Retaining Top Tech Talent: 5 Essential Strategies and How To Implement Them

In today's fiercely competitive tech landscape, retaining top tech talent has become a critical priority for companies striving to maintain their competitive edge. As the demand for skilled professionals continues to surge, businesses must prioritise strategies to nurture and retain their brightest minds or suffer “brain drain”, losing top talent (or not attracting it in the first place) can lead to expensive technical debt and loss of domain knowledge. With the average tenure in tech now reaching just 18 months (yes that’s only 1.6 years), it has never been a more important consideration.

Here are five tips to help you employ to attract and retain top tech talent:

1)     Foster a Culture of Growth and Development:

In a (relatively) recent Forbes article which listed 16 reasons tech professionals give for leaving their positions, over a third of those related to culture, mission, personal development and tech. Clearly a very important factor to get right and obviously very unique to each business.

Tech Pros are clearly driven by knowledge, understanding and opportunity and this goes way back to Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton and Alan Turing, pioneering in their respective times to solve problems in new ways, with new technologies, that they helped develop.

To retain this talent, businesses must engage, drive, motivate and foster a culture of learning and development to stay ahead of industry trends and sharpen their expertise – with your business hat on, if your competitors were doing something new and offering different services, would you keep doing what you’ve always done or rise to the challenge? Tech professionals see no difference and fear standing still.

How to do this:

Well, as mentioned this may be very specific to your business or industry but simple, effective things to think about include offering access to internal training programmes, workshops or offering professional certifications (Udemy or Pluralsight are a good place to start) or building internal wikis. Having clear, defined career progression, or developmental milestones to work towards will help employees understand their progression or what may be expected of them and what might be needed to get there.

There are other things like self-directed project time, independent focus or allowing cross departmental work say if someone developing software wanted to get involved in some of the hardware work (where appropriate) or team activities like “hackathons” to consider.

An important one here not to overlook is more simple things like continuous feedback, regular communication and objective criticism, delivered appropriately can be invaluable.

2)     Emphasize Work-Life Balance:

Burnout is a serious issue to deal with and if you are suffering brain drain or operating a skeleton crew, do not underestimate it, as it is top 3 for reasons people leave their positions.

The tech industry gets a bad rap sometimes with long hours and high pressure being the norm…but big tech advertises the laid back, bean bag culture as a big draw, what gives? And how can we compete?

The fact is, big tech expects long hours and high-pressure work too, but they are generally really good at most of the other points in this list, as well as prioritising work life balance, mental health and wellness that, despite making rounds and rounds of redundancies, people still want to work for them for “the culture” the “personal development” and the “tech”

But by prioritising work life balance through remote or hybrid working, setting reasonable work goals, deadlines and hours (we’ve all been guilty at working way past our bedtime). Simply offering this is a good start but by genuinely prioritising employee health and happiness from the top down you’ll see a big boost in buy-in to your mission, vision and values, how your managers act or speak in their daily interaction (or any obvious bad apples) and how your employees interact with each other or your customers. Think of it as the trickle-down economics of employee retention, if you don’t care about them, why should they care about working for you?  

How do we do this?

So, as our earlier point this may be very dependent on industry and/or your respective business but a good start would be introducing policies that promote health and wellbeing or flexibility including flexible working, core hours, remote or hybrid working. Some businesses are capitalising on “work from anywhere” or “unlimited holiday” or the recent trial in a 4 day work week is also showing promising results. Anecdotally, I’ve genuinely spoken with top talent who are only open to discussing roles with 4 day working week or remote working opportunities, you wont have access to these candidates if you don’t offer these working arrangements.

To put some of this into practice you may have to adjust how you’ve done things before, including how you line manage or prioritise daily activities but with technologies like Slack, Teams, Trello, Jira, etc etc etc, there are so many options to how you might do this AND maintain performance.

3)     Recognise and Reward Achievement:

Sounds obvious right? Easily overlooked though when you have deadline after deadline to achieve, are constantly firefighting or put simply it is often difficult to really quantify performance outside of genuinely rubbish metrics like lines of code (No thanks Elon)

Acknowledgment and appreciation are powerful motivators and recognising accomplishments and contributions through regular feedback and public praise will help maintain the engagement, trust and loyalty you have already created.

