Health Tech Companies Face Challenges Hiring Skilled Developers

Digital health recruitment is a challenge for health techs. It isn’t that digital health is a boring space. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Digital health and health tech is one of the most exciting spaces in tech today. The work is intellectually stimulating, there is ample investment in the sector and there is the added benefit that you’re working on tech that will help us all live longer, happier and healthier lives. So why is digital health recruitment a challenge? 

Shortage of Talent 

Firstly, there is a shortage of developers in the US and globally. In the spring of 2021, there were 921,000 unfilled positions in the US for software engineers and developers. Some in the US are calling it a crisis, but the truth is that it’s a global problem with some researchers putting the total shortage at 1.4 million globally. This talent shortage means that companies looking to hire need to poach developers from competitors.   

The grass is always greener for developers 

The shortage of developers and the constant poaching, leads to the next challenge in digital health recruitment: turnover. Some have called this a revolving door and there are all sorts of studies with different stats, some even arguing that 33% of software developers start looking for new jobs in as short a time as 6 months after accepting a new position. What this means is that hiring is a constant job and a constant struggle with people coming and going. High turnover can also hurt company culture and have a knock-on effect on your team. 

Speed is the real challenge  

In a fast-growing health tech company, the challenge isn’t really digital health recruitment, the challenge is speed. Hiring developers takes time. Training and onboarding them takes time and the revolving door of people leaving slows you down even more. As the old saying goes ‘time is money’. I would argue that in tech, time is more valuable than money. In the current market, digital health recruitment is not fast enough, and it risks putting yearly growth goals in jeopardy. So what should help tech do?  

A new approach: External Development Partners 

The digital health tech space isn’t the first area to struggle with the recruitment of software engineers. In fact, it’s a problem across all sectors that rely on software developers. In sectors from finance to pharma, the trend has been to find expert external consultancies to work with. These consultancies are experts in the relevant regulation and have a team of highly trained developers ready to immediately interface with your team.  This is becoming more and more common in the health tech space as well, driven by the digital health recruitment challenges mentioned above.