Tag: IT Recruiting

Both Sides of the Staffing Coin: Building a High Performance Team -and- Building a Great IT Career

    Jim D

I find it remarkable that despite the slow recovery the IT job market remains very tight. This poses significant hurdles for IT managers looking to add talent. In the post below, I cover how to build a great team and team into good seams of talent.  I think this will be a significant issue for IT managers for the next three to four years – finding and growing talent to enable them to build high performance teams.

And for IT staffers, I have mapped out seasoned advice on how to build your capabilities and experience to enable you to have a great career in IT. Improving IT staff skills and capabilities is of keen interest not to just the staff, but also to IT management so that their team is much more productive and capable. And on a final note, I would suggest that anyone who is in the IT field should consider reaching out to high schoolers and college students and encourage them to consider a career in IT. Currently, in the US, there are fewer IT graduates each year than IT jobs that open. And this gap is expected to widen in the coming years. So IT will continue to be a good field for employees, and IT leaders will need to encourage others to join in so we can meet the expected staffing needs.

Please do check out both sides of the coin, and I look forward to your perspectives. Note that I did publish variants on these posts in InformationWeek over the past few months.

Best, Jim Ditmore

Building a High Performance Team Despite 4% IT Unemployment

Despite a national unemployment rate of more than 8%,  the overall IT unemployment rate is at a much lower 4% or less. Further, the unemployment rates for IT specialties such as networking, IT security or data base are even lower — at 1% or less. This makes finding capable IT staff difficult and is compounded because IT professionals are less likely to take new opportunities (turnover rates are much less than average over the past 10 years).  Unfortunately these tough IT staffing conditions are likely to continue and perhaps be exacerbated if the recovery actually picks up pace. With such a tight IT job market, how do you build or sustain your high performance IT team?

I recommend several tactics to incorporate into your current staffing approach that should allow you to improve your current team and acquire the additional talent needed for your business to compete. Let’s focus first on acquiring talent. In a tight market you must always be present to enable you to acquire the talent when they first consider looking for a position. You must move to a ‘persistent’ recruiting mode. If your group is still only opening positions after someone leaves or after a clear funding approval is granted, you are late to the game. Given the extended recruiting times, you will likely not acquire the staff in time to meet your needs. Nor will you consistently be on the market when candidates are seeking employment. Look instead to do ‘pipeline recruiting’. That is, for those common positions that you know you will need over the next 12 months, set up an enduring position, and have your HR team persistently recruit for these ‘pipeline positions’. Good examples would be Java or mobile developers, project managers, network engineers, etc. Constantly recruit, interview and when you find an ‘A’ caliber candidate, hire them — whether you have the exact position open or not. You can be certain that you will need the talent, so hire them and put them on the next appropriate project to be worked on from your demand list. Not only will you now have talent sourced and available when you need it because you are always out in the market, you will develop a reputation as a place where talent is sought and you will have an edge when those ‘A’ players who seldom look for work in the market, decide to seek a new opportunity.

Another key tactic is to extend the pipeline recruiting to interns and graduates. Too many firms only look for experienced candidates and neglect this source. In many companies, graduates can be a key long term source of their best senior engineers.  Moreover, they can often contribute much more than most managers give them credit, especially if you have good onboarding programs and robust training and education offerings for your staff. I have seen uplifting results for legacy teams when they have brought on bright, enthusiastic talent and combined it with their experienced engineers — everyone’s performance often lifts. They will bring energy to your shop and we will have the added dividend of increasing the pool of available,  experienced talent. And while it will take 7 to 15 years for them to become the senior engineers and leaders of tomorrow, they will be at your company, not at someone else’s (if you don’t start, you will never have them).

The investment in robust training and education for graduates should pay off also for your current staff and potential hires. Your current staff, by leveraging training, can improve their skills and productivity. And for potential hires, an attractive attribute of a new company is a strong training program and focus on staff development. These are wise investments as they will pay back in higher productivity and engagement, and greater retention and attraction of staff. You should couple the training program with clearly defined job positions and career paths. These should spell out for your team what the competencies and capabilities of both their current position as well as what is needed to move to the next step in their career. Their ability to progress with clarity will be a key advantage in your staff’s growth and retention as well as attracting new team members. And in a tight job market, this will let your company stand out in the crowd.

