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The Hiring Manager Interviews: Kohl's CIO Jeff Marshall Hires Candidates Who Embrace Change

Marshall says successful hires provide their teams with the tools that will make them successful, protect them from bureaucracy, and reward their contributions.

By Jane Howze

October 17, 2007 — CIO —

Kohl's Corp. is one of the nation's fastest growing retailers. Between 2004 and 2006, the Menomonee Falls, Wisc.-based company opened 275 new stores across the U.S., bringing its total number of stores to 817. Its revenues grew by almost 25 percent during the same time period, from $11.7 billion to $15.5 billion.

This growth requires an IT function that is nimble, entrepreneurial and well mobilized. To that end, Jeffrey Marshall, Kohl's senior vice president and chief information officer, endeavors to build balanced teams that include a mix of leadership, analytical and relationship building skills. A balanced team, says Marshall, makes for a stronger team.

Over the course of his 20 year career in IT management, Marshall has learned to hire people whose skills complement his own. He's also learned to hire strategically, for the long term, as opposed to hiring for a specific position. Those and other hiring strategies he discusses in the following Q&A have proven successful at Kohl's: Marshall has hired over 700 IT personnel while limiting turnover to less than 5 percent in the two-plus years he's been with Kohl's as its CIO. Here he offers his secrets for hiring the right people for the long term.

How do you go about hiring IT professionals at Kohl's?

We have had to become more creative in how we go to market with our hiring requirements because we are in a smaller market, with headquarters near Milwaukee, Wisc. We started with ads, newspaper articles, radio spots, etc. Then we decided to do job fairs. We're currently holding our fourth job fair, and they're getting increasingly effective because we are targeting specific kinds of people with specific skill sets, such as infrastructure or Sella network management, rather than targeting people for specific job titles. We will market the fact that if a prospective candidate is interested in Sella, they need to talk to us because we're using it. If you're interested in databases, applications, middleware or enterprise service systems, that's what we're building. We'll have another job fair that focuses on application development and another one that focuses on Project Swing or Apache. We find that we get a much higher caliber individual through the job fair than by advertising for specific positions. Our last job fair attracted several hundred people, and we now have a 10 to 20 percent hiring rate.

Can you describe the interviewing process for an IT candidate at Kohl's?

Once our in-house recruiters get candidates on the phone and establish a certain level of interest in the candidate, we conduct a video conference. During that video conference, I take the candidate through the interview process and make sure they understand all that is involved [with the job], including the possibility of relocating. If they're not certain that this [opportunity] is right for them, it's going to be a traumatic experience and cost us a lot if the position doesn't work out. We make a tremendous investment in the people we hire and we make a tremendous investment in the hiring process so that we hire the best people for our organization.

More on Marshall's hiring process >>

 

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