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Developing New IT Talent Management Capabilities
By
Heather A. Smith James D. McKeen
The IT Forum … Is a focus group of senior IT managers from a variety of different industries convened regularly by the authors to address key management issues in IT. This report highlights a recent discussion.
– See back page for details of the IT Forum and other reports.
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Introduction There is no doubt there is a widespread talent management crisis in IT. Study after study has
shown that lack of access to the right skills and resources is the number one barrier to IT
success (Berry & Gabris 2016, IDG 2017, Mok & Berry 2016, Coleman 2016). This shortage is
not only ongoing but is also increasing in importance (Carnahan & Somaya 2016). As one
researcher stated, "The war for talent is intensifying for IT organizations and many
organizations are challenged to find good people" (Mandiwalla 2017). Another noted,
"organizations are in a dogfight to attract IT talent." (Hewitt 2012).
In spite of a broad acknowledgement of this situation, surprisingly, most organizations are
doing very little about it (Hunter & Coleman 2016). Signs of this include a reported gap
between the desire to recruit and the actual capabilities to attract and acquire qualified people
(CIO 2016), problems with retention (Carnahan & Somaya 2016), lack of talent management
innovation (Hunter & Coleman 2016), and lack of diversity in IT leadership (IDG 2017).
Although most IT executives expect that the skills and knowledge their organizations will need
over the next ten years will have little resemblance to those in their organizations today, only a
small number feel they are adequately preparing for them (Morello 2017, Poitevin 2017, Mok
&Berry 2017). Few companies have a robust talent acquisition pipeline (CIO 2016) and only
some are addressing the need to overhaul their work force (Morello 2016).
There are many reasons why IT talent management has become more challenging for
organizations but it is generally accepted that the move to digital business and the changes
and uncertainties involved in this transformation are driving the urgency (Morello 2017, Wiblen
et al. 2010). Digital business changes the stakes for organizations, compresses windows of
opportunity, and introduces new social, political and behavioral norms among individuals.
Talent management under these circumstances is highly complex because of the incomplete,
contradictory, and changing requirements involved. In turn, this is prompting a deeper look at
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the skills people in IT will need in the future and the HR practices, processes, and tools
involved in developing, acquiring, or retaining them (Morello 2017).
This paper looks at the current state of talent management in organizations and discusses ways
to improve talent management capabilities in IT. It first looks at current IT talent management
practices and then at the scope of the challenge involved in improving them. Following this it
looks at the three components of improving capabilities in talent management: strategy;
behaviors and structures; and technology, and concludes with practical recommendations for IT
managers for getting started.
What is Wrong with IT Talent Management Today? Members of the focus group rated their ability to acquire new talent and retrain it at 4.5/10
with a range of 1-8. Those that felt their talent management practices were largely positive
noted that they had a group dedicated to HR IT and that their processes were nimble and
simple. "Once we've found someone we like, it doesn't take too long to get them on board,"
said the manager of this company. "IT is in charge of the hiring and we have good
compensation and a pension. But we still need better channels into top end resources." Those
who were frustrated with talent management focused on HR issues. "It's hard to hire good
people," said a manager. "There are too many constraints and the process takes too long. It's
killing us!"
In most cases, IT's biggest complaint is that HR doesn't understand IT's needs. "HR rules just
don't work for IT staff. They can barely spell IT!" complained one manager. "The HR process
can be dreadful for IT," said another. "HR for IT is not of high value. We need to shift our
thinking about it."
At its worst, HR is highly bureaucratic and fails to recognize the specific needs of IT. As a result,
the average length of time needed to fill a STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering and
mathematics) position has risen from 43 days to 76 days in recent years (Craig 2015). "We
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have too many people involved and too many levels of approval," said a manager. "Every
contract has to be signed by the Head of Legal and the CEO. By the time we're ready to hire a
person it's likely they already have another job." In addition to the complexities of the hiring
process, focus group members pointed out other systemic problems with HR that affect talent
management. "Our company doesn't understand IT compensation and market rates so our
compensation is always behind, " said a manager. "We don't have a mature process. At
present, we're just ensuring we have bodies to fill chairs," said another. "We're still just hiring
for specific technical skill sets. We need to look at more horizontal skills," said a third." "HR
hires for hard skills but not attitude and the soft skills we now need," said a fourth.