Another tactic to apply is to leverage additional locations to acquire talent. If you limit yourself to one or a few metropolitan areas, you are limiting the potential IT population you are drawing from. Often, you can use additional locations to tap entirely new sources of talent at potentially lower costs than your traditional locations. Given the lower mobility of today’s candidates, it may effective to open a location in the midwest, in rustbelt cities with good universities or cities such as Charlotte or Richmond. Such 2nd tier cities can harbor surprisingly strong IT populations that have lower costs and better retention than 1st tier locations like California or Boston or New York. The same is true of Europe and India. Your costs are likely to be 20 to 40% less than headline locations, with attrition rates perhaps 1/3 less.

And you can go farther afield as well. Nearshore and offshore locations from Ireland to Eastern Europe to India should be considered. Though again, it is worth avoiding the headline locations and going to places like Lithuania or Romania, or 2nd tier cities in India or Poland. You should look to tap the global IT workforce and gain advantage through diverse talent, ability to work longer through a ‘follow the sun’ approach, and optimized costs and capacity. Wherever you go though, you will need to enable an effective distributed workforce. This requires a minimum critical mass in each site, proper allocation of activities in a holistic manner, robust audio and video conferencing capabilities, and effective collaboration and configuration management tools. If done well, a global workforce can deliver more at lower costs and with better skills and time to market. For large companies, such a workforce is really a mandatory requirement to achieve competitive IT capabilities. And to some degree, you could say IT resources are like oil, you go wherever in the world you can to find and acquire them.

Don’t forget to review your recruiting approach as well. Maintain high standards and ensure you select the right candidates through using effective interviewing and evaluation techniques.  Apply a metrics-based improvement approach to your recruiting process. What is the candidate yield on each recruiting method? Where are your best candidates coming from? Invest more in recruiting approaches that yield good numbers of strong candidates. One set of observations from many years of analyzing recruiting results: your best source of strong candidates is usually referrals and weak returns typically come from search firms and broad sweep advertising. Building a good reputation in the marketplace to attract strong candidates takes time, persistence, and most important, an engaging and rewarding work environment.

With those investments, you will be able to recruit, build and sustain a high performance team even in the tightest of markets. While I know this is a bit like revealing your favorite fishing spot, what other techniques have you been able to apply successfully?

Best, Jim Ditmore

 

 

Evaluating and Selecting Senior Talent – Perhaps the Google Way?

    Jim D

There was an interesting article earlier this week on the interview approach that Google has used as part of their talent selection in the Wall Street Journal by William Poundstone. My preceding post reviewed the Google approach and what best practices there are for more junior IT talent. In this post, I cover the best techniques for evaluating and selecting senior IT talent.

As mentioned, according the the WSJ article, currently Google gets over a million applications per year, and from this only about 1 in 130 applicants are hired. Yet getting this flood of applicants and having ratios of candidates to hires close to 1 to 100 is not unusual. At the last two large companies I have held senior positions in, we received hundreds of thousands of applications per year, and the end ratio to the hire was close to 1 to 100. And, as an IT leader making sure your HR department can handle these ever-growing volumes effectively is an important service you should provide, especially if you are a retail company. Remember every potential applicant who has a poor experience on your web job site and process is a potential customer who is now turned off on your company. Again, the preceding post covers how to filter and handle this flood today, we will cover the senior end of the spectrum.

For recruiting senior staff, I think it is important to understand two key facts:

  • They already know the buzzwords and techspeak and political positioning and that you are unlikely to catch them out in an interview with traditional questions (e.g., ‘What was your best project experience and why?’ or ‘When have you failed and what did you learn?’ or ‘What weaknesses do you have?’)
  • Fully one third of all senior hires through traditional methods are duds and only one third are outstanding hires or A players

So how do you effectively sort through a knowledgeable field of seemingly qualified applicants and make the right hire and avoid the duds?

The Google approach, and apparently a growing approach elsewhere is to include brain teasers in the interview process such as:

‘You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?’

