The 2025 tech talent tipping point
17 Jun 2025
Strategic moves for SA’s executive leaders
By Michael Patterson, Executive: Technology Staffing for HelloKindred
2025 marks a turning point in tech hiring. Trends unfolding offshore offer an insightful glimpse into what our South African executive leaders can expect: AI reshaping once-familiar ground, shifting workforce expectations, and leadership challenges for a new age. For executive decision-makers, now’s the time to actively build agility, resilience and value into your talent strategies.
1. Reposition your Employee Value Proposition to remain competitive
Research from shows that 68% of tech professionals are actively looking for new jobs – not because they have to, but because they want to. This represents an immense opportunity to skim off the best employees the industry has to offer. If you wait to act, you’ll be hiring what’s left, not leading the market.
Today’s top professionals are attracted to workplaces that reflect their values. Rather than focusing on churn, consider how what your organisation stands for could be an enabler. Employee value propositions need updating to meet these new expectations, from transactional to transformational – impact over perks; fulfilment over pay. Your EVP is no longer a recruitment tool; it’s now your retention and differentiation strategy.
2. AI as a strategic enabler; humanity as the competitive edge
Forward-thinking firms are blending automation with humanity to streamline and improve the hiring process. The keyword here is “blend” – over-reliance on automation risks eliminating what makes your brand human. AI can enhance speed, scalability and precision, but only the human factor can build trust – hence, soft skills like adaptability and empathy are increasingly in demand.
AI may be reshaping recruitment, but that doesn’t mean replacing people with platforms. Resist the urge to go all-in. Trust is the new leadership currency, so judicious use of AI requires a governance lens, not just a cost-efficiency one.
3. Build your workforce – don’t buy it
Specialisms change so fast that it’s more advisable to hire for competence and potential than for “finished” candidates. Seventy-seven percent of UK employers would now rather hire a person with adaptability, problem-solving and potential for growth than someone who was top of their class. This speeds up time-to-productivity, broadens talent pools and enables long-term agility.
It’s imperative, then, that you commit to upskilling and development post-hire – once you have your talent onboard, building internal mobility and continuous learning into your operating model turns good hires into great hires and long-term assets.
4. The importance of being agile
Increasingly, resilience is synonymous with flexibility. The surge in contract, freelance and fractional hiring, especially in critical areas like AI, Data Management, Cloud and Cybersecurity, reflects the need for diversity and agility to breed innovation.
Your competitive edge lies in your ability to be flexible and scalable and to embed critical skills by leveraging the array of engagement models now available. Build hybrid teams: combine permanent hires – for culture and continuity – with contractors – for speed and innovation – to build fast-moving, collaborative ecosystems with on-demand talent that flexes with need and scales with opportunity.
5. The inclusive difference
Young professionals – Millennials and Gen Z – expect an inclusive workplace as the absolute baseline. More than any previous generation, they recognise the value of a plurality of perspectives, and it’s a priority for them.
Diversity, once seen as window-dressing and box-ticking, is no longer about how your firm looks from the outside; it’s about how it works on the inside. Despite news headlines sharing how some firms are pulling back on actively embracing diversity, it has steadfastly remained a critical initiative and differentiator. It’s most definitely not a compliance exercise – diversity, baked into your hiring model, is a driver of retention, innovation and outperformance, and an important magnet for engagement and brand recognition.
6. Strategic signals to watch
Accelerating AI adoption means that, by one estimate, 15% of work decisions will be made autonomously by 2028. PwC reports that 98% of CEOs will shift operating models this year, bringing together human and AI capabilities. With Agentic AI and synthetic data taking centre stage, trust and responsibility have become indispensable leadership values. Talent strategy and AI are now indistinguishable. Future leadership must approach human capital and algorithmic decision-making with a unified agenda.
Don’t get left behind. Lead the charge.
Tech talent has morphed from an HR challenge to a strategic lever for innovation, growth and organisational resilience. The winning formula for 2025 is rethinking talent from the ground up, not racing to fill headcounts with outdated legacy talent strategies.
At HelloKindred, we bring a distinctly human touch to technology staffing. We partner with high-performing clients to help them execute their people strategies with speed, precision, and impact. With immediate access to an extensive network of top-tier technology professionals worldwide, we connect businesses with skilled, engaged talent that accelerates delivery and enhances impact.
Our dynamic staffing models integrate remote, contingent and blended talent solutions giving you the agility to scale seamlessly and our scale, extended networks and deep domain expertise streamline talent acquisition, ensuring the right fit, faster.
