With Adobe Experience Manager, your company’s content authors can quickly and easily create the personalized experiences customers demand. Too bad it’s nowhere near as easy to find AEM developers to implement it, customize it to your business, maximize its functionality, and monitor and maintain it. There are about third fewer AEM developers than open AEM developer jobs in the U.S. It’s also because hiring managers sometimes take steps that lead to headaches instead of headway. It’s a common problem, but it doesn’t have to be if you know what to look out for. Here are five missteps that are stopping you from finding top AEM talent.
1. Relying solely on LinkedIn.
With over 190 million members in the U.S., and new members added at a rate of more than two per second, it’s no wonder that LinkedIn is the social media channel recruiters use most to find candidates. What is a wonder, though, is how anyone finds an AEM developer on the platform in the first place.
Trying to find a candidate within your own network could be like searching for a needle in a haystack. That haystack may or may not contain a needle, to begin with. But it couldn’t hurt to post your job opening to your feed. Then, cross your fingers that your busy connections see it. Also, that they will also have an AEM developer in mind to forward your posting to.
Posting to LinkedIn Jobs will ensure that your opening will be sent, via an email or notification alert, to a list of members who’ve asked to know when jobs resembling yours pop up. Hopefully, one of those members will be specifically qualified to help you complete your current project. And just as hopefully, that member will be attracted to your listing over the 7, 8, or 9 others that LinkedIn will have bundled alongside yours in the email or notification.
If your company has purchased the LinkedIn Recruiter service, you can take the search into your own hands. Using filters, you can zero in on candidates you think have the experience you need, then send them an InMail to see if they’re interested. LinkedIn’s email response rate is three times greater than regular email on average, so it’s highly likely you’ll get a reply. However, since there aren’t enough of AEM devs to go around, it’s also highly likely that reply will read something along the lines of “thanks, but no thanks.”
2. Trusting that HR understands your needs.
Because AEM allows your organization to customize how you use it in an endless number of ways, you need a developer with more technical knowledge than an average developer. That means the person searching for the candidate should have more technical knowledge than average, too. Although HR professionals have a lot of invaluable skills, techspeak doesn’t tend to be one of them.
Sure, you could get lucky. You could have an HR representative that has worked with AEM previously. They could understand that in order to display a custom message in AEM, a developer needs to understand how to use OSGi. Or that in order to overtake the processing of a resource request in AEM, a developer needs to write a servlet. It’s possible. But it’s also possible that your well-meaning HR representative could hear the phrase “hacked into the mainframe” from a candidate, and not think twice about advancing their application.
3. Scheduling interviews with any candidate HR turns up.
Part of the reason you would ask HR to help you in your search is to save yourself time. Between leading your team, keeping up with day-to-day tasks, and looking for ways to improve IT performance, you’re already stretched to capacity. Finding a free hour to search for a candidate, let alone interview one, isn’t a luxury you can easily afford. However, as established in misstep number 3, HR’s pre-interviews aren’t always going to pinpoint the most qualified, most experienced AEM developers.
If serendipity strikes, you could find yourself face-to-face with a roomful of perfect prospects with the exact skill set, specializations, and employment expectations you’re looking for. It could be that you find yourself in a position where it’s too hard to choose because they’re all just right. But most likely you’ll just end up wishing there was a better way to screen out the ones that aren’t.
4. Hiring a candidate because you’re pressed for time.
If you’ve just started looking for an AEM developer now, you may soon feel like you’ve started out behind. That’s because using typical methods to find top talent in a shallow talent pool can take weeks, months, or in some cases years. It might be tempting to hire someone — anyone — with a basic AEM understanding.
You could say to yourself, “hiring is always a risk anyway” and just roll the dice on the first interviewee who seems AEM-fluent. And who knows? Their knack for industry jargon could genuinely come from years of qualifying experience. If not, however, you may end up with issues that cost you more time and resources to solve.
5. Going without an AEM recruiting specialist.
AEM recruiting specialists work every day to build and maintain relationships with AEM developers. They know the ins-and-outs of AEM, so they know what to look for — and what to look out for — when adding developers to their talent pool. They also know how to navigate the challenges associated with H1B visa holders. Chances are, they’ll already have a candidate in mind for your project when you contact them.
It’s only natural, though, that you would want to start with the tools that are already in your arsenal. After all, you already have LinkedIn at your fingertips, and HR staff to support you. And if you’re the kind of person that enjoys time-consuming, stress-inducing hiring processes, then you won’t be disappointed — no matter how many under-qualified, under-experienced candidates turn up on your doorstep.
Avoid missteps in your hiring processes.
Hiring an AEM recruiting specialist, like TechBridge, can put you on the fastest, easiest path to filling your open AEM position. With a specialist on your side, you can avoid spending countless hours connecting with lukewarm leads on LinkedIn, and interviewing candidates that can’t do what you need to be done.
TechBridge Inc. is a Utah-based recruiting agency that pairs talented AEM developers with IT hiring managers all across the country. Whether you need a single AEM specialist or an entire team, project help, or full-time employees, we can connect you with the talent you need — fast.