Hopefully, these brain teasers will enlighten the interviewer about the intellect and creativity of the candidate, and also provide how they might respond in a tough situation. While I think this can be better than the stock interview questions that the candidates are already prepared to answer, I think there are a number of better techniques to sort out the best candidates from those who are just adequate or worse, the duds. And again, I think you must start much earlier in the process than the interview.

You should have a dedicated process just for senior candidates staffed with your best recruiters. And these recruiters are good at three things:

  • Being good at cold calling and getting hold of A players who are busy and not looking for a job (we’ll talk later about the source of the names, but this is the entry step)
  • Checking references – really finding out how well and in what manner this person has delivered
  • Recognizing critical cues about the candidate based on the candidates behavior throughout the selection process

In your selection process for senior talent, the first step is the candidate sourcing, or where you get the names of potential top talent that would fill one of your senior positions. This is actually probably the most important step of the process, because if done well, you will have a ready source of mostly ‘A’ caliber talent and you will avoid most of the duds ever getting into your recruiting process. For reliable sources of good talent I would rely on the following:

  • your own personal ‘virtual’ bench – you should cultivate and maintain a virtual bench throughout your career. Those outstanding performers who worked for you or with you and would come and work for you again.
  • thoughtful referrals from your current ‘A’ players – use their virtual bench and their knowledge of other strong performers to reach the A players that you might otherwise not find.
  • industry referenced talent based on either:
    • strong results at top firms or progression working under a well-known strong leader – that’s where quality results, leadership, and excellent approaches are forged.
    • strong recommendations from previous colleagues now working with the candidate – get a real-life view from a reliable perspective.
    • balanced recommendations coming from an established vendor – while taking care to understand their potential bias of course, could point out talents from someone who has a the perspective to measure and benchmark.
  • top recruiters or search firms known for their quality (this must be used in a cautious manner though) – also can have great perspective and if they know you well, and are focused on your needs can get you the right talent. Don’t forget often talent is off the table because of agreements with other clients.

Once you have the right list of candidates then you move into the evaluation and selection process. I have successfully implemented top-grading approaches to interviewing but I would suggest I am an 80% adherent of this method. The top-grading approach can be lengthy and exhaustive but I think you can trim it substantially and achieve the same effect (though I am sure Brad Smart would disagree). And you can improve it by adding and emphasizing behavioral and team interviews. Given that many senior hires do not work out due to culture misalignment, leadership style, or poor teamwork; a behavioral interview focused on these aspects will reveal potential issues. I recommend doing a team type interview where at least one, if not both of the interviewers are skilled in behavioral interviewing and non-verbal cues. Ensure you explore their flexibility and adaptability for   different environments and cultures. Someone who has been highly successful in one environment for 10 or 15 years may be a fish out of water in your firm.

As for those key questions to help sort a great fit from an okay fit, I recommend that you will get a clearer response if you ask a ‘reflective’ question versus a direct question. For example, if you want to understand their personal attributes, rather than ask them a question like “Do you work hard’ or ‘Do you consider yourself innovative’, etc, instead ask them to reflect their own image with questions such as ‘When you are building a team, on what attributes do you select the team members?’  They will not typically have a stock response for a reflective question, and they will be less guarded in their response because they would not perceive that they are talking about themselves, merely their approach. But their answers can be illuminating, it will show what they value. Someone who builds a team based on loyalty and experience attributes is very different than someone who builds a team based on initiative, intelligence, and ability to work through problems. Reflective questions can provide these insights.

Another reflective approach is to simulate leadership approaches and decisions with broad scenarios. Suggest they have inherited a poor performing team. Ask them what they would do. Again, you will get very different answers — some might delegate the problem to a trusted expert, others will apply an improvement approach that has worked for them previously, or they may form a committee to investigate. These are all illuminating. You can also try ‘off-guard’ questions to test their resilience or knowledge. You can even be slightly confrontational to see how they react to such situations. Do they constructively defend their positions or do they just fold and seek full consensus.  I recommend building a developing your own scripts that enable further insights into your senior candidates.

As you narrow down the choices, ensure you check the reference before you have made up your mind. I have seen many poor senior hires where one or two well-placed phone calls would have steered the company clear of the choice. And, if you do make the wrong hire, don’t wait to fix it. The single biggest regret that most senior managers have is not moving fast enough to replace a poor performer. If they are not doing well in the honeymoon period, they will not get going when things get tough. Spare them and you and make a quick and respectful break. Plus, you will likely still have the #2 or #3 candidate available.

