Winning the Talent War

By Renee Oricchio

For both the IT hiring manager and the IT job candidate, it is the best of times and the worst of times. As for who has the advantage, it all depends on the skill sets in question.

"At the senior level, it's definitely not a candidate's market," says David Reff, a recruiting consultant who specializes in IT executives.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are stories like the one Samuel Bright, a Forrester Research analyst, was recently told by a West Coast CIO, who took the unusual step of locking in his hard-to-find Oracle database administrators with a two-year contract at $160,000 a year -- a job that typically pays closer to $100,000 a year.

In the post-tech bubble environment where outsourcing and layoffs have become the norm, this can come as a surprise to IT managers.

"With reduced head count, organizations are looking for very focused skill sets," explains Bright. "So, the competition for just the right person can be very competitive."

Bright sees some of the high and low-demand areas for IT talent as follows:

High demand: Project managers, relationship managers, business analysts, architects, security specialists

Low demand: Network administrators, packaged application support, legacy support, programming, routine network management

Money isn't everything
Of course, recruitment is only half the battle. Retention is the other half. For the CIO having trouble with either, there's likely a more fundamental problem than uncompetitive salaries.

"Every company says it values its people," says Reff. "But the truth is if you're really struggling to attract and retain talent, then obviously you're not living up to your word and it's time to look in the mirror."

Among the more common problems CIOs experience with IT staff retention include:

• An unhappy work environment  When in doubt about how the staff feels about the job, there is no harm in asking. "The vast majority of employees all want the same things: autonomy, dignity, and respect, to feel appreciated, to feel like their work has meaning and its part of something important," Reff says. "And don't forget fun."
• Low turnover  "Employers look at low turnover and say, 'Wow, everyone likes us!' But this can actually be your worst case scenario," says Bright. It could be a sign of stagnation. If employees haven't been developed and groomed for new challenges, over time their higher salaries are based on seniority rather than ability. They don't move on to other jobs with other organizations because they can't match, much less improve, their salaries elsewhere. Meanwhile, the boss ends up with very few job openings, losing that much needed opportunity to recruit new blood.
• Too many managers  What happens to the occasional IT superstar on staff? Too often bosses compensate them with a higher salary and then feel compelled to complement it with a managerial title to justify the raise. Do that enough times and a CIO can end up with a department full of frustrated managers with no one to manage.

Talent Strategy 101
IT departments tend to focus on recruitment or retention, but rarely both, says Bright. He recommends connecting the two into one talent strategy. Here are a few areas IT managers can emphasize:

• Opportunity  Organizations are often too focused on their immediate need for a person. "They need to be equally grounded in what opportunity the job represents," Reff says. This is where an employer can really stand out among the competition when the job is less about a list of required skills and responsibilities and more about being an engaged player with an exciting future on the team.
• Career path  Career development is key. Have a plan to grow talent into other areas of the department, even elsewhere in the company, to avoid those traps of meaningless seniority and management titles.
• Job rotation The best way to explore future career paths is to test the waters first with cross-training. It also sends a positive signal to staff that the company is serious about investing in them for the long haul.

The Times Are Changing
Recruiting across the board is expected to get much tougher over the next several years. Reff notes a popular statistic that -- with the baby boom generation approaching retirement -- for every two people leaving IT over the next 10 years, there will be one college graduate to take their place.

Unfortunately, that talent pool may be drying up, too. 

"College graduates are less enthused about going into IT," says Reff. "They're turned off by fear of outsourcing and all the layoffs. Frankly, IT doesn't have the cachet it once had."

With the forecast for fresh talent looking so bleak, CIOs have every reason to get their houses in order now, and figure out how to win the talent war.

Renee Oricchio is a freelance writer in Norwalk, Conn. For the past 20 years, she has written and produced news segments about technology and business for CNN, MSNBC, Ziff-Davis, CNet and a variety of Silicon Valley-based local news outlets.