CIO — After a year of IT budget cuts, hiring freezes and layoffs, the IT staffing crunch of the late ’90s has likely retreated to a dusty corner of your long-term memory. If so, get ready for some major dŽjˆ vu.
Opinions vary about precisely when the recovery will kick in, but when it does, the experts are unanimous: CIOs who haven’t used the lean times to map out smart staffing strategies will be toast.
"Demand for IT is going to happen pretty aggressively and quickly?much faster than an IS organization can be prepared for unless it’s already preparing for a recovery," says Diane Tunick Morello, vice president and research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. Her colleague Linda Pittenger, president and CEO of People3 in Bridgewater, N.J., Gartner’s HR consulting arm, is even more blunt: "A lot of CIOs say, ’Well, we don’t have to worry about this recruitment problem anymore.’ Those CIOs don’t have a clue."
A recent CIO survey suggests that plenty of IT executives are already clued in?and are about to snap up the best available IT talent out there. Our April survey of 251 IT executives found that 19 percent are already hiring IT staff to handle increased IT activity, and 27 percent plan to hire in the third and fourth quarters of this year. Another 34 percent plan to add new staff in 2003. (See "Staffing for the Rebound: How CIOs Plan to Cope," Page 52.)
It might be hard to believe right now that the IT labor market will tighten in the foreseeable future. As Jim Lester, senior vice president and CIO of Columbus, Ga.-based Aflac, points out, we’re unlikely to see anything like the rare confluence of Y2K and the dotcom craze that sparked the IT staffing crunch of the late ’90s anytime soon. But even Lester says he’s "always concerned" about where he’s going to get high-quality IT staff. Maria Schafer, program director responsible for human capital management research at Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group, warns that "demand will pick up; then there’ll be a scramble."
Here are seven ways to avoid getting caught short when the economy turns around.
1 Don’t scrimp on your staff.
In hard times, it’s easy to forget the value of human capital. Faced with pressure to cut budgets, many CIOs scaled back on their efforts to attract, nurture and retain employees last year, according to Ellen Kitzis, group vice president of executive programs at Gartner. In Gartner’s annual poll of CIO priorities, attracting and retaining high-quality employees slipped from the number-two key management issue in 2001 to number nine in 2002. The message CIOs are getting from their company is that people aren’t as big a priority as getting cost out of the budget, Kitzis says.
