Searching for rare IT specialists

Which IT specialists are considered rare?

There are no vacancies in IT that can be called mass ones. However, an experienced recruiter understands the difference in the number of applications and time-to-hire between the vacancies of junior React developers and enterprise architects. 

In practice, the complexity and rarity of a position depend on the core technology, number of requirements, and the domain / sphere. After creating a recruitment brief, a recruiter estimates the market volume, compares it to internal analytics and candidate conversion data, and can make a forecast concerning how difficult (or realistic) it is to fill a vacancy. 

Here are some examples of rare positions in IT that a recruiter may come across:

• Developers who use Rust, Cobol, Erlang, or other rare languages. For example, Cobol is an outdated technology that is still used in some banking projects in the USA, Ukraine, and all over the world. 
• Application security or backend QA specialists.
• Software development engineers in test (a developer, tester, and DevOps engineer all-in-one).
• MLOps, DevSecOps, and other “Ops” specialists that are not yet common on the market.

Although such candidates can be found in different local markets, their numbers are limited. This means that recruitment teams may need to take extra measures and allocate additional resources to find and hire the right talent.

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How and where can rare IT specialists be found? 

We have already addressed the challenges of recruiting for such positions. Our next step is to determine the right strategy and decide where to look for these rare candidates. We have several tips that will help you in this process.

Broaden Your Search to Different Platforms

When the IT candidate pool is restricted, it is critical to utilize as many resources as possible to find potential hires. Job boards and professional social networks such as Djinni, Skyworker, and LinkedIn, along with niche platforms, like Github, Kaggle, StackOverflow, and others, can prove to be helpful.

Build your employer brand and create an internal training system

To attract the best, you need to be the best. Strive to create a company where people want to work, starting with salaries and ending with corporate culture. This will increase the number of job applications and enhance candidate engagement. 

Sometimes, the shortage of professionals is so great that it is easier to develop talent in-house. To do this, consider using training courses and intensive workshops, collaborating with universities that offer technical majors, webinars, and other educational activities.

Engage external experts

Sometimes, the internal recruitment team may not have enough resources at their disposal: the candidate database and tools may be limited, and more advanced resources, such as LinkedIn Professional, can be quite costly. IT recruitment agencies and external experts will help find new approaches and increase the number of applications.

ITExpert’s experience in finding specialists of rare IT professions

Our team boasts diverse experience working with the rarest positions in IT. We have helped fill the vacancies of Pixi developers for the gaming industry, data scientists in the sphere of computer vision and 3D reconstruction, embedded developers with very specific requirements, software development engineers in test, data quality managers (a hybrid role of a test engineer and a database developer), and many others. For some of these positions, there are only 100–150 specialists in local candidates market. 

How do we achieve this? Our ideal formula has several components.

If you do not want to experiment in your company, then we can conduct a consultation with you on the technical requirements of a position and start your search now! You will receive your first candidates in 3–5 days.