Can we talk frankly for just a moment? Who’s really in charge in IT departments when it comes to hiring and retaining new talent? You’d think that with the global recession, companies would have the upper hand. However, with the critical importance of IT solutions to existing company operations and increasing global competition, it’s possible that firms need IT workers more than IT workers need the firm. What’s an IT leader to do?

My, How Things Have Changed!

How did we get to where we are today? It wasn’t all that long ago that you could land a job in a company’s IT department right out of college and then expect to spend either your entire career there or at least the next 10 years if you chose to do so. Those days are now long gone.

Instead, what we are dealing with today is workers who view their current jobs (or job opportunities) as relatively short lived events. The experts tell us that everyone needs to expect to have between 10-12 different jobs during our IT careers. This new mindset makes it much harder for IT Leaders to recruit and retain the top IT talent that they need to move their teams forward faster.

New Solutions For IT Leaders

I’ve been hearing a lot IT managers lamenting the current state of recruiting top tier talent lately. To them I say “get over it“. Look, the world is the way that it is and there’s nothing that either you or I can do about it.

If new hires to your IT department are going to view their job as a temporary stop on their career journey, then fine – work with it. This simply means that you need to change how you manage your team.

In the past, IT managers were content to allow workers to “niche” and become experts in one particular area. No more. Cross-training of every member of your team should be among your highest priorities. This will benefit your team members because they will pick up new skills and won’t get bored doing the same job over and over again. You’ll benefit because when a team member decides to leave, the loss won’t be quite as painful as it could be.

IT Leaders also need to looking for tomorrow’s IT leaders. A benefit of having a great deal of turnover in your teams is that you’ll have a chance to evaluate a greater number of IT workers for future leadership positions. Those who have the necessary skills, are the ones that you need to give additional responsibilities to. By doing this, you just might convince them to stick around a bit longer…

Final Thoughts

The world has changed and IT Leaders need to change along with it. Coming to the realization that we can’t hope to keep team members for extended periods of time means that we need to change how we hand out assignments and how we search for tomorrow’s IT management talent. If you can adjust how your manage your teams to deal with they way that the world really is,  then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing. Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job so hard to do…

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Post tags: employment, hiring, information technology jobs, it, it career, IT professional, IT Staffing, job, jobs in information technology, professional staffing, recruiting, recruitment, retention, retention strategies, staffing solutions

IT Leaders Need To Think Differently About How They Will Do Recruiting In The Future

It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment.

During the economic downturn IT workers were staying put because they didn’t know what was going to happen next. Additionally, firms stopped hiring except for the most critical functions. When things start to pick up again, this will all change. Are you going to be ready IT Leader?

The Problem With The Way That IT Recruits

We all need to remember that recruitment is really a game that we are playing with our competition – we want to get all of the good talent in order to boost our firm and our competition wants to do the same. On top of all of this, who among us has ever been trained on how to properly do recruitment?

The good folks over at Forrester Research realize that we need some help and so they’ve done some research for us. Their conclusions just might surprise you a bit. They believe that there is something that we need to start doing if we want to be successful in attracting the right kind of talent: we need to diversify our talent pool.

The Way That IT Recruiting SHOULD Be Done

Right now all of us pretty much do the same thing when we want to fill a position in our IT department: we start looking at other firms who do what we do in hopes of finding an IT professional who is willing to leave and come work for us. This has worked for a long time because there have been so many people working in IT. However, with outsourcing and the Baby Boomers starting to retire, this isn’t going to keep working much longer.

Instead, Forrester tells us that what we need to do is to expand the pool of talent that we recruit from when we go looking to fill a position. This means that we need to start looking at college students and non-IT business professionals as potential sources of new recruits.

College students have always been an underused resource. The reasons are many, but more often than not it boils down to the simple fact that it takes time to guide them when you give them a task – you can’t just “fire and forget”. Sometimes poor management of college students results in poor performance and this can leave a lingering sense of frustration that causes IT Leaders to shy away from working with college students.

Non-IT business professionals, sometimes called “super users“, are a fantastic under-tapped resource. This resource has both the technical and business knowledge that can prove invaluable to any IT department. Providing existing employees with an opportunity to rotate into the IT department can be a win-win situation: you get the talent that you need and the employee gets a brand new career track.

Final Thoughts

What are we really looking for when we go to fill an IT position? We’d really like to find candidates that have three things: technical skills, business knowledge, and interpersonal skills. The ponds that we’ve been fishing from for these types of workers has just about dried up. In order to meet the staffing challenges of the future, we’re going to have to start fishing in other ponds.

