IT Recruitment Shortages, Can A Lesson Be Learned?
IT Recruitment Shortages, Can A Lesson Be Learned?
September 25, 2007: It’s been reported for some time now that the recruitment pool for IT positions has been shrinking, and has been contributing to major hassles for organisations attempting to bring in the talent.
Whether you lay the blame for the IT recruitment shortage at the feet of the government, schools and universities, poor skills management or a conspiracy by a pod of dolphins, it really doesn’t make a difference. From the point of view of the organisation, the recruitment shortage exists and needs to be dealt with.
This doesn’t mean that the organisation can solve IT recruitment problems by themselves, but rather this is an issue that is popping up everyday. Whilst it can be fun to moan about how terrible the shortage are and throw blame at aquatic mammals, this doesn’t get positions filled, and that’s what needs to be addressed.
“Organisations need to be more creative and strategic about how they gather employee’s” says Andrew Keast, Director of e-recruitment solutions provider, NGA.
According to Keast, the focus needs to be on how to bring candidates in quicker. This often involves broadening the net in order to bring the candidates in quicker. The net can be extended to print media, social networking and any method of bringing the candidate to your own website, not just the standard recruitment process.
This kind of approach touches on addressing strategy concerns, that is it’s one thing to say lets try and use social networking to our benefit, its quite another to change your entire recruitment strategy in order to achieve your goals. From the organisations perspective, adjusting the strategy can be a big task, but one that needs to be looked at particularly if it hasn’t changed in the last ten years, because the marketplace certainly has.
“Organisations want people on board with the right skills in the right time frame” says David Rowntree, Consultant at Mincom.
Rowntree advocates the abandonment of ‘Hire and Fire’ strategies which have dominated traditional strategies. Organisations need to ‘Obtain and Maintain’ now, which means training and ongoing upkeep of the workforce, as opposed to just coming down hard wherever there is a perceived problem.
Maintaining your workforce also needs to involve a greater degree of information control, in order to observe & manage shortages, problems and training schedules. There is an unprecedented level of technology options available out there for businesses when it comes to managing there IT recruitment, yet most are still stuck in the mindset that sending out the classified advertisement and maybe even an online version is all that needs to be done.
“We ran into major problems with an aging workforce, an increasing workload and location problems” says Darryl Scott, ERP Program Director of one of Queensland’s major power providers, Ergon Energy. “Another gap existed around training management. We now have every person applying for training through an online system”
Recruitment strategies shouldn’t stop when new staff walk in the door, and if every organisation was able to obtain and maintain effectively then the recruitment shortage would be that much easier to fix.