Tag Hiring

Entries 3 Total

The Hiring Process Speaks Louder Than You Do

May 14, ’10 9:52 AM

I recently came across a good post on the on-boarding process for executives, and how it is often given short shrift in organizations, to the detriment of the new leader.

In my experience, staffing routinely goes off the rails much earlier than that, during the hiring process itself. A prospective team member may learn much more about you (and your organization) through experiencing your actual hiring process than what is said in the interviews themselves, or from the slick information packet put together by the folks in HR.

Following are a few areas where the language found in the position description may be discounted by the actual process candidates experience:

Speed of Hiring Process: You are in a competitive, fast-moving industry.Your business customers expect a lot from IT and therefore you expect a great deal from your leaders. You’ve filtered initial resumes to those candidates that can demonstrate decisiveness in an environment of constant change, with quick successes under their belt. Yet your hiring process for key people might average three months from start to finish. Your HR recruiter may be gracious enough to give the candidate a heads-up to expect as much. If, after four interviews the candidate pushes to get a sense of where things are at or move the process along, you may even get a little testy with them.

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The Ownership Trait in IT Staffing

Aug 31, ’09 11:36 AM

In the challenge to find and retain the best employees within an IT organization, there are many recommended practices, from putting developers through a brief coding test, to verifying that project managers posses a solid understanding of accepted methodologies. Prior work experience is matched against the organization’s current challenges, while education and references are checked.

In all this paperwork and the gauntlet of interviews that ensue, I’d propose that an authentic and visible sense of ownership is perhaps the single most valuable differentiator between multiple candidates of equal measure. Why?

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Time to Review Your Hiring Process

Apr 27, ’09 2:41 PM

The conventional thinking is that it is easier to add top IT talent to an organization during an economic downturn, as layoffs have forced many good people onto the market, and others are eager to jump ship to any company that is actually growing or doing interesting things in IT.

There are alternative theories out there, including Auren Hoffman’s suggestion that it is actually harder to get top talent now, because more C-players are being let go, thus skewing the talent ratio and creating more “noise” in your hiring process:

In troubled economic times, anyone can get laid off, but a disproportionate number of layoffs tend to fall on C-players. This is because they are the lowest performing people in a company and there generally are more C-players at a company than any other caliber.

I believe Auren’s theory may hold true for smaller organizations, where a leadership team can closely manage the RIF process with little HR/Legal involvement or complications, hopefully raising the bar for their entire team during the process.

Within larger enterprises, the intricacies of a large RIF process, the likelihood that it will be driven in part by HR and Legal protocols, the need to manage legal and PR risk, and real inconsistencies in the review/grading process across large teams may push more A/B players out into the market than one would imagine. Add to this the fact that A/B talent is always more likely to be looking whenever a company is under financial pressure or cutting back on interesting IT work.

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