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Getting the IT talent you need: 4 best practices

IT Integration

Given the mission-critical nature of your organization’s IT operations, it’s essential that you attract and retain the right IT human resources. To acquire the IT talent you need, I suggest these 4 best practices:

  1. Make sure you understand the relationship between your organization’s business goals and the myriad ways its IT operations fulfill those goals
  2. For too many enterprises, there’s still a disconnect between the business’s overarching strategies/goals and the way IT operations actually work. This disconnect makes hiring the right IT human resources even tougher than it already is.

    One of the best ways to change this involves bringing in an experienced technology advisor able to guide executive and IT leadership through discovery workshops focused on:

    • Gaining intelligible, manageable, actionable information;
    • Validating and justifying long-term goals;
    • Outlining a holistic technology roadmap in support of those goals; and
    • Creating a baseline for enterprise security and success
  3. Determine what sort of IT requirements you really have
  4. Unless yours is a large, diverse IT shop, you may struggle to provide what IT talent seeks most in addition to salary – an ability to learn and grow and the opportunity to work on interesting projects .

    Ask yourself, is the IT expertise you need best acquired via long-term, full-time positions – or are you better off with short-term contractor arrangements? Perhaps you might benefit from bringing in a technology consultant’s team of expert IT professionals on a project basis, especially if you’re in critical need of cybersecurity expertise .

  5. Provide your IT staff with certified learning and training opportunities
  6. Technical training boosts productivity, return on IT investment, competitive advantage, and staff loyalty. Some IT staffing advisors offer ways to make technical training easy for your IT people (as well as end users).

  7. Hire a highly qualified, deeply experienced IT staffing advisor
  8. Look for an IT-specialized staffing advisor with an in-the-trenches grasp of technology trends and requirements that maintains a top-notch IT talent pool, is committed to excellent customer service, and…

    • Can help you strategically plan your IT hiring with an eye to short- as well as long-term goals, types of IT expertise you require, best mix of permanent staff and contractors, etc.;
    • Attracts top IT talent, thanks to extensive industry connections and a team of dedicated technical recruiters;
    • Retains top IT talent because of its own worldwide data center , networking, cloud / managed services , and application development operations; and
    • Conducts searches for permanent IT staff, contractors, or consultants based on the needs you identify and using sophisticated technical screening processes and an automated resume retrieval system.

When it comes to finding the IT skills you need, the right staffing advisor is one that both recruits top IT talent and engages that talent in its own leading-edge IT operations and services.

Meet the Author
Tim Burke is the President and CEO of Quest. He has been at the helm for over 30 years.
Contact Quest Today  ˄
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