Data centres must hire faster (without sacrificing security). Here’s how.
An ever more data-centric world demands ever more data centres, which in turn demand ever more people to staff them.
The challenge? Intense competition paired with sweeping (and growing) skills shortages has created a tougher-than-tough hiring environment.
Data centre recruitment isn’t a peripheral issue. It’s either the major limiter or major lever for growth. Effective recruitment teams hire fast. But speed can’t come at the expense of security and compliance, especially not in the highly-sensitive data centre environment.
Balancing both is the major challenge for data centre recruiters.
Pressure is mounting on data centre hiring teams
The last decade has seen data centre demand skyrocket as our world becomes increasingly digital. That’s already brought challenges for the organisations battling to create, maintain, and expand capacity. But with the emergence of GenAI, those issues are worsening. Dramatically.
McKinsey estimates that around 70% of growing demand will be for data centres equipped to host advanced AI workloads. They predict that global demand for data centre capacity could rise at an annual rate of up to 27% from 2023 to 2030, to reach 298 gigawatts (GW).
That’s a major hike on current demand of 60GW – one that bodes badly:
“To avoid a deficit, at least twice the data center capacity built since 2000 would have to be built in less than a quarter of the time.”
If global data centre demand more than triples by 2030 operators will face challenges at every turn, from securing energy infrastructure to overcoming regulatory hurdles.
But the biggest issue is people. Creating and maintaining effective, safe, reliable data centres rests on having the right talent. And that’s becoming increasingly hard to secure.
According to one study of 3500 senior European data centre professionals, 98% believe staff supply will decrease in the coming year. And 92% believe this will be coupled with a rise in demand.
What’s driving the data centre talent shortage?
- Limited talent pool
Data centres are highly complex and evolving, demanding specialised skills that are often being defined moment-by-moment. Plus, data centres are often in remote areas with more limited talent pools.
There simply aren’t enough people to meet demand, especially for roles like data centre technicians, facility managers, network engineers, and security specialists. For instance, The Uptime Institute Data Center Staffing Survey 2023 found that 58% of respondents struggled to source qualified candidates.
- Intense competition
The explosion in demand has created an enormously competitive recruitment environment. For every great data centre professional, there are a generous handful of data centre organisations willing to offer them the same as, or better than, you.
In an employee- (or candidate-) driven market like this, the correlate is high turbulence as professionals can easily job-hop for better opportunities.
The Uptime survey also found that 55% of data centre operators struggled to retain staff, for instance, with 40% losing people to direct competitors. High turnover lumps pressure onto recruitment teams and sends costs soaring.
Facing these two challenges, there’ll be clear winners and losers in the race to attract, train, and retain the right people. Recruitment is either your biggest roadblock to capacity growth – or your biggest accelerator.
So how can talent professionals make sure you’re on the winning side?
The tightrope: data centres need to accelerate hiring while mitigating risk
Unless you have an unlimited budget for ever-escalating salary hikes, speed is your biggest weapon in building a competitive recruitment function. Time-to-hire directly correlates to offer acceptance rate. That is, the faster you can get offers out the more offers you’ll have accepted.
That makes time-to-hire one of the data centre industry’s most critical recruitment metrics, because it’s the lynchpin to competitive hiring. In this case, the early bird really does catch the worm.
However, speed can’t come at the cost of security, trust, and compliance. Data centres are highly sensitive environments: hiring trustworthy people is paramount. Sacrificing thoroughness for speed is an uncomfortable risk. (For a lesson on the perils of scaling capacity fast at the cost of dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, you need only look to TikTok.)
But there’s another issue here too, because unfilled vacancies also increase operational risk.
The operational risks of slow data centre recruitment:
- Increased errors
The longer roles go unfilled, the more slack your existing teams have to pick up. Increased workloads increase the risk of fatigue, stress and burnout, which increases the risk of errors.
Burned out staff are more likely to make simple but costly mistakes like flipping the wrong breaker, misconfiguring a switch, or neglecting an important patch. This can cause delays and disruption, if not outright security breaches.
- Lost opportunity revenue
Delays hiring the right people can slow the rollout or upgrade of facilities, limiting capacity. Lost revenue and strained client relationships are the end-game if providers aren’t able to meet deadlines, deliver continuous service and scale infrastructure.