How do we do this?

Whatever works for you, your business or your employees! Again, this may be specific to your culture, where you are in the world, or how introverted or extroverted your teams is. Not everyone wants to go for after work beers/pizza or and could be as simple as not losing your rag if they aren’t up and running by 9:01, offering flexible start and finish times.  

Some suggestions could include extra holiday days for team or individual performance, team away days, paid for certification, promotions or development opportunities or smaller responsibilities like handling scrum ceremonies, opportunities to lead certain projects but it’s the small things in this instance that go furthest and will usually be individually specific like letting someone finish early to spend more time with their family or arrive late knowing they might be celebrating the night before. There is a fine line though, this isn’t about creating divas. If you’ve followed the earlier points well you should be picking up on successes in everyone’s work not just the top performers.

4)     Cultivate a Collaborative Environment:

Tech talent thrives in environments where collaboration and innovation are encouraged. Fostering a culture of open communication, where ideas are freely exchanged, and feedback is welcomed will encourage cross-functional collaboration by breaking down knowledge silos and promoting teamwork across departments. If you can get the team motivated behind a common goal and working together, many hands will make light work and, in many ways, top tech talent operate like pro sportspeople, they will want to work with a good manager, with exceptional talent around them, playing at the top level. Collaboration and culture is key to getting these top tier candidates to stay when big budget salaries come knocking – its never all about the money is it?!

How do we do this?

Creating shared goals and building in accountability will help here but also removing areas of single points of failure (read: relying on 1 or 2 particularly talented techies) or creating knowledge silos. You can then build in importance of every responsibility in the team, right down to the bottom, your leaders should lead from the front and no job should be above them. This isn’t to say you should have the top tier talent cleaning out the bathroom but fostering a consistent understanding that every job is important while also providing opportunities to collaborate on other projects, share knowledge, and learn from one another's experiences, you can build a more cohesive and productive team.

5)     Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits:

The pro sports people analogy applies here to, and while there is always someone willing to pay more it is a really good idea to keep a finger on the trigger regarding what really is competitive.

It is really important to hammer home that if you offered graduate salaries at £25-30k (which has been the standard since before the 2000s), adjusted for inflation this would now be closer to £40k, with Europe paying up to €60k (£50k-ish) and Internationally nearly $80k is average (or £60k-ish) for the same talent, and this is just graduates.

Paying “high salaries” seems to be a dirty phrase but top tier talent is more global than ever and competitive doesn’t just mean competitive within 30 miles anymore, it means competitive for the UK at the very least, with international salaries for similar roles at nearly double (granted there are pros and cons) there will always be some pressure here, but be realistic.

If you want to employ the top 1% you’ll have to offer top 1% compensation, if that’s unachievable, you might have to adjust your expectations. Equally if you benchmark your salaries and find you are offering below 50th percentile and expecting skillsets in the top 10% of this market, you’ll be constantly asking yourself why everyone leaves within “just 18 months”

How can we do this?

In today's competitive job market, competitive compensation and benefits are essential for retaining top tech talent.  It’s difficult really to offer a one size fits all approach to this but there are “pick-n-mix” benefits options like Perkbox which are a great middle ground. Above all, listen to you people, what do they want? Why not cater for that instead of offering a salary sacrifice on an electric car that no one in your business wants?

You’ll need to bench mark your salaries and benefits regularly but taking exit interview very seriously can gain some interesting insight into where the holes in your business or teams may be.

One of the biggest reasons candidates contact us is they’ve had their annual review or finally offered that promotion and pay progression is poor, often under 5% whereas the commonly a new position comes with a a 20% increase, it would take you 4 years to achieve the same pay parity otherwise.

In the fast paced world of technology, retaining top talent is essential for driving innovation and maintaining a competitive edge, but there is no silver bullet. What works for one business might not work for you, but by engaging, motivating, understanding, caring and training you employees you can build loyalty, create great teams, upskill, increase productivity, remove dependencies and provide opportunities to collaborate more effectively and as a by-product, retain staff better too.

Put yourself in their shoes, how would you want to be treated?

For more tips or advice on how to navigate your challenges in tech recruitment reach out to me directly or give me a call on 01527 407140