How do CIOs attract talents?

During the period of economic upward trend, CIOs must deal with the problem to find suitable employees and retain capable talents.

What kind of IT talents is the most popular? The answer could be extremely long---rich experience, as well as the knowledge of new technology and old system. They should have the extraordinary abilities to analyze and solve problems, communicate excellently, get the work done independently and own the spirit of teamwork. They should have the experience of business process management, project management certificates, and understand IT architecture well. They hold the conviction of serving for customers and the background of SAM would be a plus.

Stockley: although technology is always what we are looking for, it ranks the last standard to consider during recruiting.

Nowadays, the nature of IT is changing. IT department is evolving from technology supporting center to innovation business partner. To be a member of IT department, you must be equipped with various skills, which are also developing with the passage of time. Despite the valuable professional IT knowledge, CIOs are looking for talents with additional project management skills, enterprise business expertise and skills of directly dealing with the customers. According to a survey targeting CIOs in the US by Robert Half Technology in 2006, 41% of the interviewees said that they paid more attentions than 5 years ago to the basic business knowledge of their employees.

So far, professionals with both business knowledge and IT expertise are in short supply. "All the CIOs are pursuing the same kind of talent repository, so this situation will last for a long time before the basic issue is addressed. Now, there is no effective way to reverse the status quo and CIOs have to solve in their own unique way." said by a CIO named Diane Wallace in Connecticut.

A talent battle is brewing. "You can first recruit talents from campus who are interested in IT, then you should expand your team and retain those talents. If you do nothing on this work, you will face big trouble in the future." said by Ralph Szygenda, CIO and Vice President of GE.

In order to win the talent battle in the future, CIOs need to adopt key measures to mitigate the intensity of short supplied talents and pave the way for the future. So there are 5 things for the CIOs to do from now on.

1. Rethink about your recruiting practices

CIOs often claim to want candidates with skills on a certain level, but the employees they recruit ultimately present another level of skills, usually, there is a serious gap between ideal and reality. A recent study by Society for Information Management，SIM of the US showed that business capability and project management skills were the top two skills being valued by companies when recruiting IT staffs. However, most of the CIOs interviewed said that they only paid attention to their technology skills in recruitment.

Why does the difference exist? CIOs will usually face huge difficulties when adjusting their recruiting practices to search for talents with business ability and IT knowledge. Chris Stockley is the CIO and Vice President of a construction contractor---Skanska, he wants his staff to be customer-oriented and with outstanding ability in communication and cooperation. He says that although technology talents are what we are looking for, we put it as the last standard to consider in our recruitment process.

After the HR department finishes the primary filtering and interviewing, Stockley will observe the candidates with various strategies to evaluate their business skills. For example, he will arrange the candidates to give a presentation. "The contents of their presentations will not be related with the jobs they apply for and the purpose is to measure out their communication ability and the ability to cope with pressure."

2. Cooperate with HR department

Katherine Spencer Lee, CEO of Robert Half Technology said, "CIOs get used to handle everything by themselves, which will be a big problem in recruitment because they can not fully utilize what in their hands." In this case, HR experts and recruiting experts can be the best partners for CIOs. However it will take CIOs a lot of time to convey their requirements before any fruitful result will come out."

Szygenda of GE wants to recruit medium and high-level staff for project management, business communication and SAM. It is the most difficult for operating and realizing the position of "Process Information Officer" because it requires the applicants to be with solid IT background and strong business operating experience. It is becoming more and more difficult to find this kind of talents and recruiting specialists continuously get them the same kind of talents that do not meet the requirements.

The solution used by Szygenda is to meet with the recruiting specialists periodically. He said, "They have human resources in hands, but they will only focus on the resumes of the most outstanding ones. So we will fix a time to meet with them, put pressure on them to find out the talents we really need from their talents repository."

Stockley usually invites recruiting specialists to attend the annual SA meeting of the IT department, during which he will share the recent achievements with his team and the plan for the next three years. "We will not point it out specifically what kind of skills set we need our staff to have," he explained, "but the recruiting specialists will get a true understanding of popular talent standard on the market through this communication."

