Source: WIRED, "After the Great Resignation, Tech Firms Are Getting Desperate" by Megan Carnegie

JOY NAZZARI, THE founder of British proptech startup Showhere, is desperately trying to hire 16 people—a combination of senior-level developers, project managers, and designers. But her pool of candidates is running dry.

“It’s never been harder or more expensive to hire new people,” she says. “Yet you also have to defend who you already have, because they’re seeing the bright lights—being hit up on LinkedIn and hearing stories of friends attracted by big salary packages.”

Nazzari is among the employers who have found it difficult to replace the wave of workers who quit in The Great Resignation, which began last year and hasn’t let up since. In the US, the number of workers quitting has now exceeded pre-pandemic highs for eight straight months, according to consumer data company Statista.

It’s a similar story in the UK. Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, published a report in January that found that people are resigning at the highest rate since 2009. Huge numbers are leaving the labor market entirely and more than 80 percent do not want a job—the highest on record since 1993, according to Raja’s analysis. This has left gaping holes in the workforce.

The Great Resignation has widened the gap between the supply and demand of tech workers, and has made employers resort to extreme incentives to recruit as many of them as possible. In IT alone, 31 percent of workers actively sought out a new job between July and September last year. This is the highest among all industries, according to analysis from Gartner. Meanwhile, data from training company Global Knowledge found that 76 percent of global IT decisionmakers are dealing with critical skills gaps on their teams. Multiply that problem across other tech roles, and it’s clear that the skills shortage is likely to worsen before it gets better.

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