Generally, in talent management, IT and HR share the hiring process, while IT is responsible for
specific retention practices apart from broad organizational factors such as pension, share
options, and bonuses. Once hired, people often get pigeon-holed in a specific role. "We just
pay attention to specific, granular skills. We need more cross-training but it's an uphill battle,"
said a member. "There's a reluctance to lose skills in order to develop people." Retention is
rarely actively managed. Some recognize that their work environment and culture have a role
to play. "Our people are generally demotivated," said a manager, "We all have trouble
retaining certain roles," said another. "But a lot of our retention issues depend on the broader
economic cycle." "We need to have clearer expectations of our staff and what we expect from
them. "Secondments to other areas help broaden people's skills – especially for high potential
people – but it's still really hard to make them happen," said another. When people do leave,
exit interviews appear to be of little value. "We never learn," sighed a manager.
In general, the group concluded that no one in the organization really owns talent
management. "Everyone knows their own piece and doesn't care about the others," a
manager explained. "We need to look at end-to-end HR but there's no organizational
willingness to do this because they don't see the value." Even in the company where there was
a good relationship with HR and a dedicated HR IT team, the manager noted, "Many of our
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Figure 1. Two Factors Affecting Employee Satisfaction and
Motivation
processes are sub-optimized and there's no incentive to move faster. What we really need is a
process architecture." One organization had recently hired a Chief Talent Officer but to date
there had been little visible impact on talent management processes.
Even though most leaders agree that talent is a real differentiator, they simply don't commit
the energy and resources to back up this belief (Dachenhaus 2016, Kane et al. 2016). There is a
lack of meaningful attention to developing a strategic and integrated people plan because
personnel and workforce are the issues that managers dislike most about their job (Berry &
Gabris 2016). There is also a lack of clear understanding of the value of formal workforce
planning and of the expertise to develop and execute a people strategy. As a result, most
organizations reduce it to a headcount budgeting exercise and a set of transactional processes
(Martin 2006). These largely reactive approaches are ineffective in today's environment.
Members also noted the lack of diversity in IT as stemming from inadequate acquisition and
development strategies.
Furthermore, although most organizations aim to address the well-known "hygiene factors"
that prevent employee dissatisfaction, few have active programs to promote the "motivator
factors" that create high
satisfaction and strong
commitment to their work
(Herzberg 1964, Berry &
Gabris 2016, Bailey &
Madden 2016) (see Figure
1). The focus group noted
the importance to IT
professionals of having
meaningful, challenging,
and rewarding work and of
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feeling valued. "In many cases, we have failed to manage our existing talent and are not always
using them to the fullest extent," said a manager. "People want to grow and need good work
and providing this takes effort."
The Talent Management Challenge A company's ability to execute on its business strategy and respond rapidly to changes is
directly related to the quality of its workforce (Berry & Gabris 2016, IDG 2017). This means
being able to access and deploy the right sets of skills, behaviors, and competencies on an as
needed basis. In today's digital workplace, effective talent management is becoming an
organizational goal rather than an HR niche (Phillips 2008).
Within IT, there is a serious supply and demand imbalance for emerging skills and also a need
to shepherd existing staff from the specialized technical mindsets of the 20th century to the
hybrid business-IT profiles required for digital business in the 21st century (Morello 2017). In
the new world of IT, soft skills are increasing becoming at least as important as technical skills.
With specific technology skills migrating throughout organizations, companies are looking for
IT staff to provide a transformative vision, be forward thinkers, support change, and offer other
leadership and collaborative skills to the business (Kane et al. 2016). Appendix A lists just some
of the new skills that researchers are predicting IT staff will need.