In many occasions recently, Szygenda emphasized that his department was focusing on application integration during this period, so they need project managers and business process analyzers with experience in application integration. "After this kind of communication in advance, the recruiting specialists will provide us with qualified candidates before the beginning of recruitment of a job vacancy." he said.

Provide the award behind money

How to retain talents in the economic downturn is not a problem, but now the situation is not as so. The data from United States Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that currently, the American technology staff recruitment has transcended it was in 2001, the peak period of staff recruitment, in United States, there are 35 million IT professionals are employed this year. For CIOs, such a healthy operation in the talent market is bad news. During this period they must strive to retain the best and brightest talents, which is very difficult in the prosperous talent market.

"Encouragement, special compensation plan and the signature right award in the current are no longer with attractive terms." Szygenda realizes that they are providing more money to attract and retain staff. According to the Forrester data, the average total IT spending of the United States this year will be increased by 4%, the IT staff's salaries will be increased according to different positions. The employees who are working in the fields of automation or outsourcing, such as call centers, application maintenance and technical support may find their revenues are actually decreased; those with employees with the skills of service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process reengineering (BPR) and project management will find that their incomes are growing with double-digit speed.

However, not every organization has enough money to resolve the problem of staff loss. Larry Bonfante from CIO said, "We are non-profit institutions with the revenue of only 220 million US dollars this year; we are competing with those financial services companies on the island of Manhattan for talents. JP Morgan pays two times more salary than us." In order to compete with them, Bonfante disseminates Network Society's work are full of the exciting experience of tennis sport and the atmosphere like working in university, "We strive to create an atmosphere to make the staff are greatly attracted beyond the factor of salary."

So, what is the most valuable compensation manner of the United States Network Association? It is the flexibility of work. By which, Onfante has attracted two best directors, who are two females with children, "The staff are allowed to work at home and have flexible working time arrangement, and I am not the director who only focuses on the clock, what interests me more is the result."

The statistics data of Hudson Highland Group "2006 IT Talents Compensation and Benefits Report" shows that 1 / 3 of IT staff value more on having a flexible work schedule. "More employees are willing to give up the traditional extra cash incentives to achieve a better balance between work and individual life." According to a survey of human resources management to CIOs, time flexibility is also the most common incentive manner used to encourage and retain IT staff, 61% of respondents state that they have adopted this strategy.

Creative inner training

According to the Hudson's report, when the IT talents are choosing jobs, another income they value most is the job-related training. But most of the training budget in organizations is drastically cut down during the economic downturn, and restoring the training expenditures is still the challenge that the CIOs have to face. Therefore, some CIOs deal with these difficulties through some innovative methods.

Wallace, a female CIO in Connecticut, needs business-minded staff - they must have good communication and negotiation skills, which can extend the IT and business solutions to the internal customers. To nurture such in-house talents, Wallace invests 11,000 US dollars into the specially designed four-day training program instead of the expense of upgrading project management software. "We can upgrade the software next year, but if you do not have the persons who meet the requirements to promote, then how many profits can the software updates bring?" She says.

Alan Boehme, another CIO adopts the unusual strategy. He tracks all revenue generated from the IT contribution, but also tracks the money saved for the business sector, and re-invests a certain percentage of money to IT human resources development, such as providing fund to the staff training held by the company's project management college. "Investing part of the income to IT staff training and education, the aim is to enable IT department to be more professional and competitive in the operating field, and more quickly to bring future earnings to the business sector." He says.

CIOs have got used to own all things themselves, during recruitment; the habit may become a problem because they are unable to make good use of all the resources they own.

Implementing the rotational scheme

Stanley clearly understands how many benefits will be generated from the staff positions rotation. Every year, 20% of the IT workforces are rotated to different positions of other departments or business units. He also recruits those business staff who are rich of IT knowledge from other departments to their own ranks. Business department will not protest, "The market and operating departments have snatched talents from our IT department in the past few years, and now, we are even."

Stanley attracts business people to the IT sector by selling them the concept of IT-driven change. "They think that my idea is very cool, and they know that the rotation of jobs in the IT sector now will not affect them to return to the business sector." That larger-scaled internal experience makes employees easily discern how IT and business departments closely integrate.