Onerous Hiring Processes Prevent Companies from Competing in White-Hot Labor Market

CIO —

By Meridith Levinson

Fierce competition for information technology workers is forcing some employers to reassess their hiring processes, according to executives with IT staffing firm Spherion.

“Organizations are evaluating how they’re acquiring talent to ensure they’re in a position to claim the best and brightest,” says Sean Ebner, a regional vice president for Spherion who’s based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Many entities had adapted very stringent hiring processes [during the economic downturn] which are starting to get in the way of their ability to attract and retain the best talent.”  

Ebner points to a client whose strict criteria for selecting candidates weeded out perfectly good ones. The client, a bank (Ebner declined to offer the name), wouldn’t hire anyone who held more than four jobs in seven years, regardless of their skills and experience.  

Another financial services firm with which Spherion works makes all prospective employees, regardless of the position for which they’re applying, take a battery of tests to assess their personalities as well as their English language, writing and cognitive reasoning skills. Ebner says the financial services company is realizing that it needs to figure out the kinds of jobs for which certain tests would be necessary instead of making every candidate take every test, which slows down its hiring process.  

Executive Response

Not all IT leaders are sold on the idea of streamlining their hiring processes, however.  

“I have no interest in hiring someone if they’re not what I want, regardless of how many [job] offers they have,” says Tom Gosnell, CIO of Cuna Mutual in Madison, Wis. 

Because recruiting is one of his most important activities as CIO, Gosnell says he can’t let the challenges associated with a tight labor market force him into knee-jerk hiring decisions. He says he’s gone so far as to tell his managers that even though the 550-person IT department needs Microsoft .net skills, he doesn’t want to hire someone who has .net expertise but who lacks other skills, because such an individual won’t have opportunities for career growth. “I want people who understand the business and have an interest in growing the business and have a deep technology competency,” he says. 

Although Gosnell is not inclined to forgo parts of his hiring process for the sake of beating a competitor to the punch on a job offer, he admits that his company does need to continue to improve its overall processes for recruiting. Specifically, he’d like to see his company strengthen its relationships with recruiting firms and enhance the online recruiting capabilities on its website.  

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