Building new talent management capabilities is therefore a complex challenge (Berry & Gabris
2016, IDG 2017) and addressing it will require numerous systemic changes. As Figure 2 shows,
new capabilities arise out of the iterative and ongoing interaction of three factors:
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1. New Strategies. Organizations
need to think more strategically about
talent management in a number of
ways. IT workforce transformation must
be elevated to the level of business
impact and risk with broader
recognition of its impact on an
organization's overall competitive
status, growth, and profits (Craig 2015,
Kumar & Pansari 2015). Key
stakeholders must also be engaged to
think differently and more creatively
about it. And leaders will need a much
deeper understanding of their existing skills and competencies and their company's future
course to be able to do this.
2. New Behaviors and Structures. IT structure and culture must be redesigned/influenced to
more fully reinforce the needs of a digital workforce. IT organizations are quite often
structured into silos reflecting the needs of a workforce with more traditional IT skills (Berry
& Mok 2015). Developing digital capabilities means that activities, people, culture, and
structure must all be in sync across both internal and external organizational boundaries
and more closely aligned with company strategy (Poitevin 2017, Kane et al. 2016). And
these must be more agile and responsive to changing demand.
3. New Technologies. These must be used in ways that support this alignment and strategy
and to speed up processes. Today's talent management solutions appear to be of limited
value in helping managers understand all aspects of the talent pipeline and make decisions
about it (Phillips 2008). Improved solutions are needed to provide key information and
Figure 2. How New Organizational Capabilities
Develop
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insights to leaders about talent management issues, better integrate the work of IT leaders
and HR, and enable a more holistic management of talent.
The remainder of this paper looks more deeply at these three components of developing new
IT talent management capabilities.
Develop a Talent Management Strategy Going through the process of developing a talent management strategy forces business
leaders to understand how to effectively leverage their workforce and access external talent
pools to drive business value. It supplements regular HR activities with a plan that identifies
areas in which change is needed and prioritizes investments to identify needed competencies
and improve an IT function's capabilities through acquisition, development, and retention
(Berry & Gabris 2016). A talent management strategy has three major objectives (Hewitt 2012):
1. Strategic workforce planning. Any strategy must start with a clear vision of the
organization's future and the competencies it needs to achieve its goals (Mok & Berry
2016). Thus digital business strategic planning is closely linked with IT strategic workforce
planning. It is important to understand which types of expertise will help the organization
build competitive advantage. Because CIOs, HR, and other leaders tend to use different
terminologies, it is essential to focus on common orientation points, such as the
organization's mission, values, and strategic objectives which will then clarify the best
approaches to building the workforce (Morello 2017).
Organizations need to know where their current expertise is located and to recognize that
each area of IT may need different competencies (Berry & Mok 2015). In addition to looking
at the technical skills needed, they must also understand the "soft", business, and
behavioral skills of their employees and then use this information to determine how these
current skills could be used in new contexts (Mok & Berry 2016). Once these are
understood, other talent management components of a talent management strategy can
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be developed to address gaps such as: talent sourcing and acquisition, development and
retention, and decision support and metrics (Dachenhaus 2016).
2. Branding and talent acquisition. Organizations and IT functions have a "talent brand" said
the focus group. This is an expression of their culture, values and beliefs, the lifestyle that
goes with employment, and the nature of the work and is somewhat different from a
company's overall brand (Berry & Gabris 2106, Hunter & Coleman 2016). It is important to
understand a company's talent brand before beginning to recruit talent – especially top
talent – because a good fit between brand and the potential employee answers the
question: Do I want to work there? Brand is also a factor in talent retention because it
affects fit between the company and its employees (Kumar & Pansari 2015). The group
noted there are several social media sites that will give a company a remarkably accurate
description of their talent brand.
Once a talent brand is understood, the next step is to understand the profile (not just
technical skills) of the IT talent a company is looking for. This must consider not only
employees' tactical skills but also cultural fit such as values, soft skills, work-life balance
considerations, professionalism, and type of work. Research shows that although 73% of
new hires have the necessary knowledge and skills, only 35% are considered to be an
organizational asset (Craig 2015). Job analysis is one of the most neglected aspects of
hiring, as it ensures candidates are well-aligned with a position. This has been shown to
eliminate future turnover and ultimately result in higher organizational productivity. The
goal is to focus on mutual interest between the company's needs and those of a potential
employee to ensure fit between the two. In this sense recruiting is more akin the job of a
matchmaker (Dachenhaus 2016).
