The Chief Information Officer's Body of Knowledge: People, Process, and Technology

Chapter 2

Recruiting Best Practices

Walter Bacon

In times of economic growth and in recessions, identifying, attracting, and securing top IT talent poses a challenge to most organizations, whether they are a start-up, Fortune 500, or the fastest-growing Internet company in Silicon Valley. Why? In this chapter, we address these three aspects of recruiting with a handful of best practices. Some of the principles will be familiar; others might offer you an “aha” moment and provide you with a few tactics to add to your already established methodology. Either way, often we need to be reminded of the basics and the importance of not skipping steps in the recruiting process. When we forget the simple steps and rush the process, we can find ourselves painfully short staffed and perplexed as to why. This chapter is a reminder to slow down and cover your bases when it comes to building out your teams with top IT talent.

Best practices for recruiting top IT talent need to be looked at from two perspectives and addressed accordingly. The two perspectives are proactive efforts versus reactive efforts, or strategic versus tactical. Proactive efforts and strategies are what you do to prepare and ready your team for recruiting success. Reactive efforts, of course, are what you do when time is running out and you need the talent now! Both strategic and tactical game plans are needed to succeed in recruiting.

Let us first remind ourselves of the many steps a search can take us through as it continues ...