According to market research, the global Software as a Service (SaaS) industry is projected to grow from $251.17 billion to a staggering $883.34 billion between 2022 and 2029.
While this growth presents tremendous opportunities, there are also looming obstacles — including a large number of emerging companies, an increasingly crowded market, and more competition than ever before.
This competition isn’t limited to customers for your products. It also applies to recruitment. From SaaS sales talent with the requisite hard and soft skills to the best and brightest tech talent, identifying and attracting high-value employees can be a significant challenge.
SaaS recruiters can gain a vital inside edge by understanding the market and addressing these challenges to optimize their SaaS staffing and hiring practices. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the unique SaaS job market, specific challenges to SaaS recruitment, and SaaS recruiting for startups.
Understanding the SaaS Job Market
For the past decade, the SaaS market has been experiencing meteoric growth. And even amidst an uncertain economy with the Great Resignation, SaaS and tech markets continue to boom.
According to CompTIA’s August 2022 Tech Jobs Report, the unemployment rate for tech jobs dropped by 1.7% while job openings spiked up by just around 50%.
And while layoffs and hiring freezes in big tech were sounding alarm bells, the tech job market continued to boom — with SaaS startups and mid-sized SaaS companies poised to compete for the top tech and IT Talent re-entering the job search.
Challenges in SaaS Recruiting
SaaS companies may have many opportunities, but capitalizing on them ultimately depends on the degree to which recruiters and hiring managers can attract qualified talent in an extremely competitive employees' market.
This is easier said than done, especially when you factor in the unique challenges of SaaS recruiting, including:
Volatile Job Market
The fast-moving SaaS industry is inherently dynamic. Factor in the talent gap caused by the Great Resignation and emerging AI developments, and the job market can be equally volatile.
As employers scale in both directions, the availability of jobs and types of positions can vary wildly. Additionally, job seekers will be especially strategic (and cautious!) about seeking out the right opportunities at the right time.
Hard-to-Reach Qualified Talent
The SaaS talent gap is real. In fact, founders report that hiring concerns (including hiring the best talent and hiring fast enough) are the biggest issue keeping them up at night.
The most qualified talent are typically passive talent — meaning, they're already in a role and aren't actively looking or waiting by the phone for an opportunity. Given this fact as well as the talent shortage, sticking with conventional recruiting methods can prevent companies from finding the people they need to move forward.
For example, focusing entirely on candidates' past experiences during recruitment can overlook the potential of less experienced candidates.
This is why companies need a forward-thinking and reimagined way of recruitment to reach the elusive, highly-qualified talent they need.
Competition Among Top Talent
Finding the best candidates in an employee’s market is only one piece of the recruitment puzzle.
Equally important?
Attracting them to your company.
Today’s qualified job seekers have many options. Employers must go to new lengths to win them over their other offers.
8 Tips on How To Strengthen Your SaaS Recruiting Efforts
Whether you’re looking to fill tech roles or customer success, sales, and senior leadership positions, it’s vital to acknowledge the varying priorities of candidates.
Higher compensation is just the start.
In addition to offering perks like remote work arrangements and more desirable benefits packages to job seekers, outside-the-box recruiting approaches are also necessary, such as extending hiring timelines and demonstrating a unified organizational vision.
If you’re looking to strengthen your SaaS recruiting efforts, consider the eight strategies below.
1. Build a Tech Talent Pipeline
A talent pipeline refers to an at-the-ready pool of qualified candidates.
Depending on your specific organization, this could include tech experts, sales professionals, and more. Similar to a talent pool, the two differ in one key way: While a talent pool refers to a broad group of potential job prospects, the talent pipeline is vetted and qualified.
The benefits of establishing a tech talent pipeline are profound. Not only does this proactive approach offer assurance of qualified internal and external candidates when vacancies arise, but it can also accelerate recruitment metrics like time to hire, time to fill, and quality of hire.
While developing a tech talent pipeline is extremely beneficial, it’s also an intensive process calling for rigorous workforce planning, human capital management, and people analytics.
2. Develop a Strategic Recruiting Plan
The caliber of your employees can make or break your business. That’s where a strategic recruiting plan comes in. Rather than leaving critical hiring elements to timing and chance, a well-crafted recruiting plan (as well as a sourcing strategy template) becomes a roadmap for accessing the right talent when needed.