With both brand and profile understood, a recruiting strategy can then develop innovative
brand messages and target a variety of channels to appeal to the types of talent a company
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wants to attract. Talent acquisition strategies should be holistic and consider a variety of
approaches for attracting talent. Companies must recognize that traditional approaches to
recruitment should be supplemented with a variety of non-traditional ones, such as
searches on social media, of recent applications, or alumni networks. Strategies that focus
on corporate culture and unique and exciting work have also become important ways to
attract top talent (Carnahan & Somaya 2016). It is important to be aware that women
perceive specific brand messages and language differently than men and that the language
of a job posting may fail to reach this key demographic (Florentine 2017, Kumar & Pansari
2015). Similarly, companies should not ignore internal candidates. Publicizing openings
internally is a good way to identify internal competencies and promote a brand that
encourages employee development (Phillips 2008). Finally, referrals should be part of any
talent acquisition strategy – both from existing employees and from new hires – as these
are often the best ways to find candidates.
3. IT employee development and retention. These strategies establish a career path
development framework that is aligned with IT competencies of the future workforce.
Overcoming the talent gap of today means companies must develop their own talent as
well as revamping talent acquisition strategies (Kane et al. 2016). Organizations should start
by recognizing that current employees may have a diverse skill set that is not completely
understood and which could be valuable if developed. They should also assess the efficacy
of their current employee engagement strategies (Kumar & Pansari 2015). Strategies aimed
at creating new and meaningful opportunities for existing employees will increase both
satisfaction, employee loyalty and retention (IDG 2017).
“Employee-centric” organizations offer regular training, career advancement opportunities,
assistance with achieving a good work-life balance, and empower employees to make
decisions. Connecting people with the information and opportunities they need to succeed,
focusing on their development, and creating strong teams also puts employees in charge of
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talent branding which will pay off in more positive brand awareness (Hunter & Coleman 2016).
Mentoring, extracurricular activities, and other initiatives to extend and deepen relationships
with employees also boost employee satisfaction (Kumar & Pansari 2015). Organizations should
also seek to promote diversity in their teams, both to counter unconscious bias and also
because such teams have been shown to promote greater innovation and productivity (IDG
2017). Each of these efforts requires intentional and focused efforts on the part of management
to design, execute, and monitor.
Create New Talent Management Behaviors and Structures New talent management strategies are notoriously challenging to execute because they
require comprehensive and multi-functional changes in an organization's practices, culture, and
behaviors. The group identified six areas where behaviors and structures will likely need to
change:
1. Recruitment and onboarding processes. Process fairness, including transparency,
communication, and timeliness, has been shown to be a critical factor in why candidates
accept or reject a job offer (Mandiwalla 2017). "It takes way too long to fill our high
demand positions," said a member. Transparency about what the job entails is essential.
This is not only key to talent acquisition efforts but also for retention. Most candidates who
leave a job within the first year do so because of poor job or cultural fit (Byford et al. 2017).
Complexity is also an issue. "Take some time to apply for a job on your website,"
recommended a manager. "If it takes more than three minutes, it's too complicated."
Once hired, a person needs to be integrated to become a fully functioning member of the
team. Few companies provide meaningful support during this stage even though effective
integration can reduce the time needed to reach full performance by 30% (Byford et al.
2017). The biggest stumbling blocks in this area are lack of understanding of organizational
politics and culture and poor cultural fit. A recent survey of IT leaders showed that many
wished they had had mentoring in these areas when they first joined their firms (APC 2018).
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Coaching, mentoring, and formal training are the biggest gaps organizations have in
integrating new members (Mok & Berry 2016) and few of the focus group companies had
good processes in these areas.
2. Internal development. IT career development is the number one retention vehicle for IT
professionals (Dachenhaus 2016). Companies therefore need formal career development
programs with defined career paths and competency levels, funding for training, managers
who can coach and mentor, and informal development opportunities, said the focus group.
