Hire and hold IT staff in 2015: The Reg's how-to guide Employers beware – after years of relative inactivity, job seekers are gearing up for change. Economic improvements and an increase in business confidence have led to a burgeoning jobs market and an epidemic of itchy feet. While a certain amount of staff churn is inevitable – and even good – new research from IT recruiter Hays …
Upvote for the truth here,
I've noticed they want several specialist skillsets in one but only want to pay the lower
example "must have minimum CCNA, MCSE, HP and DELL accreditations"
for a 2nd / 3rd line position in London at £30-35K
Belittle their work, cancel their training, hobble their working practices so they are shackled to the wall, constantly alter direction so they can't plan and prepare, nix their leave at the last moment to keep them bound to you.
Then when they are totally crushed, grey husks of their former selves and joy a distant memory, their self-esteem be so ruined that they will not even feel themselves worthy of more. They will not apply to other jobs, and will shun recruiters as the ray of hope burns them and they will recoil, shaking their heads.
"... hobble their working practices..." I could cry. Just been told that tomorrow we lose the admin rights to our PCs. We will now need a form to request that a company director authorize any proposed update. No doubt this form will need to be accompanied by a fully costed business case. Good job I was updating my CV last night.
Hmmm can't say I agree with anything much in the article other than give me a respectable pay and benefits. I don't need a carrer path(infact I hate it - I'm a sysadmin the tech changes faster than any carrer path would allow - just let me get on with what I do well - setup systems with monitoring and stuff and let me read el-reg and lolcats etc... while I wait for things to break).
The ability to learn new skills, for instance, although it can deteriorate, tends to persist longer than the last thing you learnt, especially if you are always "hot-skilling" as well as hot-desking.
Numeracy, literacy, integrity, client-facing ability, teamwork -- in fact, all the skills that don't have certs -- may be even more important. My very first consultancy boss was simultaneously a great believer and skeptic of the interview. The former because (only) an interview will usually tell you whether the candidate is a cultural/team fit, the latter because it won't tell you their technical skills. He used to take these on trust, and terminate the liars, exaggerators (and, perhaps even worse, people still at level one "unconscious incompetence") before their short probationary period expired.
But I'm highly skeptical of the several suggestions I read that pay doesn't matter that much. It does to me, who are all these non-materialistic people out there? Is IT pay considered so high that people don't really care whether it goes up or down a few thousand a year?
I think convincing someone to leave their existing employment for less money but better environment/role is a very difficult sell, because those are 'soft' factors which the candidate can't evaluate until he gets there and could easily be bullshit.
On the other hand, retaining good staff by giving good working conditions instead of paying top whack is definitely a reality. I doubt there's a single employee at my small ISV who couldn't earn more money somewhere else just by doing a job they'd enjoy less.
My last job was awesome, great team, great product, great office environment. Then the management re-org happened and we ended up with 3 new layers of management. The new CTO brought all his underlings over from his last post and the place resembled something out of Office Space with their old (certainly not new) ways of thinking.
Within a year our happy, productive team resigned one by one until there was just one left, a pretty spectacular dissolution of a talented and happy team. The pay wasn't great for me but it wasn't all about that - I hate those managers that came in and ruined something so very good. It baffles me why as our product(s) brought in millions per annum.
People at the top need to listen to their tech teams and not drone on about meaningless core values and bloody well get with the f@*king times! If team X is always on the foosball table or Xbox - if they are hitting burn downs and churning out solutions to problems who cares?
(We never had an Xbox)
:)
After 15 years of being told we techs were a high expense, had too expensive conditions, wanted costly training to do work with new kit and software etc it became easy to think IT techs were unwanted while the number of managers, release managers, change control and finance refusers continued to grow. So suddenly there is a place for local staff that actually do IT? No wonder I discourage kids from IT. The bulldust causes breathing difficulties. While the managerial classes continue to think of themselves as minor deities and depreciate technical skills it will only get worse in the IT coalface.
A digression: The way admin timewasting rules are invented to micromanage staff suggests to me the PHB group don't have enough to do and feel inadequate. So Northcote Parkinsons famous dictum comes into play. "Work expands to fill time available"
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