UK businesses looking abroad for tech talent due to shortage

A quarter of UK businesses look abroad for tech talent due to a shortage of talent in the UK according to new research. 

HR solutions company Remote surveyed 251 ‘hiring decision makers’ in the UK to explore the state of the tech talent market. 

However, despite the number of companies looking abroad, 20% of those surveyed said that London still offered sufficient talent to meet their needs and 63% had recruitment strategies primarily focussed on the UK talent pool. 

CEO and Co-Founder of Remote, Job van der Voort, said: ‘The research shows that for businesses to meet their tech talent needs, they need to go a step further and look beyond their own market. Tech talent hasn’t disappeared, it’s just distributed around the world, and companies need to overcome the challenges to access it.’

A vast majority of businesses looked within long-standing tech hubs when hiring abroad, including San Francisco, Berlin, Paris and New York. Companies are also changing their working environments to accommodate a wider search for new staff as 43% of those surveyed said they are moving towards more remote work. 

Research by consulting firm Gartner recently identified Mexico City, Ahmedabad and Budapest as three of the top emerging hubs for IT and tech talent, with the former having a supply-demand ratio of 8:1, compared to London’s 2:1 ratio. 

An article from Global PEO Services also labelled Japan as the best country for hiring tech talent in the world as the UK seeks to deepen its digital ties with the country and make it easier for tech companies from the two nations to work together. 

The adherence to hiring within existing tech hubs comes from a variety of concerns about hiring in a new market with 12% of companies worried about language barriers within the workforce and 18% avoiding new markets simply because they have never hired within them before. 

Remote’s findings line up with a recent announcement by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who said his government would attract the world’s top 100 talents in the world of artificial intelligence and make the UK an attractive place for tech talent.

Photo by Eric Prouzet