I’ve worked in Tech for 24 years - starting off as software engineer, then into technology leadership and now at Hg focusing on driving engineering excellence and best practice across the portfolio.

Throughout my career, finding high quality talent - and especially hidden talent in places that might otherwise be overlooked - has been a preoccupation.

For me, the standout finding from this research from Generation is that it represents a major failure of recruitment processes – if a candidate needs 1-2 years work experience to be successful in a role, then it just isn’t an entry level job. There’s clearly a need for hiring teams to be more realistic about where they try to deploy entry level roles as well as defining more clearly what they need from those roles. Some functions or organisations may not be able to support true entry level roles – nobody expects to leave school and immediately work at a Formula 1 team.

It may also be that in a constrained talent market driving ever higher costs, budget constraints are forcing hiring teams to position some roles as requiring less experience than the role really demands.

An important avenue for the next phase of the work could be to explore the split between those roles employers need to operate the business - “traditional IT” roles - and those needed to design and build, for example, highly innovative SaaS products. I have found that solely skills-based hiring works really well for IT roles - such a as Cloud Operations, Security Operations and Support - but can be riskier for product-oriented roles where the need for deep context of the end customer workflow and baseline technical complexity can be much higher.

There is also a challenge related to organisation size which needs delving into further. For product roles the operational challenge in my experience is that many R&D organisation struggle to support true entry level roles until they reach a critical mass around 50+ engineers. In many organisations this is around the same point they start to explore expanding their access to a global talent pool to scale more rapidly and the use of lower cost locations. Further delaying the point at which true entry level roles can be supported.

The net result is that I suspect most true entry level roles are found in the largest firms who are building a pipeline for senior talent 5 to 10 years in the future — and because of their scale and brand reputations often have the luxury of cherry-picking the very best candidates from the most elite universities, further cementing that traditional pathway.

If an organisation isn’t large enough to support true entry level roles within their product development function, perhaps there could be a useful refocus on building a pipeline via IT, Operations & Support until the required scale is achieved. The model of transitioning someone from an IT-type role to a product role once they’ve built a couple of years' experience is worth exploring further, as part of the employer coalition or beyond.

In my career, the most acute challenges in technology recruitment have always been at the more senior engineering and leadership roles. But of course, unless we get the entry level openings right - not just in terms of absolute numbers, but also in giving those from disadvantaged backgrounds a fair chance - then those challenges are only going to get harder.