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ABC: An Introduction to IT Recruiting

Anxious about your staffing responsibilities? Questions answered here.

By Stephanie Overby

CIO —

• What are the most sought-after skills in IT today?
• If business skills are so important, can I poach job candidates from the business?
• How can I figure out what compensation is fair?
• Besides money, what will attract the best and brightest?
• Should I enlist the help of a third-party recruiter?
• What about college recruiting?
• Should I invest in an internship program?
• Should I try to promote from within or look outside the company?
• Is it better to focus on retention rather than recruiting?
• Should I do anything special to retain baby boomers?
• Can I skip these recruiting headaches by outsourcing more of my shop's work?
• Where can I find more information about recruiting and other HR issues?

What are the most sought-after skills in IT today?

In order to respond to the increasingly complex demands of today's businesses, the information technology department, once almost entirely populated by skilled technologists, has morphed into a more flexible corps of business-savvy IT professionals. In filling more customer-facing roles, technical prowess (while far from obsolete) takes a back seat in many cases to skills like project management, business-process change or vendor management expertise. (For more on this trend and three roles that have emerged as critical—the project manager, the relationship manager and the business analyst—see "The New IT Department: The Top Three Positions You Need.")

According to Gartner, six out of 10 IT employees will assume business-facing roles by 2010. The shift in IT needs has meant increased demand for certain IT hires and a decrease for others. (For information on more hot jobs like IT finance and internal consultant, see "More Hot Hires.") Then there are positions that require both technological sophistication and business savvy, like the increasingly popular enterprise architect. (Check out "Wanted: Enterprise Architects.")

The shift is represented in recent research from Foote Partners, which has been tracking a decline in pay for IT certifications along with a steady rise in pay for non-certified IT skills. According to CEO David Foote, that's because employers are desperate for workers who can get things done. "Technical skills are certainly part of the mix," says Foote, but "being a desirable 'impact' worker means getting along with people, keeping an eye on IT's role in business execution and quickly delivering what customers want, which is a moving target."

If this all sounds a bit fuzzy to you, you're not crazy. During a time of shifting roles and responsibilities (like now), everything is in flux—from titles to skill sets to pay. As a result, successful IT recruiting has become as much art as science.

Unfortunately, there's still a discrepancy between what CIOs say they want in their candidates and the skill sets of those they actually hire. Business capabilities and project management expertise represented eight of the top 10 skills identified as critical to keep in-house, according to a 2006 survey by the Society for Information Management (SIM). However, the majority of respondents primarily sought technical skills in entry-level recruits. IT leaders who have spent years looking for technical proficiency may have trouble adjusting their hiring practices to net candidates with business and the so-called "soft" skills.

If your hiring managers are still looking solely at IT certifications or programming language capabilities, it may be time to rethink those practices. (For some new hiring tricks from veteran CIOs, scroll down to the "Rethink Hiring Practices" section of "How to Hook the Talent You Need.")

If business skills are so important, can I poach job candidates from the business?

More and more, new IT hires are as likely to be brought over from the business side as they are to have been groomed in IT. Some CIOs and IT managers do find it easier to teach technology skills to business professionals than vice versa.

One potential problem is that, depending upon the reputation of IT in a given organization, business people may not be all that interested in jumping to the IT side. Diane Wallace, CIO of the state of Connecticut, pitches the perks of IT to the larger business community. "I know IT can be a very attractive place for them if I market it correctly," says Wallace. "I tell them that the great thing about IT is that it's one of the few places in any organization—from state government to the private sector—that touches every important project going on in the business." Wallace pitches business recruits on the chance to get involved with large, strategic projects across all the state's divisions instead of working on one initiative in a non-IT department. Her marketing mantra? "You don’t need to know how to code."

While the business may have poached employees from IT for years, they may not be so eager to be on the giving end of that relationship. So it's important for CIOs to make it clear this is a give-and-take that benefits IT and the business equally. In an ideal situation, employees would rotate back and forth, giving them broad exposure to both the business and IT.

CIO's recent staffing survey found only 11 percent of respondents offer job rotation programs. That's a missed opportunity. (See "Launch Business-IT Rotation Programs.")

 

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