Quick Tips for IT Managers

Sourcing, screening, and selecting IT talent has never been a greater challenge. IT managers must overcome financial constraints, talent shortages, demanding candidates, and most significantly of all, a lack of time to hire right. But hiring right is not just a good idea, it’s essential to the long-term success of any IT department or, for that matter, any company. The following tips help ensure the long-term success of your IT department, and your company, as a whole.

• Clearly define and demonstrate to senior management the link between hiring and productivity, efficiency, and your company’s bottom line. By having these simply laid out, senior management is more easily able to understand the correlation between staffing and success, and thereafter make a prompt decision to enable the same.

• Re-engineer your hiring process to improve sourcing and minimize Become more proactive in your approach to candidate selection, to accelerate decision-making and improve your access to top talent.

• Coordinate your efforts. Approach task management more intelligently by better matching people to tasks. Hire contractors to backfill your need to complete lower-level work and routine maintenance activities, and put your stars on your critical projects.

• Think strategically about your staff augmentation efforts. Implement better workforce planning to eliminate capacity constraints, shorten learning curves, and accelerate productivity.

• Don’t go at it alone. Team up with an IT staffing company to add value to your staff augmentation efforts. Educate your IT staffing partner(s) as to what you need in IT talent. Give them the information they need, and the mandate, to be more proactive, and then invest time to train the IT staffing company, to enable them to be more proactive and accurate in providing the talent you need.

Considering that top IT professionals can be 1,000 percent more productive than their peers, hiring right should be the single most important goal of any technology manager. Information technology is the core of innovation, efficiency, and business intelligence, all of which lead to a long-term competitive advantage.

Jeffrey D’Antonio
Account Executive