Challenges and Trends in Strategic IT Staffing
With over two decades of leadership in IT staffing and resource capacity planning, Cyndy Fuhro shares her insight about recruiting, hiring, and retention in IT today. Discover how, even during times of growth like we’re seeing now heading into 2019 and the start of the 2020 budget cycle, expansion has its challenges.
Employment growth is strong today with global opportunities in key international markets and here in the United States, where we are experiencing historic lows in the unemployment rate (as low as 3.7 percent in Q4 2018). Last month, hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created and filled in health care, manufacturing, construction, transportation, logistics, and warehousing.
Supporting the IT needs of all those verticals and many others, CDI is also poised for growth with new hiring goals between five and ten percent of our workforce. While our recruitment methods focus on bringing in top talent—the brightest, most engaged, skilled, productive employees—several factors in the recruiting landscape remain challenging.
Strategic staffing for specific IT verticals such as automation, workload virtualization, and cloud service management continues to present challenges for CDI. Managing those segments today, especially the customer experience, is subject to dynamic shifts, disruptive new players, mergers and acquisitions, changing partnerships, or even competition from former customers.
Talent is About People First, Technology Second
At CDI, we have always believed that the digital transformation that has taken place over the last several years was never just about companies adopting more new technology.
We embraced what we knew was a culture shift and managerial challenge and responded to these market changes by developing a strategic IT staffing model that helped us attract, hire, train, and cultivate new talent, and then we integrated our best people into core business processes as the leaders and top contributors they wanted to become. CDI framed talent development in terms of our larger business strategy with a steady focus on emerging technologies that improved operational efficiency and delivered customer value.
We are competing with other employers for top talent and we recognize that emphatically. However, I can honestly tell you that CDI is always applying new techniques to differentiate ourselves and identify who might be the next match for one of our openings.
Social Networking
One of the central challenges we face is identifying true top talent, and one of the largest pieces to help us solve that modern recruiting puzzle is working with our marketing team to develop messaging and utilize social networking sites. Social media provides a relatively low-cost way to separate serious active candidates from passive candidates who are not actively seeking a new position.
We also use them to validate applicant claims, cross-check résumés, verify work history, and get a snapshot that reveals a candidate’s cultural fit including their work habits, job skills, and any personal platforms that might align well with or conflict with business goals, philosophies, market dynamics, or the expectations of our clients.
And we’re not alone. A 2016 study by the Aberdeen Group revealed that three out of every four HR staffing professionals regularly uses an online career site linked to social media for talent acquisition. Portfolios, references, resumes, and other applicant achievements are available on popular social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These tools help us to source and screen candidates with shared interests and authentic passions rooted in specific technologies.
Millennials are currently the largest generation in the U.S. workforce and most, if not all, are finding job opportunities via social media. Between mobile apps, social media, and job posting sites, the technology is simply there and ready to go for candidates to post their resumes and see what happens. It’s just the way the world works today.
Strong 2019 Outlook
The crunch is on right now because it is the fourth quarter of 2018. Even though our plans are to hire additional employees over the next six months, the fourth quarter is always a slow time due to the holidays and generally conservative end-of-year behavior from both hiring managers and candidates.
2019 looks strong and we’re adding new verticals to our portfolio in order to continue competing at the highest level. That also means we’re aggressively looking for new employees to staff these offerings. Our partners can see us growing and continue to offer us new opportunities to collaborate and win deals. Our customer base also continues to grow and the services we offer existing customers continues to expand.
Referrals
All our growth generates buzz. Like a viral video or tweet that gets a lot of attention and retweets, that buzz creates the greatest gift a business can experience—more referrals. And they come in several varieties: employee referrals for job candidates, partner referrals for consultants looking to make a move, or even our clients referring us to their partners or to their own new clients. They all share a common theme, a growth mindset, allowing us to add more staff.
For example, a recent engagement with a manufacturing firm looking to automate and innovate went so well, the client relayed their satisfaction up the chain to their affiliates and subsidiaries and before we knew it, CDI was actively bidding on and winning new work in a related field we had not previously targeted. That is the power of the referral and it all stems from strong teams staffed with the best people.
Authentic organic referrals capture the success and support we provide. They drive expansion into new verticals and set the stage for re-telling new success stories that resonate with new clients and the cycle continues with more growth, new hiring, customer success, and referrals to grow again. It’s a win-win for CDI and our customers who enjoy continued success in meeting their goals.
CDI: A Tradition of Excellence
I want to summarize our core challenges in a short list before explaining what I think we are doing at CDI to overcome these obstacles and bring in the best talent. Over the past year, I would say CDI, and really the entire IT industry, experienced the following staffing challenges, prefaced with the phrase, “It is difficult to find…”
- …qualified candidate referrals and candidates who are actively ready to accept a new position.
- …candidates with knowledge and experience in specific verticals or high-demand skillsets (for example, service management, integration with ServiceNow, CRM tools, automation, architecture, and sales).
- …candidates who want to commit to a specialized technology (due to emerging technologies, they have more opportunities than ever before to try something new).
- …candidates who want to commit to a market space (due to market shifts including the expansion of technology into the mainstream consumer world, they have more opportunities to jump from B2B to B2C, or switch to the education, government, or non-profit sectors).
- …candidates with skills to handle legacy technology, but also with knowledge of next-gen tech.
To meet these challenges, and to compete and attract the best talent, CDI has adopted a simple philosophy and engraved it deep in the heart of our recruiting strategy. We welcome each and every candidate we select into the larger CDI family. No one has to go it alone. We are still a private family-run business. At CDI, every employee is family, from the president down to the newest individual contributor on a team.
And we showcase excellent work in our consulting engagements. Clients and partners will recognize your hard work. We celebrate and support you. CDI provides a culture where it is easy to share ideas, present opinions to challenges, and collaborate in an ego-free environment with other team members.
I want to echo some truly magical words from a top recruit I proudly discovered way back when he was just in his mid-twenties nearly two decades ago, employee number 34, who is now our Director of Infrastructure Services, Tony Daniello. In his poignant blog post, Tony expands on what makes CDI unique, and none of us can say it better than this:
I was taking a chance here, and eager to explore the world of consulting. I wanted to find the right growth opportunity with the right company where I could be part of something special.
With CDI, client relationships were not exclusively all-business. Some clients have given me the distinct honor of counting them among my good friends. And I know that they can call on me in the same way. When I look back at some of my first customer assignments, I’m most proud of the ones that turned into long-term relationships.
Our culture encourages social interaction on a professional and a personal level. It is a culture of team work, inclusion, and learning. Even though the business has grown significantly, we still maintain a small, almost family-like vibe where the owners make it a priority to get to know as many employees as they can. This culture recognizes the knowledge and experience of our most loyal employees and treats them like the assets they are.
At CDI, we overcome the challenges of IT staffing today by creating opportunities for talented employees to discover their passions, sharpen their skills, drive their motivations, build new memories, work as a team, and complete milestones with the recognition and celebration they deserve as part of our growing family.
Thinking about joining us? Check out www.cdillc.com/about-cdi/careers/.