The last recommendation I have for senior hires is: don’t forget about the ones on your current team with potential. For senior roles, I think large organizations often ‘pigeon-hole’ current talent and never see the potential they truly have. Someone who is successful in their current role, is smart, capable, coachable, works hard, and gets outstanding results is someone who likely can step up to the next level with assistance. Don’t overlook them.

If you deploy these techniques with senior hires, you should be able to reduce the ‘duds’ rate to 10% and increase the ‘A’ player rate to 60 or 70%. This is a huge improvement that will make a major difference in your organization. So, what techniques or ‘key questions’ have you used to make the right senior hires? Let me know, I am very interested in your approach as this is a tough area to be consistently successful in.

And if you were wondering about the brainteasers, WSJ and Mr. Poundstone also provided the answers to those Google interview questions. I did not provide the ‘right’ answers to the ‘reflective’ questions though.

Best, Jim

Evaluating and Selecting Talent – perhaps the Google Way?

    Jim D

There was an interesting article today on the interview approach that Google has used as part of their talent selection in the Wall Street Journal by William Poundstone. According the the WSJ article, currently Google gets over a million applications per year, and from this only about 1 in 130 applicants are hired. Getting a flood of applicants and having ratios of candidates to hires close to 1 to 100 is not unusual. At the last two large companies I have held senior positions in, we received hundreds of thousands of applications per year, and the end ratio to the hire was close to 1 to 100. Since the advent of the internet job boards and social networking, most large companies are now dealing with a flood of applicants. In fact, enabling your HR department to handle effectively these ever-growing volumes is an important service you should provide, especially if you are a retail company. In other words, every potential applicant who has a poor experience on your web job site and process is a potential customer who is now turned off on your company.

So how do you effectively sort through the flood of applicants effectively, select only the best and leave the rest with a positive experience?

The Google approach, and apparently a growing approach elsewhere is to include brain teasers in the interview process such as:

‘You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?’

Hopefully, these brain teasers will enlighten the interviewer about the intellect and creativity of the candidate, and also provide how they might respond in a tough situation. While I think just about any off-the-wall puzzle question could do that, I think there are a number of better techniques to sort out the best candidates from those who are just adequate. And I think you must start much earlier in the process than the interview.

First, you should have two processes: one for senior candidates and one for everyone else (entry, junior, and mid-level). Let’s take the more junior roles first in today’s post. You should note that the source of the candidate has very different yields in terms of strong hires. Thus, you should treat candidates differently based on the recruiting method. And you should greatly prime those recruiting methods that are proven. For the more junior roles, your best sources for ‘A’ caliber staff are graduate and intern programs and referrals from current ‘A’ staff. In fact, I would venture these are 2 to 3 times more effective at getting top staff than all your other methods. So, assuming you have invested as much as possible in these two methods (you have referral awards in place, you have an extensive and well-supported intern and graduate program with appropriate universities), how best to handle and sort the flood of applicants from your other sources and fill the remaining shortfalls?

Consider the process from applicant to new hire as a giant funnel. And one where your internet interface must be top-notch to be appealing to your top candidates and thoughtful yet efficient at filtering and still providing a considerate experience for those you will not hire but could be your customers. To ensure you are getting the right candidates at the end of the process, and yet prevent your costs from soaring given the number of applicants, you must have efficient and effective early steps in the selection process. I recommend having a subject area test that an applicant takes via the internet for the vast majority of the junior positions. Your technical team can compile the test (say 200  questions) for the HR recruiting team and keep it up to date. Rotate a different 40 or 50 questions to each applicant that they can take the test over the internet in a set period of time. This will then filter out 80% of the applicants that are often not qualified and just applying. Your company can then send a thoughtful letter explaining they did not score high enough to be considered further but you appreciate that they applied.

Next, make it very clear throughout the process, that you will check references. This will cause the poor performers to think twice about applying to your company. As you move to the next step of identifying the candidates to interview from those who passed the test, I recommend setting a high bar where the candidates must be qualified but then have one additional outstanding experience or quality (e.g., won an award at their previous company or school, showed initiative in gaining additional certifications or knowledge of your company, etc). Now you have optimized the pool that you will interview — not too big to make it too time-consuming and expensive, and not too small to gain diversity and ensure you don’t miss great candidates. Again, I recommend two additional methods for the junior candidate process to achieve a better screen: a problem or work simulation; and a team interview.

