or nearshoring refers to outsourcing service to countries located nearby and similar time zones from the company contracting the service. For example, for the United States and Canada, it would be Mexico or other Latin American countries.

As we mentioned before, tech companies in North America have seen a great opportunity in expanding their IT teams through this model. Why? Because by being close and in a similar time zone, the communication between team members is more efficient.

Companies may feel overwhelmed by the idea of expanding their operations to a different country. But there are multiple solutions, such as staff augmentation, that can make the expansion completely painless.

What are the benefits of nearshoring?

Over the past year, we’ve learned that all organizations can move their operations to a remote work environment and have seen great success with this. Productivity has improved, employees have more flexibility in their schedules, among other things.

With this flexibility, companies feel more confident in expanding their teams through a nearshore model. Not only do they have the benefit of a remote team, but there are also additional benefits.

There’s excellent technical talent in Latin America. A Gartner study outlined why this region has become one of the most appealing options for North American companies. With the growing tech scene in countries like Mexico and Chile, there’s specialized talent emerging across the region.

There’s also the benefit of working in similar time zones. This makes the communication between teams more effective. It also helps boost productivity across the different projects that the company is working on.

Latin American neighbors also share cultural compatibility. They are in tune with social, cultural, financial, and business trends that North American businesses find value. There’s also the great advantage that there’s talent in Latin America that is proficient in speaking English, so all ideas and concepts aren’t lost in translation.

Partnering up with a nearshore neighbor brings multiple opportunities to technology companies across North America. It’s time to explore this fantastic opportunity and get to know an extraordinary talent that Latin America has to offer.