Rethinking about how we attract, develop, and then retain college recruits can pay huge dividends. Who wouldn’t want to hire someone that they already knew and who they had groomed for a specific role in the organization? Likewise inviting non-IT business professionals to join the IT department solves staffing problems and breaks down internal walls.

Learning to do a better job of fishing for new talent will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Where do your new hires come from – other IT companies? Have you used college students before? How did that work out? Could you list 5 “super users” who work in your company right now? How many of those would be interested in working in IT? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?

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Post tags: Boss, business knowledge, career, college students, employee, employment, hiring, information technology jobs, interpersonal skills, it, IT Management, IT manager, IT Professionals, it staffingexecutive recruiting, job, jobs in information technology, leader, leaders, management, manager, new hires, professional staffing, recruit, recruiting, recruitment, recruitment retention, staffing, staffing solutions, team building, technical skill

The great thing about talent portability in today’s IT market is that whenever you have a need to fill a position that requires a specialized set of skills or experiences, you can generally go shopping and find exactly what you need. The downside to this is the simple fact that your competition can do the same thing and they might be selecting from your employees!

Gone are the days in which firms developed their talent from within. Carefully nurturing those-who-would-be managers, giving them the training that they needed and rotating them among job assignments so that they would be ready when the trumpet sounded for them to take center stage in the Colosseum of business. Perhaps somewhat sadly, that model no longer exists.

Instead, today’s IT professionals are free to move on whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Applicant-tracking company Taleo has done a survey in which it was revealed that 80% of firms that participated in the survey have moved away from this “we know whats best for you” model to now starting to use internal job boards that are designed to make it easy for employees to apply for open positions and move around within the firm instead of leaving it. The poster child for this approach is Dow Chemical who was able to cut its turnover rate in half when it moved to using the internal job board approach to fill positions.

A small note of experience is probably due at this point. I’ve worked at a number of large firms in which it was mandatory that all openings were posted on the job board. However, the position was often already effectively filled by the posting manager long before the posting. Once the rest of the firm starts to understand that the job board is basically just window dressing, its value and its ability to retain staff goes down significantly.

What’s interesting about the shift to using a job board approach is that it moves the burden of managing an employee’s career from the company over to the employee. This has, of course, caused a great deal of chaos. The disconnect comes when an IT team member wants to move on to another job opportunity and his/her manager doesn’t want to let them go. Now we’ve got conflict! Welcome to the world of negotiations – somebody needs to be able to step in and find a way to preserve the investment that the company has made in this employee.

Different firms are finding different ways to deal with this issue. McKinsey tries to resolve this type of issue by (of course, it’s McKinsey after all) using rankings: how did the employee rank the job posing opportunity and how has the employee’s team ranked them on the current project that they are working on? If all of this analytical work does not resolve the issue, then the Senior Partner gets brought in to play the role of King Solomon. Before they imploded, Bears Sterns had created an office of mediation which took on the job of working out such differences between employees and their managers when an employee wanted to move on to another internal job.

In the end, the world of employee training and retention has been turned upside down. Where once firms were responsible for training and managing the careers of their employees, now that is no longer the case. Instead, the responsibility for managing one’s career is now the responsibility of each employee and training, which used to be a given, is now viewed in terms of its short term payback to the company. The old system of talent management had been set up along the lines of an engineering system: given a set of inputs, a predictable set of outputs would be produced. Today’s talent management is much more fluid. It is driven more by external market conditions and viewed through operations tools that are better able to adapt to increasing levels of uncertainty. It is possible to manage your pool of talent, you just need to update the tools that you are using to do it with.

Tags: employee, recruiting, retention, IT jobs, IT manager

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1. The Answer Is 9, But Do You Know What The Question Is? What is it going to take for you to get...

Hopefully we can agree that the way that IT talent is being managed in most companies is just flat out broken. It’s easy to point fingers and say that a process doesn’t work, it’s much harder to suggest a solution to the problem. Let’s spend some time doing just that – the hard stuff.

Fix Suggestion #1: Make and Buy Talent In Order To Manage Risk

Back in the good ‘ol days of the 1950′s and 1960′s there really was only one source for new talent within a firm – you had to grow it yourself. This growing process took a great deal of time so extensive management development systems were created to track how the next “crop” of talent was coming along. When an opening occurred in the organization, then either a new manager had to be harvested or else that part of the company and it’s associated opportunities had to be discarded.

As you can well imagine, the folks in charge of growing new talent would “plant” more talent early on in the process so that they would never be caught without someone to harvest should the need occur. Back in the day, firms could afford to have more talent than they needed. That doesn’t work today. If you are ready to be an IT leader and the opportunity does not show up quickly, then you are more than likely to walk out the door. Just to make things even worse, the Watson Wyatt consulting firm has done a study that shows that talent that gets trained and then is not presented with an opportunity to use that training will often leave the firm.