The problem or work simulation (not a brain teaser), would be a 1 or 2 hour session where you give the candidate an exercise similar to the work that they will be doing. If a Unix administrator, give them Unix scripts to write. If a developer, ask them to design or or outline how they code an interface, etc.  This will give you real insight into their capabilities.

The team interview is critical. Often, organizations make the mistake of having only management interview a candidate when in reality, those who are more familiar with the work, and who often will hold a higher bar on the selection, are the teammates and peer staff that this person would work with. In fact, they don’t want someone who is incompetent or would be a poor fit because then they have to carry the load. So include in them in the process. Have one of the more outgoing and senior individuals lead the interview with one or two others participating. And ask the HR person or someone skilled at nonverbal communication to join. Then, when the lead person is asking the questions, the others can observe the body language and other signals that this candidate is giving off that most interviewers miss because they are so focused on the next question. They can ask questions as well of course but should focus on what is not said. Given the importance of team in IT, this is a critical filter to ensure you get people who not only know what must be done, but can do it in the team and culture setting that you have at your company. I have employed the team interview process to ensure you set a consistently high bar, eliminate those who would be detrimental to the team, and importantly, avoid the manager picking only their favorites. And don’t neglect checking the references. And the more senior a person is, the more important it is for you to check the references.

Have established the key selection steps above, the tougher part can be getting the candidates in the first place. Often, the best candidates, the ‘A’ players are not in the applicant pool but are busy working somewhere else. This is where your referrals from your ‘A’ players come in. Your top engineers often know the other good engineers at other companies or elsewhere in the industry. Ensure you have recruiters willing to follow up on the referrals and if necessary, cold call. And make sure, once the candidate is past the initial filters, you move them quickly through the process — otherwise you will lose out on the best candidates to other companies who moved quicker.

Every now and then you will come across other approaches that allow you to identify the top performers. I recall when working for a company in the Midwest that we had a critical need for MUMPS (or Cache) developers (we had a major financial services legacy system developed on a tool primarily used in hospital applications).  We had enormous difficulty finding anyone who had the experience much less developers who were top-notch until, in talking to one of the senior engineers, I found out he had just received a certification and he had not scored as as high as some others nationally. When he showed me the website with the scores listed of those who had taken the test nationally, there was the gold mine of all the top developers in that field. By the next day, we had our best recruiters calling those developers to see if they were interested in a new job at a new company. In fact, I think we ended up hiring 7 of engineers who scored in the top ten on that list.

So you may not have a list of the best fall into your lap like I did at that time, but you can get the best by always having your door open. In other words, for most shops of any size, you will always need project managers, network engineers, server engineers and developers and designers. By taking a ‘pipeline’ approach, where you always have a ‘proxy’ opening for these positions, you can be choosier (you are not under a deadline to fill a position) and when the ‘A’ player who is working at another company gets frustrated one day and decides to post his resume or look, you will come in contact. And with a tuned process using the steps above, you will likely land the best candidates.

Doing a robust intern and graduate program is another form of a pipeline. If you do not have these in place, establish strong intern and graduate programs with the universities near your key sites. It will be a good source for as much as 20% of the new and replacement staff you need. View the intern assignment as one long interview and be sure to have a job placement offer ready at the end of the internship to assure the best interns of a place at your shop when they graduate the following year.

If you deploy these techniques, and ensure your managers place recruiting tasks as important and urgent, and review regularly the operational metrics around recruiting (not just time to hire but more importantly quality of hire by vintage and by source) you will build a strong pipeline of talent that enables you to build sustainably a high performing team. In my next post, I will talk about the different approaches to use for more senior positions as well as top-grading, a very good technique to filter at senior levels.

And by the way, WSJ and Mr. Poundstone also provided the answers to those Google interview questions. Enjoy!

What techniques or best practices have you used to recruit? Any particular pitfalls or issues to avoid? What companies do you admire for their recruiting processes?

Best, Jim