The most important on-the-job development practices include the opportunity to work on
high-stakes, high visibility jobs, or innovative projects. Formal classroom training is also
valued (Hamori et al. 2015).
With rapid changes disrupting their workforces, CIOs and IT leaders must become more
willing to reskill their existing employees as opposed to hiring new ones (Berry & Mok
2015). One company with a major commitment to retraining is AT&T. It strives to give every
interested employee the chance to change with the organization. It started by
documenting existing skills gaps and formulating future role profiles, and then simplified
job titles to foster the development of interchangeable skills, for example, 17 roles have
evolved into the job of 'software engineer'. It has also created a series of curated course
bundles and a new model of career paths that supports lateral development and both
ascending and descending career moves (Donovan & Benko 2016).
3. Culture and structural changes. Companies typically realize only 63% of the potential value
of their business strategies and inadequate human capital practices play a big role in this
lost value (Martin 2006). Traditionally, companies have had a low appetite for risk,
functioned with a hierarchical leadership structure, and work was performed in silos. With
digital business, leaders must foster experimentation, aim for speed, embrace risk, create
distributed leadership structures, and encourage collaboration. Making such changes
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means that leaders must be intentional with culture, rethink traditional models of working,
invest in their talent at all levels, bolster risk-taking and collaboration, and provide
employees with the resources and opportunities they need to improve their digital skills.
When senior leaders actively develop these traits, they are more likely to retain their talent
and attract more people to their organization (Kane et al. 2016).
Flatter organizational structures organized around agility tend to create more productive,
effective, engaged employees (Mok & Berry 2016). Other experimental structures include:
communities of practice, scrums, self-directed teams, virtual centres of excellence, micro-
work, crowdsourcing, hackathons, internal startups, digital acceleration teams, and
expertise ecosystems (Morello 2016). A significant change among focus group
organizations is the elimination or modification of traditional performance evaluations in
favor of more immediate and consistent feedback in the form of conversations about
improving performance and professional development.
4. Non-financial factors. Although compensation is important, much research now shows that
there are many other factors that will attract and retain talent as well, such as:
• Innovation (Moser et al. 2015, Hunter & Coleman 2016)
• Workspace (Hunter & Coleman 2016)
• A chance to work on interesting projects (Florentine 2017)
• Employee experience (Mok & Berry 2016)
• Availability of technology (Mok & Berry 2016)
• Lifestyle perks such as remote work, flextime, and benefits (Moser et al. 2015)
• A creative, inspiring, fun corporate culture (Florentine 2017)
• Opportunities for personal growth and to make a contribution to the success of the
organization (Florentine 2017).
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5. Meaningful work. One of the most important areas of talent management is the creation of
meaningful work. "People want to grow and need good work that focuses on the why,"
said a manager. "We need to look at how we distribute work assignments and give credit
for work performed." Another added, "The tone is set from the top." This underlines the
personal nature of meaningfulness, which relates to doing a job well and being recognized
and appreciated by others (Bailey & Madden 2016). Meaningful work is at the top of
Maslow's hierarchy of needs and addresses an individual's opportunity to self-actualize. IT
professionals expect their employers to offer work that is not routine, makes a difference in
people's lives, and which they find challenging. When available, this highly motivational
type of work leads to improved performance, commitment, and satisfaction (Hunter &
Coleman 2016, Ransbotham et al. 2015).
Interestingly, although employees must discover meaningfulness for themselves,
organizations and leaders can inattentively promote meaninglessness through the
environment they create and how they treat their staff. Some of the key ways they can do
this include: disconnecting people from their values – often seen in the tension between
the organizational focus on the bottom line and the individual's focus on the quality or
professionalism of work; taking employees for granted and failing to recognize their work;
giving people pointless work such as occurs when priorities change; treating people
unfairly; and overriding people's better judgment (Bailey & Madden 2016).
6. Continual revaluation. "We struggle to make progress in some areas," said a manager, "so
we measure and track everything." Although measurement is the best way to identify
problems and improve, the focus group companies in general agreed that they don't do a
good job of measuring how well they're doing in talent management. As a result, most
don't know their turnover rates, how long positions remain unfilled, or how many jobs are
filled internally. Similarly, none deeply analyze the results of exit interviews that can, if
designed properly, uncover HR issues, employees' perceptions of work, working
15
conditions, organizational culture, and leadership styles (Spain & Groysberg 2016). And
only one organization tracks gender and diversity in IT.
