Certainly, no one denies that economic growth is a good thing. In the Information Technology industry, however, continued economic growth has created a tight employment marketplace and additional pressure for many firms in staffing for essential roles. Those who are responsible for staffing for IT positions know that this marketplace likely will continue to be tight for at least several more years. This has had significant impact on recruiting, selecting, and retaining the best talent. Among the issues being faced:
- Top talent vanishes in the midst of the hiring decision-making process, accepting job offers elsewhere;
- Hires, made quickly, often result in less-than-satisfying results for both employee and organization;
- Top talent departs within a few months of hire;
- Managers struggle to identify critical aspects of the best talent; and
- Candidates are exposed to rounds of interviews by employers that confuse assessing with selling, leaving candidates less than impressed with the organization.
What does this mean for organizations, specifically those who lead their firms’ efforts to recruit, select and develop the best IT talent? Two things come to mind:
Quality is a must in each step a firm takes to staff an IT job. It takes a quality process to attract, select, and develop the best talent needed to compete in a global marketplace. Your company may not see itself as a global organization, but the reality is that the best IT talent is sought globally. Fortune magazine, in a recent cover story on the world’s most admired companies, reported: “Key to success: people, people, people.”
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, states, “If you get the best people in the industry to fit into your culture and you motivate them properly, then you are going to be an industry leader.” The issue is not whether or not you can afford quality; the issue is that you can not afford to do without it.
One Atlanta firm pegs the cost of a customer service representative hire gone bad within one year at about $275,000. Another firm estimates the cost of an executive hire decision that doesn’t work out in the first year to be upwards of $1 million. These costs include those directly associated with finding a new employee (time investment, advertising, recruitment agency fees, etc.) as well as the negative effect on productivity, managers’ time, training, and the administrative fees associated with ending one person’s employment and beginning another.
Speed is of increasing importance at each step of the process. Flounder here and you lose the best candidate. Even worse, you lose your reputation in the marketplace to attract a stream of top talent. The Wall Street Journal reports that Price Waterhouse commits to calling back campus interviewees within hours of an interview to set up the next one. This internal commitment to speed sends a powerful message to the marketplace about the firm’s intentions. It suggests that “IT job candidates are important to us, so we have built a selection process that incorporates speed.”
Are quality and speed in the staffing process at odds? Absolutely not. In fact, the best processes maximize both.
A global financial services firm, for example, recently demonstrated its commitment to quality and speed when it reorganized its selection process for a leadership program. The company implemented a weekend interviewing event that brought together top talent and line executives.
During that weekend:
- line managers were trained on interviewing for specific jobs;
- each candidate went through a disciplined sequence of interviews;
- a structured candidate-evaluation process was established; and
- job offers were made within 48 hours of the interviewing process.
The results of that systematic approach: Job offer acceptances climbed to an all-time high, increasing 20%, while the number of offers extended declined by an average of 15%. Because of the increased acceptances by top talent, the company was able to cancel another such interviewing session, saving more than $200,000 in expenses. Equally important was this feedback: Candidates volunteered that the quality and speed of the selection process played a key role in their decision to accept the job offers. Creating a staffing process branded for speed and quality became this company’s approach for attracting and securing top talent.
So how do you respond? By taking the following “FASSST” approach, you can develop a hiring process for getting the best IT talent:
Figure out your staffing parameters
Begin with a look at the company’s business direction and the role of IT in achieving that direction. For example, is IT core to the direction or rather a support function? What is the value of the IT job or jobs in question? Knowing the cost of a poor hire will be crucial to creating focus and securing the necessary commitment to revitalizing the staffing process. What is the current talent composition of the IT department or team? To what extent is diversity being addressed? What about the adequacy of the talent pipeline for leadership roles? Consider the critical outcomes for the team in the context of organizational issues, such as change. Knowing the answers to these questions will help set the stage for filling a staffing need.
Agree on ...
1. Contract vs. employee status. Determining up front whether a candidate is a contract consultant or a permanent hire will determine how you go about staffing. If you simply want to fill a short-term technical need, clearly technical skills play a significant role in identifying the right candidate. It becomes less important to focus on qualitative traits. Changing your focus during the interview process may require a second look at competencies and additional interviews. A change may also send confusing messages to your sources and candidates and, thus, damage your credibility.
2. Competencies. Of course, you already agree on this, but how well? It is not uncommon for managers to agree to competencies at the beginning of the staffing process only to struggle with indecision when discussing candidates. This occurs when competencies have not been clearly defined and agreed upon as the basis for evaluating talent. Know what traits and characteristics have distinguished exemplary performance in the job in the past. If you study the top IT talent in your company today, you might be interested to find that most of the competencies that distinguish them as such are not their technical experiences and skills, but rather those characteristics that are qualitative in nature, including personal and organizational orientation, interpersonal relations, accomplishment focus, analytical thinking, initiative, and innovation. To ignore this qualitative domain is to take the easy way out in selecting candidates and will result in less satisfactory hires.
