Transfer window closed?

By Ben Tindall, Sales and Marketing Director

If you are an IT manager in a mid-sized company you will share the frustrations of football fans who support non-Premiership clubs. If their team is lucky enough to find a young talent who could really help deliver the results the club needs, in no time at all they are tempted away by the glamour and money offered by a big club.

This scenario will be familiar to growing companies that need to upscale their IT teams quickly in response to new opportunities. Finding good developers is difficult enough when you have to compete with the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon, but even if you manage to get one, how do you keep them? How do you stop your company from simply being a training ground for the big boys? Here are four simple tips:

Grow together – make your developers an integral part of your vision for the company. As you grow and develop, make sure they grow and develop alongside the company. Make sure they are involved, so they never feel like they are standing still.

Communicate – keep in touch with your developers. Ask their opinions, listen to their views and be seen to respond to their comments and beliefs so they feel they are contributing beyond their day-to-day activities.

Reward them – research shows that money becomes the prime driver for employment only if other tangible rewards are missing. Sure, you need to pay developers a reasonable salary, but if you also make sure they experience job satisfaction, and feel valued, then the salary becomes less important.

Team work – Like all successful football clubs, you need to build a team that thinks and acts like a team – because nobody wants to leave a successful team.

Of course, there is an easier way to meet the challenge of new IT projects quickly and effectively: outsourcing. If you know a company that can provide experienced teams to integrate seamlessly with your operation, then it could be less expensive, faster and much less frustrating than looking on the developer transfer market. Who knows, you might even get promoted.