Bigger picture, the data centre industry is competitive and fast-moving. Delays impact competitive edge, which impacts market share and long-term profitability. An inefficient recruitment function isn’t a fringe issue: it’s front and centre to organisations’ long-term ability to thrive and survive.
- Increased security vulnerability
Data centres are prime targets for cyberthreats, bringing the risk of massive financial loss, legal penalties, and potentially irreparable reputational damage. To protect against these threats, data centres need cast-iron cybersecurity strategy and protocols.
But understaffed teams are vulnerable teams. Negligent or inadvertent user behaviour is one of the main drivers of insider threats – losses from which doubled from 2018 to 2023.
Staffing gaps might drive less-than-thorough oversight of employee access logs, for example, so you don’t spot breaches when you should. Or understaffed teams might not have the capacity to respond promptly to breaches, exacerbating damage that could’ve been controlled.
The fact is, speed and compliance are a tightrope. Data centre operators need to protect against risk – but hiring the right people and hiring them fast are both non-negotiables.
Anything less than that increases risk, slows growth, and hampers competitive advantage. That’s a balancing act that many data centres aren’t getting right.
Fast, reliable background screening is non-negotiable for safer hiring
The only way to accelerate hiring while also reducing risk is to improve your background screening and pre-hire checks. That comes down to two priorities:
Reliability
Many providers – especially small local providers in remote areas – are notoriously unreliable, if not downright dishonest. You need to trust that, when a provider says a check is completed, it’s actually completed. Not just hurried through to get off their books.
You need absolute confidence in your background checks providers. That’s what Veremark brings, with renowned global expertise meaning we ensure reliable compliance over multiple jurisdictions. For more reliable checks, everywhere your data centres are.
Speed
It’s not unusual for background screening to take weeks. But that’s weeks too long. The pre-hire checks industry has largely been slow to evolve, with clunky, cumbersome, black-box processes that are far too slow.
Veremark leverages great tech to automate checks for global hires, with real-time dashboards so you always know where you’re at. Plus our global coverage means you can handle all your international checks from one place, instead of wasting time managing multiple vendors.
Fast, reliable background screening providers reduce turnaround times and increase confidence in critical pre-hire checks. So you can hire people you trust, faster – to scale your data centre operations at the pace needed to capture demand.
Better background screening is a core accelerator for data centre hiring
Data centres are the backbone of the digital economy: the faster operators can create and scale capacity, the bigger the competitive opportunity. Hiring suitable talent fast is a cornerstone — and better background screening is an instant accelerator.
Veremark is one of the world's leading background screening and pre-hire check providers, with a mission to help the world trust faster. Contact us here.
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FAQs
FAQs
This depends on the industry and type of role you are recruiting for. To determine whether you need reference checks, identity checks, bankruptcy checks, civil background checks, credit checks for employment or any of the other background checks we offer, chat to our team of dedicated account managers.
Many industries have compliance-related employment check requirements. And even if your industry doesn’t, remember that your staff have access to assets and data that must be protected. When you employ a new staff member you need to be certain that they have the best interests of your business at heart. Carrying out comprehensive background checking helps mitigate risk and ensures a safer hiring decision.
Again, this depends on the type of checks you need. Simple identity checks can be carried out in as little as a few hours but a worldwide criminal background check for instance might take several weeks. A simple pre-employment check package takes around a week. Our account managers are specialists and can provide detailed information into which checks you need and how long they will take.
All Veremark checks are carried out online and digitally. This eliminates the need to collect, store and manage paper documents and information making the process faster, more efficient and ensures complete safety of candidate data and documents.
In a competitive marketplace, making the right hiring decisions is key to the success of your company. Employment background checks enables you to understand more about your candidates before making crucial decisions which can have either beneficial or catastrophic effects on your business.
Background checks not only provide useful insights into a candidate’s work history, skills and education, but they can also offer richer detail into someone’s personality and character traits. This gives you a huge advantage when considering who to hire. Background checking also ensures that candidates are legally allowed to carry out certain roles, failed criminal and credit checks could prevent them from working with vulnerable people or in a financial function.
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