3. Selection process. Determine an interview sequence. Who will interview and when? Get commitments from all involved about their availability to complete the process quickly. A technical sales job unfilled for several months because of delays in arranging interview schedules can easily mean several hundred thousand dollars of lost revenue. Who will “sell” candidates and precisely what will be “sold?” Everyone should be in agreement in terms of sharing specifics related to expectations, opportunities for advancement, learning new tools, project roles, etc. Lastly, decide how the decision-making process will be made, including who has responsibility for facilitating it.
Source effectively
Whether you are looking for a regular employee or a contractor will determine the need for different strategies. Where have you reached the best talent in the past? If you don’t know, take a look at the best performers in the job and find out how they came to you. Find out why source “A” is better than source “B.” Focus on the 20% of the sources that bring you 80% of the best talent. How can you increase your brand recognition with this group?
Cisco Systems conducted extensive focus groups with its IT talent to understand their target talent pool. Then, Cisco aimed efforts at reaching this group through the leisure activities they pursue. For example, it advertised at movie theaters and designed a Web site dynamically appealing to them. What new sources can your firm pursue? One key to optimizing your sources: Involve technical managers in working directly with each source.
Select, don’t settle
Review the interviewing method used by your organization. Check to see that it provides you with the appropriate hard data to uncover personal traits that you and your associates identify as critical to exemplary performance. Equip each interviewer with the tools to consistently gather this data and to be able to assess it against a standard. Provide skill-development opportunities for all interviewers to learn to effectively, and consistently use these tools in their selection process. Assign specific competencies to each interviewer to take ownership of their discussion with the candidate. When you identify top talent who measure up to your standards, don’t waste time conducting more interviews just to see more candidates. Establish a structured decision-making process. Using their “assigned” competencies, each interviewer should rank the candidates interviewed on those respective characteristics. A final, comprehensive interview conducted by one interviewer serves to cross-validate the data. Rank the candidates overall. Then, if ratings result in ties or close rankings, discuss the specifics of the competencies in question. Do this immediately after each interview because delays will often mean losing candidates from the process. If your process calls for reference checking, do that quickly, also.
Sell when it counts
The interview process should include both selling and assessing; understand that these are different responsibilities . Often, IT interviewers spend their interviewing time selling the candidate rather than assessing him or her. Later, they end up making a decision with their “gut” since they never conducted an interview. Identify those who can sell the job, the project, the company, and the opportunities. Let them “sell” rather than interview. Calibrate the degree of selling to the interest in the candidate. Set up post-interview selling to keep in touch with the candidate. Listen to areas of candidate interest and respond accordingly.
Take action to launch a successful start
The individual that you just hired may have a half-million-dollar impact on the business this year. Invest in launching his or her success. Be sure to take care of things that easily turn off new employees, such as the lack of a phone or computer software and tools, or problems with voice- or e-mail or other resources needed to get started at a new job. People may leave quickly if they are frustrated with these problems. Beyond this, consider how you can bring immediate attention to company values while introducing the new employee to people and other resources essential to doing quality work. For an example of a successful program, see the accompanying sidebar story on at the bottom of this article. What strengths and development needs did you learn from the interview process? Use this to leverage strengths and develop shortcomings from day one. If the individual was hired for a team-leadership role, arrange for a structured process to introduce the new hire to team issues and expectations. Then, follow-up, follow-up, and follow-up.
The most admired companies use the best talent to help create a sustainable competitive advantage. Securing the best IT talent is the key to helping your firm compete today and in the future. Hire top talent FASSST.
SIDEBAR: Interim Puts Sharp Focus on New Employees
Interim Services has launched a “Journey to Greatness” program at its Corporate Service Center to quickly introduce new employees to the company and its culture. New employees are assigned a trained mentor who welcomes them to the company even before their first day of work and serves as a point of contact for basic training and questions. Mentors help new employees understand not only Interim’s mission and commitment to “Greatness,” but how to bring it into their own work. New employees meet key executives during the first few days to learn about functions and how each is of importance to the role that they will play. Interim’s commitment to successfully launching new employees is quickly driven home: Stop by Chairman, President and CEO Ray Marcy’s office or that of any member of the executive team, and they will break away from a planned meeting or call to converse with the new employee. Soon after beginning work, the new employee participates in a regularly scheduled “Astonishment” celebration. These gatherings bring together mentors, their new associates and executives to present success stories to show how new employees embrace Interim’s value system.
About the Author
Don Lang is Director, Talent Assessment and Development, with Interim Career Consulting, a career and human resources consulting firm. In this role, Lang serves firms who recognize that top talent sustains business success. In his work with organizations, Lang has coached hundreds of human resource professionals, line managers, and executives from around the world in developing talent selection skills. His strategic talent planning and selection consulting work for firms includes facilitating staffing process design or enhancement focused on quality and speed. Lang also serves organizations by conducting third party assessments for staffing key positions, profiling talent in newly acquired businesses, and as a basis for executive development.
Lang’s prior roles include human resources management assignments in Fortune 500 information management and financial services firms at the corporate and field level. His assignments included staffing and employee relations, as well as generalist roles with additional responsibility for management skills development. Lang moved on to operations management in health care services and more recently he held the position of Director, Client Services at a systems solutions firm. Lang holds an MBA from Georgia State University and a Bachelors degree in Economics from Lafayette College. Lang can be reached for comment at 770-604-6005 or e-mail at donlang@Interim.com. |