Hiring Managers Just Don"t Get IT

There has been a lot of hand-wringing lately about the shortage of IT professionals in the U.S. This shortfall is driven both by traditional businesses that adopt new information systems and by the extraordinary growth of dot-com companies.

Consider the results of some recent studies:

With that kind of evidence, you would think that hiring managers -- particularly those working in the IT field or high-tech industries -- would be at the head of the pack in terms of using the Internet to recruit for their open positions. After all, they’re the guys in charge of paving our much-ballyhooed Information Superhighway. And yet, that’s not the case.

Another Forrester survey found that only 44% of chief-information officers tap the Net to recruit. In fact, internet job boards ranked third in terms of usage, behind internal recruiters and job fairs and tied with newspaper classifieds and headhunters. If CIOs have as much faith in their own work as they do in the Internet as a recruitment resource, we’re all in trouble.

Job Boards Are Ineffective

Does this mean that the Internet is not an effective medium for recruiting IT and other professionals? Perhaps. In the same survey, CIOs rated internet job boards as their least helpful recruiting method, behind newspaper classifieds and job fairs. To try to diagnose the problem, I visited several of the leading boards and took a look at the handiwork of the recruiters and hiring managers who are using them.

What did I find? Lousy job postings. Basically, the ads were nothing more than position descriptions and classified-ad copy. The information was about as appealing as a piece of tarmac. No sizzle, no selling, no effort to present an engaging and compelling value proposition -- something that might convince a happily employed IT professional that they should move on to some other employer and a different job.

In effect, these high-tech hiring managers were still living in the vacuum tube era when it comes to understanding the labor market. Evidently, they think it’s a buyer’s market, that there are more job seekers than there are jobs so they can afford to treat candidates like supplicants rather than customers. While they’ve been tinkering with their bits and bytes, however, the world has changed.

Despite our much-celebrated advances in technology, it still takes us nine months to make a baby, and we didn’t make enough of them about 20 years ago. As a consequence, there aren’t enough professionals to go around, and won’t be for another 15 years. That makes today’s recruiting environment a seller’s market, a coliseum-like pit where employers must compete ferociously for the favors of job seekers. The first salvo in this war for talent is the job posting, the hook an employer tosses out to try and catch the attention of candidates qualified for their opening.

To sink in, that posting must not communicate its message in the vocabulary of a buyer’s market. In other words, terms such as requirements and responsibilities are now obsolete. They incorporate an employer’s perspective that simply won’t sell to a candidate population that has become very used to being pursued. These candidates expect to be told what’s in it for them. They want a job posting that speaks from their perspective and discusses the opportunities and potential it offers them.

In addition, this information should be formatted for optimum accessibility by a population renowned for its click-and-dash online-reading habits. In fact, research shows that most people don’t read at all on the Web, they scan. Information should not be arrayed in dense, lengthy paragraphs, as on the printed page, but in short bits of information with plenty of headings and bullets. That way, even the most hyper of surfers can quickly absorb the message and be tempted to pause and consider the value proposition in the job posting.

How to Fix the Problem

So, here’s my message for CIOs and other IT hiring managers. There’s an IT shortage out there and it requires that you recruit in a new way:

These steps won’t cure the IT labor crisis, but it will improve your return on the Internet.