USPS VP of IT on Making Sound Hiring Decisions Under Pressure
Retiring Baby Boomers, a competitive labor market in Washington, D.C., and the need to support a $74 billion business. In the latest Hiring Manager interview, the USPS's VP of IT Operations George Wright explains how he chooses the right candidates under cost and competitive pressures.
Fri, December 05, 2008
CIO — Anyone who assumes working for the United States Postal Service's (USPS) IT department would be a cushy job should read what George Wright has to say about the mail business. The vice president of information technology operations for the USPS describes an enormous enterprise—bigger than even Wal-Mart in some respects—with literally hundreds of thousands of moving parts:
We have 40,000 retail outlets, and we service 9 million to 11 million customers per day. Think about the information systems it takes to manage a company with 40,000 retail outlets and 11 million customers a day. We have 300,000 carriers on the streets, and we deliver to every household in America every day of the week. We are the largest user of airline capacity. We have 600 plants that process mail. We operate in almost every major line of business that exists in the Fortune 500. ... We run the world's third largest intranet. Our entire internal organization consists of between 650,000 to 700,00 people. Many organizations that are significantly smaller than us have more [IT] resources than we have. ... We currently have approximately 1,300 people in the IT organization.
Finding candidates for IT jobs who have the skills to support such a large-scale enterprise is one of Wright's biggest challenges. Wright says the need to recruit IT professionals is intensifying as Baby Boomers in the USPS's IT department start retiring and because the need for IT talent in Washington, D.C. is so high.
In such a competitive environment for IT hiring, Wright says it's difficult to make safe hiring decisions that aren't motivated by the pressure to fill a critical vacancy. He's been burned by that pressure before, and he's learned his lesson. That may be why he's become so set in his hiring decisions.
When a situation arises in which Wright disagrees with members of his team about a candidate, he sticks with his gut: He won't hire someone he doesn't think is right, even if the rest of his team does. But he always carefully considers their views and takes the time to explain his decisions to them.
Here, Wright talks about his hiring practices, how he acclimates them to the scale of the organization, and the many mistakes candidates make in interviews that irk him.
John Mann: Many people believe that government jobs are stable and that it is difficult to be fired. Is job stability, in general, better within your IT group than the private sector?
George Wright: Postal services are going through very challenging times. The chief executive officer [of the USPS] has mentioned that we need to reduce the number of workers we have. So while most people might think that government is a stable environment, we are required to be competitive and generate revenue. Our stability is contingent upon how well we perform and how well we grow. Like any company, if the revenue numbers go down, we have to adjust by reducing costs, and approximately 70 percent of our expenses are people. If you perform well, you have job security.