So what’s an IT manager to do? Look, it will always make sense to grow your next wave of leaders internally as long as it is cheaper and less disruptive than going outside to get it. However, there is no way that we can grow all of the talent that we’ll possibly need internally. Since hiring from the outside is a much quicker solution as well as allowing you to be more responsive to dynamic business conditions, you really need to be able to use both solutions.

How to go about doing this? The first step is the simplest, stop trying to forecast your IT talent demand with any level of accuracy. Just admit it – you really have no clear idea how many people you are going to need 1, 2, 3 or more years out. This wasted forecasting can be replaced with a different approach: simulations. Simulations won’t provide an 100% accurate forecast; however, it can get closer. What’s even better is that if a simulation shows that the company’s current plan will result in an enormous need for new talent, then the plan can be changed.

Here in the 21st Century the ease with which employees can leave a company means that developing too much internal talent is a much greater risk (and expense) than developing too little. Since you can go outside and hire the talent that you need when your needs exceed your home grown crop, there are four trade-offs that you have to evaluate when filling a position:

• How long will you need this person? The longer that the person will be needed, the more likely you should be to develop internal talent to fill the position.

• How sure are you that you really know how long you will need the talent? If you are unsure of upper management’s commitment to the company’s current direction, then you should be less willing to develop internal talent to fill the position.
• Are Other IT Managers Available To Step In If Needed?: How specialized is the position – are special skills needed to perform the tasks associated with it? Could other IT managers easily step in to fill the position if required or would special training be required?

Now that we’ve come up with a strategy for HOW to fill positions using both internal and external talent sources, the next issue to discuss will be to come up with a way to adapt to the uncertainty that every company has in trying to figure out how much staffing is going to be needed in the future…

Tags: talent recruiting, retention strategies, jobs in information technology

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Everyone who has lead a team, managed a department, or run a company knows that in addition to all of the other “keeping the doors open” jobs that they have, the task that can sneak up on them at any time is staffing. This coin has two sides: you don’t want to have too many warm bodies on your team if you don’t have the paying work to support them. At the same time, you don’t want to have to few or you’ll not be able to secure new work and that will eventually lead to your firm’s demise.

Two weeks ago I found myself in the wrong position on this issue. The project that a team that I was responsible for had run into some delays. This meant that the schedule had been stretched out and yet the funding for the staffing had not been changed. What this meant is that I had to start to shed project members. This ended up requiring me to to make several trips down to the cafeteria with team members to let then know that their time on the project was up. Needless to say this was not fun for me and it was clearly not fun for them. As I did this, I was wondering what’s a manager to do to avoid this type of poor talent management?

After the bloodletting was done, I started to do some research in order to find a better way to manage talent. A smart guy by the name of Peter Cappelli over at the University of Penn’s Wharton School has spent some time looking at this situation and he reports that things are pretty grim.

What is talent management? In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to anticipate the level of need for staff and then creating a plan for how you are going to achieve it. Dr. Cappelli says that he’s found that most firms fall into one of two groups for managing their talent: either they do nothing and run around when they have to fill a position or they have a staffing forecasting system that’s left over from the 1950′s which is now inaccurate because the world is moving so much faster.

Anybody remember internal development programs? When I worked at Boeing certain workers were identified as “Hi-Pots” (High Potentials) and they were placed on a career path that rotated them through multiple departments. This approach has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. The few shining exceptions are at GE and PepsiCo that have their famous management academies that mangers attend as part of their job. While these are great programs, who cares since only a few managers in the world have access to them.

In the 1990′s hiring folks from outside became all the rage. It was possible because there were so many people who had been shed from other companies that the pool of available talent was quite large. Bad news – that pool’s all but dried up now. Additionally, as the pool got smaller, firms who had spent money training their employees started to see them leave and go to work for their competitors. This, of course, made them even less interested in investing in training their staff.

Ok, so where do we stand right now? Most companies / departments / managers don’t have any sort of talent management plan in place right now. However, the upper management is starting to realize that this is one of their key challenges. The ultimate question is how can your firm’s talent be managed in such a way that it will allow the firm to ultimately make more money (and spend less)?

I’ve got some thoughts on things that you can do, but first do you agree that things are as dire as I’ve laid them out to be? Does your firm have a talent management program? Are YOU being managed as part of a talent management program? Post a comment & let me know.

Tags: employee, recruiting, IT staff retention, retention, it+careers

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