Employee Turnover – Why Your Developer Is Quitting?
Have you ever wondered how often a software developer switches jobs? The truth is that companies rarely turn their noses up at a well-qualified developer if they have changed jobs frequently. What’s more, businesses often poach employees from each other. As a result, the IT talent war is hurting innovation, and employee turnover is increasing.
It’s essential to find an explanation as to why employees decide to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Check out our 3 key points below that detail the reasons behind high employee turnover.
Lack of mentorship programs or opportunities to learn further
Top software developer’s priorities are self-actualization; adopting new technologies and furthering one’s skill set to reach their full potential. In general, developers don’t want their career to stagnate; they find that staying too long at the same job can cause this. However, switching doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a situation will improve.
Having the opportunity to learn and develop is the crucial distinction that determines whether a developer stays at a given job, or not. On Quora, you can find comments such as “Last week I left my cushy job at Amazon after 8 years. Despite getting rewarded repeatedly with promotions, compensation, recognition, and praise, I wasn’t motivated enough to do another year.”.
Of course, not everyone can work at a large and continuously developing company, but that isn’t the point. As a tech recruitment agency, while carrying out our recruitment processes for many companies, we heard many times that we should be focusing on finding candidates who are not money-driven.
Money does not ensure that a developer will stay at a company longer. As long as the salary, of course, corresponds to the average earnings within their given specialization. Businesses need to think about what their company offers in exchange for commitment if wanting to lower employee turnover.
Choosing the wrong candidate during the recruitment process
Sometimes the reason why your newly hired software developer quits, after a few months of work, is due to miscommunication during the recruitment process. Most companies set pretty high expectations – they want to find a skilled and experienced developer who is also highly motivated.
Understandably, every employer wants to have the best people on their team to develop a product or service effectively. However, employers are not always clear with the candidate about the expectations and their daily duties.
For example, telling a potential employee, “I want you to have DevOps skills” doesn’t explain much about the responsibilities of the role. Businesses need to be 100% clear with employee roles & responsibilities. Tell your future DevOps Engineer that they will be making decisions on how to fix any incoherent elements of the code daily, and determine who from the team will deal with each part of the project.
What seems evident for employers may not be for the candidate. As a tech recruitment agency, ITCraftship has sometimes heard from hired candidates that they were a bit disappointed about their new job because they thought the workflow or their tasks were going to be different.
Employee turnover in companies can also be caused by hiring a person who doesn’t possess the right skills from the beginning and ends up struggling with the framework and project. The recruitment process and its technical segment must be designed in a way that clearly shows specific examples of tasks that will be performed by a candidate.
Learn more by reading our article Hiring a Remote Developer While Scaling up a Company – 5 Must Know Facts, to find out more information about what your technical recruiter should know.
Not having established engineering values and practices
In small companies, employees and employers cooperate closely, and there is always the possibility to discuss issues that have arisen with fellow team members. People in such companies often focus on creating a product or a service, not on establishing practices that must be strictly followed.
When a company grows, it can run into problems hiring more and more people who aren’t as familiar with your workflow and framework as previous company members. New developers may not be able to maintain existing code because it wasn’t built with the right quality or that someone may break the build with poor check-in every few days.
Every tech company, sooner or later, should designate people to specialize in engineering processes and tools. The manuals need to be written, onboarded and training processes need to be set up to build the company’s work culture.
When software developers get stuck in projects that are going nowhere because of errors from other team members, they become frustrated. Frustrated employees eventually leave. Engineering processes are never universal; they exist uniquely within each company.
Software developers don’t want to be in a team that slows them down or impacts their work results. However, it may turn out that it’s not the person who is unqualified but rather the lack of specific practices that causes them to act this way. Building relationships with people takes time. The key is to start building a proper business relationship with your candidate from the moment they decide to apply to your job offer.
Conclusion
They say that the grass is always greener on the other side. However, if you eliminate errors during the recruitment process, communicate your expectations directly, take care of the work environment, and employee development, then employee turnover should no longer be a significant problem for your company.
The US software job market itself faces a 472K tech talent shortage, according to research done by Indeed. Moreover, 83% of the respondents agreed that it affected their businesses through slower product development, lost revenue, and increased burnout in existing employees.
MoreCurrently, many companies struggle to find a software developer mostly because of a tech talent shortage on the job market, so it becomes even more essential to keep good people on board.