Establishing a strategic recruiting plan is also an excellent opportunity to consider where your recruiting efforts are succeeding, where they fall short, and how to take corrective action. And while building a strategic recruiting plan is a multi-step process, it has huge payoff potential.
3. Identify Top Candidates With a Search Platform (Like Hunt Club)
As discussed earlier, conventional recruiting tools are no longer enough in the digital world and today's dynamic talent landscape.
When it comes to tech talent, the need to adopt new recruiting methods is especially important. It’s impossible to overestimate the value of automation to streamline the tech talent acquisition process.
This is where the Hunt Club Search Platform shines. Scanning a database of 8 million high-quality candidates, our AI-enabled recruiting platform takes much of the tedious manual labor out of sourcing and screening candidates. This allows recruiters to focus more directly on critical relationship-building with the hard-to-reach candidates you need.
4. Partner With a Recruiting Firm
Company leaders can have their work cut out for them just with everyday operations. Focusing on these mission-critical objectives may put recruiter needs on the back burner with both short and long-term implications. This is especially true in today’s hyper-competitive hiring landscape.
A recruitment agency with experience sourcing SaaS candidates can help ease some of the burdens. These agencies work with organizations to understand their hiring needs and then help fill the open roles with qualified talent.
Hunt Club is one such agency, but we take things a step beyond simply filling roles.
Hunt Club leverages innovative technology alongside a team of expert recruiters with deep talent networks across a wide range of sectors, including the SaaS industry.
Recruiting firms like Hunt Club can offer powerful partnerships in understanding and navigating the evolving SaaS industry and its unique recruitment challenges, leading to more sustainable business growth.
5. Keep Track of Data at Every Step of the Process
Data offers granular and actionable insights into the effectiveness of your comprehensive hiring process (including onboarding) — but only if you’re measuring and monitoring the appropriate metrics and KPIs, including the following:
- Time to hire
- Time to fill
- Source of hire
- Attrition rate
- Quality of hire
- Applicants per role
- Cost per hire
- Offer acceptance rate
- Number of open positions
- Applicant competition rate
- Sourcing channel effectiveness
Both separately and together, these data-driven analytics can help you identify inefficiencies in your recruitment process to refine and optimize your full-cycle recruiting efforts.
6. Leverage Social Media
If you’re not leveraging the power of social media in your recruitment strategy, you’re missing out on major opportunities to level up your hiring efforts and results.
In addition to helping you connect with qualified candidates for open positions, social media sites like LinkedIn and other job boards are also excellent tools for building brand awareness, cultivating online relationships, and improving the candidate experience with passive and active job seekers alike.
As such, it’s also an excellent tactic for building your tech talent pipeline.
7. Use Skill Assessments
Earlier, we discussed the problem of relying exclusively on experience when vetting candidates in an employee’s market. While a job seeker may not have the exact experience you’re looking for, they may have other skills, traits, and attributes to contribute that may not be captured in a job posting or job description.
When alternative credentials are increasing, skill assessment tools can help companies widen their talent pools; they help demonstrate a candidate's past experience and potential to make meaningful contributions.
According to a recent Society for Human Resource Management survey, 79% of HR professionals report that skill assessment scores are equally if not more important than traditional criteria such as degrees and years of experience.
An added bonus of using skill assessment tools for hiring decisions? They can also support your diversity and equity goals!
8. Establish a Strong Employer Brand
Today’s job seekers have a lot of power. Rather than accepting the first job that comes along, they have the liberty of prioritizing brands that truly speak to who they are and what they want.
A “good job” is no longer enough. In fact, 63% of job seekers cite “misalignment on the role and vision across interviewing teams” as a major deterrent in the job search. Establishing a strong employer brand can help you compellingly communicate your vision and values.
Furthermore, in a volatile industry, candidates are also looking for companies with staying power. A strong employer brand indicates a company’s ability to withstand and thrive.
Secure Top Talent in SaaS With Hunt Club
While it’s critical for companies to provide valuable products and services, business success ultimately comes down to one thing above all else: having the right people.
This can be easier said than done in competitive and complex markets like SaaS and tech — especially for startups.
A cutting-edge search firm like Hunt Club can help meet and exceed your hiring needs, pulling in qualified talent in much less time than traditional sourcing methods. Powered by technology and community, our full-service, AI-driven recruiting methods will help your business find and hire the best tech, professional, and executive talent.
To start building your tech talent pipeline with our tech-driven recruiting solution, connect with Hunt Club today.
