How IT Orgs Can Find and Retain the Best Candidates

We asked the HDI Thought Leaders and Featured Contributors for their thoughts on how the IT service and support industry can best fill positions during a challenging environment for finding the right candidates. Phyllis Drucker, an ITIL® expert certified consultant and information leader at Cognizant’s Linium ServiceNow practice, had some great insights we wanted to share here.

While “the Great Resign” has made it difficult to find staff, there are factors to consider that contribute to ongoing staffing issues.

First, an organization needs to retain their current staff, or keeping a department staffed is like filling a bathtub with the drain open. To retain your staff, you need the following:

Culture

The way employees are treated by management is a large factor in their decision of whether to stay or go. People will stay with good managers and leaders, and leave toxic environments. Given this, leaders must learn to empower their team and provide them with autonomy that leads to a sense of satisfaction with their job.

Growth

Organizations need to make career and personal growth available to people by emphasizing a culture of learning, making training available, and making promotion from within a common occurrence.

Employee Experience

Not all of the employee’s experience comes from their manager. Team member attitudes, technical support, the ability to get simple things done when they need it, overarching benefits, and corporate work styles will all be factors in the calculus of whether employees stay or go.

Next, when it comes to filling open positions, companies need to ensure they are utilizing best practices to attract talent. This can include:

Reputation Monitoring and Repair

Know the company’s reputation on sites like Glassdoor. If there are material weaknesses, reputational areas that need to be fixed, the company needs to address those areas and be clear in job searches that they have.

Don’t Forget to Look From Within

Understand the demand for the job that’s being filled. Some high-demand areas may best be filled with junior personnel and the opportunity to learn on the job. A company I worked for years ago had openings to support an application that drove six-figure salaries. Rather than try to compete, they allowed Service Desk and other IT analysts the opportunity to interview for a training program. They selected a member of the Service Desk who was smart and enthusiastic and he was a tremendous success. My current company is taking developers straight our of college and training them to develop in ServiceNow due to demand. This is a common approach.

Avoid Perfectionism in Skillsets Desired

Don’t seek perfection, rather seek balance and diversity. Sometimes when we hire, we’re looking for the perfect candidate rather than filling gaps in the team or finding people that are strong in some areas, even though they are weak in others. Hire for personality and capabilities, not for every skill on a checklist. Training can plug the gaps if you find good personnel.

It is a job market for employees, and that means that organizations must employ best practices to meet their needs. Be dynamic, flexible, and responsive in how you nurture the employee experience and seek out the best candidates.

Phyllis Drucker is an ITIL® expert certified consultant and information leader at Cognizant’s Linium ServiceNow practice. Phyllis has more than 20 years of experience in the disciplines and frameworks of IT service management, as both a practitioner and consultant. She has served HDI since 1997, itSMF USA since 2004 in a variety of capacities including speaker, writer, local group leader, board member, and operations director. She currently chairs the International Executive Board for itSMF. Since 1997, Phyllis has helped to advance the profession of ITSM leaders and practitioners worldwide by providing her experience and insight on a wide variety of ITSM topics through presentations, whitepapers, and articles and now her new book on the service request catalog, Online Service Management: Creating a Successful Service Request Catalogue (International Best Practice). Follow Phyllis on Twitter @msitsm.