Focus group members recommended documenting and evaluating every process involved
in talent management from acquisition, to development and retention, to termination. "We
need to understand every step and what is involved in it," one said. Getting feedback from
employees should be seen as a strategic opportunity as well, although it is difficult to get
honest answers without using third parties, the group noted. One way to do this is to solicit
ideas from people for improving the organization, framing it as encouraging innovation
(Spain & Groysberg 2016).
Apply Technology Appropriately Although there have been HR systems for several decades, few companies have invested
significant amounts in them because HR has never been seen as strategic. Today, this is
beginning to change both because the cost-benefit profile is changing due to more
inexpensive, cloud-based systems, and because of the needs and expectations of employers
and potential employees. But despite the existence of more available solutions, experience has
taught us that merely throwing technology at such a complex problem will not be effective and
indeed, earlier versions of talent management platforms have been significantly lacking
(Poitevin 2017). Technology can be a significant component of developing a more robust talent
management capability if it is used appropriately. There are several ways technology can help:
1. Simplifying transactions. Talent management is a complex mix of transactional and
relational elements. Technology can be used to keep the multitude of transactional
components involved in acquiring, managing, and retaining talent simple and easy to use,
leaving the relational ones appropriately to humans. Ideally, transactions should be user-
friendly, short, able to be completed at the convenience of the individual, and timed
appropriately (Dachenhaus 2016). However, all too often companies utilize technology to
make things more convenient for their organizational structures and processes rather than
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their present or future staff. Companies should consider how HR transactions can be used
to build a positive brand from the point of first contact and at all points in a person's
employment.
2. Supporting processes. At present, talent management solutions are not well-integrated but
do provide some effective point solutions (Poitevin 2017). They can be used in a variety of
innovative ways for recruiting, such as finding potential candidates, improving the
candidate experience, and making the process more efficient. And AI is beginning to be
used to match jobs and candidates. Tools can also be used to improve understanding of
market dynamics, and support other talent management processes including: career
development, workforce planning, and job analysis.
3. Connecting the dots. Technology is the best means to collect the data involved in multiple
talent management processes, such as: workforce planning, talent acquisition, on boarding,
performance appraisal assessment, goal management, learning management, competency
management, career development, succession management and compensation
management (Freyermuth et al. 2017). As such it can assess an organization's talent
management maturity and make sense of the data involved (Buttita 2014). And because
talent management must serve a variety of stakeholders including: executives, HR
professionals, recruiters, current employees, and potential ones (Hunter & Coleman 2016),
software can support each type of work, provide important input to it, give real time
feedback on the success of various talent management initiatives, and offer different views
of the data as needed.
4. Collecting metrics. Metrics provide visibility on an organization's human capital and its
talent management capabilities. Technology can be used to produce these metrics and
also to perform analytics to understand root causes of problems, said the focus group. "We
put these metrics in a dashboard for our management so they can see how we're doing
17
with our talent management initiatives and how effectively our HR processes are working,"
said a manager.
5. Providing specialized tools. Finally, technology can be used to support individual career
development. AT&T has developed a number of specialized tools to help individuals assess
their performance, competencies, business experience, and credentials and to generate a
personalized talent and development profile (Donovan & Benko 2016). It has built other
tools that analyze hiring trends within the company and provide profiles of different jobs
with simulations of realistic job-related situations for interested internal candidates. The
company's tools also help employees identify their skill gaps and facilitate online retraining.
In turn, with the data it collects, it can monitor gaps, the use of these tools, and successful
placements of retrained employees.
Recommendations for Managers Improving an organization's talent management capabilities is clearly a long-term, complex
proposition but the focus group had some specific recommendations for how to start:
1. Take leadership of the issue. Talent management is a responsibility no-one wants so this is
an opportunity for IT leaders to step up and lead through influence. Start by identifying the
key stakeholders involved, including senior business and HR managers, working to educate
them about the value of having a human capital management plan to accomplish overall
business strategy, and aiming to build support for a collaborative effort to improve the
organization's talent management capabilities.
