Building and Retaining High Performance Teams – Key learnings 

^Highlights

• Last month, ACS Qld hosted a panel event with Nicola Steel from JJP Talent Solutions (ACS preferred recruitment partner) about attracting, recruiting and retaining tech talent in post pandemic Australia. Recap on the key learnings from our expert panel at this great recent Branch event. 

Last month, ACS Qld hosted a panel event with Nicola Steel from JJP Talent Solutions (ACS preferred recruitment partner) about attracting, recruiting and retaining tech talent in post pandemic Australia. The panel consisted of Jamie Wilson, Founder of Cryptoloc, Russell Adcock, VP of Engineering at Skedulo and Sammy Herbert, Head of Developer Experience at SixPivot with Nicola Steel as MC.

One of the topics the panel explored was how the hiring landscape has changed over the last decade. Sammy Herbert explained how there was a tech skills shortage pre-pandemic. Then when the pandemic hit in March 2020, many jobs disappeared overnight and this continued for a further 6 months until jobs started slowly trickling back. Then in early 2021, projects started kicking off again and by around June 2021 there was an explosion of jobs. What was already a candidate driven market was starting to go crazy! Developers were, and still are, being offered extremely high salaries, receiving multiple offers and being counteroffered by their current employers.   

Sammy goes on to stress the importance of having a strong Employee Value Proposition to hire people successfully. She appreciates that an EVP takes time to develop. Companies are discovering the importance of a strong EVP by investing in developing one and by bringing all stakeholders on board not just Talent Acquisition and People and Culture.

Jamie Wilson talked about the importance of creating a safe environment, the importance of people (not just thinking of them as "resources") and making sure that love is felt within the organisation. He appreciates that it is impossible to keep smart people forever and the importance of helping them in pursuing and achieving their goals. Jamie also talks about how if a “bad egg” joins the organisation, they are squeezed out very quickly!

For Russell Adcock, VP of Engineering at Skedulo, the number one thing is trust. Don’t tell your teams what to do but provide the right guidelines, boundaries and training so they know how to make the right decisions. He explains that you need to give power to the people to do their best work. 

The panel event ended with Q&A just as the lights suddenly went out and everyone was in darkness!  The audience used the torch app on their phones to shine some light on the panel. Then the questions came which were much more rigorous and thought provoking as the audience got more involved and excited in the discussion.  Would this anonymity work well for future events, we pondered.