Digital experience: The hidden factor in the battle for talent

Despite the economic slowdown and many organizations easing back on their hiring plans in an effort to reduce costs, high-quality talent is still incredibly difficult to find and retain. Take the IT industry, where as many as 86% of CIOs are reporting more competition for qualified candidates and 73% are concerned about IT talent attrition. Demand for IT talent is far outstripping supply across all regions, a result of rapid digitization within the economy and long-standing educational and policy issues.

These talent issues aren’t just confined to IT, however. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. retailers cited talent shortages as a major challenge in 2023 and the situation is similar in industries such as healthcare and manufacturing. For employers, the need to rapidly identify, attract and hire new talent is more critical than ever. And for the vast majority, this process is now almost exclusively digital.

A recent Cisco AppDynamics survey of 12,000 consumers in 12 countries revealed the extent to which digital experience is now a critical factor in how workers find and evaluate new jobs. The average person uses six different applications or digital services when looking for or applying for a new job—and this increases to eight in the U.S. and nine in India. These include job sites, social media platforms, employer websites, and employer review sites.

But, critically, with people so reliant on applications to find their next job, they have zero tolerance if they encounter a poor digital experience, such as a crashing website, slow-loading pages, or security issues. In fact, 64% of people said that if the applications they are using for job searching fail to perform, it actually puts them off working for a potential employer.

So as businesses intensify their efforts to attract new talent, they mustn’t overlook the importance of digital experience at every stage of the recruitment process. They need to provide prospective employees with fast and seamless digital experiences, whether that is through the job vacancy pages on their websites or through email and messaging tools. Unfortunately, however, with many IT departments facing soaring levels of complexity, this task is becoming increasingly difficult. Observability provides IT teams with a platform to manage and optimize application availability, performance, and security at all times. With the flexibility to span across the entire IT estate, including cloud and on-premises technologies, observability allows technologists to quickly detect and remediate issues before they impact end users—whether that is customers, employees, or prospective hires.

CIOs need to work hand-in-hand with HR and talent acquisition teams to make sure the technical aspects of finding and recruiting talent don’t cause their organization to miss out on the best candidates. Tellingly, the majority of people claim they’re now more likely to choose an employer that provides brilliant and seamless digital experiences. And this means that employers have a huge opportunity to get ahead in the battle for talent by ensuring their applications are operating at peak performance at all times.

To learn more about this report, visit the Cisco AppDynamics website here.