2. Consider the bigger picture. Understand your talent brand. Go online to see what people
are saying about what it's like to work in your organization. Identify the channels through
which you currently recruit and consider ways to incorporate internal skills better,
encourage referrals, and address non-traditional recruitment. Evaluate your employee
18
development and retention strategies from an employee point of view and consider how
these could be improved.
3. Look outside the box. Almost none of the focus group were hiring at an internship or entry
level, although most were considering it. Members noted that hiring students for work
terms helps both companies and students get mutually comfortable and ensures job fit.
One company is also hiring disabled people. In both cases, members stressed the
importance of training both managers and team members in their specific needs. Some
members also participate in international case competitions and sponsor hackathons with
the winners getting jobs. In addition, evaluate your job postings to eliminate unconscious
bias so as to not screen out female candidates with masculine words (Shearman 2013).
4. Build versatilists. The IT world has long-debated whether it is best to hire and develop
technical specialists or encourage more generalist skills. With many IT skills moving to
business areas, this is a grey area that's getting bigger, said the focus group. Now that IT
skills changing more rapidly, leaders are seeking to acquire and develop more agile
capabilities that have broad application in various roles and which can be recombined in a
number of ways to provide greater business value. "We definitely need people with more
holistic views who are able to adapt their roles in different situations." said a manager.
5. Pay more attention to job fit. "Job fit is more important than skill set," said a manager. "We
need to find ways to assess fit before hiring, such as having applicants work with peers."
Poor job fit can be responsible for up to 80% of employee turnover and a large proportion
of the costs involved in recruiting (Craig 2015). Articulating your organizational values
clearly to candidates and expressly considering fit when hiring are thus two ways of
improving your retention rate.
6. Outsource for specific technical skills. Clarify whether or not your organization will need
19
specific technical skills in the longer term and how closely these need to be integrated. If
not necessary long-term, or if there is a critical need, outsourcing is the best solution.
7. Start measuring. Only one of the focus group companies had a comprehensive program of
measurement for talent management, citing the well-known maxim, "If you don't measure
it, you can't improve it." It is also true that if something isn't being measured, no one is
paying attention to it. Measurement is therefore an integral part of taking leadership in
talent management.
Conclusion The IT workforce is changing and will need new and different skills in the future. In the
meantime, the demand for talented IT workers has never been greater. There is no panacea for
this dilemma and IT managers will not be able to resolve all components of this themselves.
However, they can take more proactive leadership of this issue, addressing what components
they can, and seeking to educate and influence key stakeholders in other areas. This paper has
shown that talent management is a complex capability that must be approached strategically
and from a variety of perspectives. Lower order, piecemeal approaches will not be effective.
Nor is this a problem at which technology can (or should) be thrown. Instead, it is time to
recognize the long-term strategic value of having a talented, skilled, IT workforce that will help
companies transform themselves for the digital age and design a holistic approach to
developing new talent management capabilities.
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Concept The purpose is to bring senior IT managers together to examine topics that are of critical concern to them and their organizations. Via the Forum, members share experiences, learn from their peers, establish valuable networks, and develop practical strategies for creating, implementing, and managing IT solutions.
Recent Papers § Innovation with Technology § Emerging Technology Management § Developing a Data Strategy § Developing a Cloud Strategy § IT in 2020 § Transforming to Dev-Ops § Developing Thought Leaders in IT
§ IT’s Role in a Culture of Experimentation § Managing Disruption in IT § Balancing Information Security and
Enablement § Artificial Intelligence § Moving Towards an API Economy
Participating Organizations § Bell Canada § BMO Financial Group § Canadian Tire § CIBC § Empire Financial Group § LCBO
§ OLG § Ontario Teachers Pension Plan § Ontario Universities’ Application
Centre § Reliance Home Comfort § Sun Life
Membership Membership in the IT Forum is by invitation only. The annual fee is $3,000. Please direct inquiries to Dr. James McKeen at [email protected].