Recruiting, hiring and retaining employees are all challenges in today’s competitive employment market. And it’s extra challenging when it comes to technology professionals. In this article you’ll gain tips on how to recruit, hire and retain technology professionals.
[related]For human resources and talent professionals filling tech roles can be daunting. When Indeed surveyed tech hiring managers, 83 percent of the survey’s respondents felt like they were losing out on real revenue and serious productivity, not to mention burning out their current team, thanks to a serious shortage of top talent.
The challenge is particularly trying for non-traditional technology markets such as AV integration in which there is often awareness gap by which the best prospective employees aren’t aware of career opportunities in the particular market.
In this article, any company looking to recruit, hire and retain technology professionals can learn from the practices at ConnectWise, a business software provider, for which hiring and retaining quality employees is crucial to business success.
ConnectWise partners, meanwhile, can go a step further working side-by-side with the business software developer on recruiting and onboarding objectives. Learn more here. [https://www.connectwise.com/resources/job-description-library]
Hiring Technology Professionals: What’s at Stake?
The importance of hiring the right person is hard to put into words. Recruiting and retaining top talent can be the key to success for a lot of companies as they establish themselves and grow.
ConnectWise has identified a three-step series of best practices to help guide professionals tasked with hiring technology professionals:
- Interview Best Practices
Conducting a useful interview tests the skills of even a seasoned hiring manager. The truth is that the selection process is about a lot more than just experience. You’re also looking for someone who brings something unique to the role, and you want to make sure your choice fits smoothly into the cultural dynamic of not only the team, but the company as a whole.
What to do? Focus your interview questions on more than just skillsets or the standard “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Consider more in-depth questions that your applicants might not have prepared for, like “What do you do that other people find annoying?” or “Tell me about someone who is better than you at something you care about.” There’s no perfect answer here, just a selection process that lets you see how a candidate responds to an unexpected question, and whether they’ll be as honest about their faults as they are about their strengths.
- Onboarding Processes
Your onboarding process sets the tone for an employee’s entire career with your company. You want to make sure that it’s smooth, organized, well thought out, and really prepares your new employee to do their job well. After all, if you set them up to fail from day one, they’ll probably do exactly that. If your onboarding process gets them started on the right foot, they’ll be more likely to stay with the company for the long haul.
What to do? Start by talking to your existing team. What do they wish they’d know when they were onboarding? What worked for them, and what seemed to be missing? Talk to your newer team members and your veterans, and make sure you’re keeping track of how their onboarding could have been better. Armed with the information from your existing team, you can put together a documented onboarding plan that fills in the blanks for new hires. As each person comes on, don’t be afraid to update the onboarding document as you learn new things or processes/company details change.
- Offboarding Improvements
Let’s be honest, firing someone feels bad. But it’s also a necessary part of keeping your team strong, happy, and productive. If you can’t get someone out the door when the time is right, they poison the team with negativity that eventually will drive away even your most loyal, valuable employees.
Without a defined process in place for handling offboarding, you’re stuck with employees whose issues are bringing the whole team down.
So, how do you know when it’s time to let someone go? Without a defined process in place for handling offboarding, you’re stuck with employees whose issues are bringing the whole team down because you can’t figure out how to fire them, or you’re letting people go without following a process that makes the reasons clear. Either way, you’ll be left with a team that feels less than secure.
What to do? Have a plan in place to identify team members who aren’t a good fit, document their issues, and offboard them when the time comes. Make sure your plan not only covers the human resources details of how and when to offboard an employee, but also what happens after they’re gone. Don’t leave your existing team holding the responsibilities for their own jobs plus the role that’s been abandoned without a documented plan for how everything is split, tracked, and finally taken over by a new hire.
Achieving a positive company culture is critical to keeping the best employees from jumping ship.
It Doesn’t Stop There
The truth is that every day, you and your team are facing change. You can adapt to it, roll with it, and allow your team to do the same, and that will not only cut down on the stress change can bring, but will let you constantly find flaws and adapt to improve them.
With an internal culture that embraces change, you’ll create a team capable of constant evolution.
With an internal culture that embraces change, you’ll create a team capable of constant evolution that keeps you, your team, and your business moving forward.
You’ll also make it possible for team members to speak up when there’s an issue, and a change-capable atmosphere means you’ll be able to pivot faster to address those issues.
That openness to change will also help encourage an atmosphere of radical candor, where your team feels empowered to talk to you, their peers, and others in the company about what’s truly going on. They can bring up issues, propose solutions, and feel safe talking about their biggest (and smallest) issues. At the end of the day, if you’re not talking about problems, they never get solved, so encourage an open discussion of policies, procedures, and ways to make work better for everyone on the team.
Ask Yourself: Why Should Employees Want to Work at Your Organization?
What makes a company truly desirable to work for is its ability to walk the talk of creating a positive culture, which means treating people in a positive way. This positive energy isn’t something that can be applied through external measures though. It starts from within.
Self-management is the practice of taking care of yourself so you can better take care of others. Be the positive, motivated, engaged example your employees need to see on a daily basis, but remember that authenticity is key. If you’re not “feeling it,” neither will they.
Your Vision Is Your ‘Why’
If you see the word “vision” and you don’t immediately think of your own, perhaps it’s time to revisit this concept. Your vision is your why. It’s the defining purpose in everything you do. Your vision should “pull” you toward your goals. It creates alignment within the team, creates loyalty to the cause and keeps everyone going in the right direction. This should be communicated often throughout the year, and should be something you strive for–not low-hanging fruit.
Get the Best on Board
If you want the best possible team to work with, start at the beginning: the hiring process. Retraining team members who aren’t a good fit is challenging for all involved, so make sure you’re getting the best on board by improving your hiring process. By adopting this mindset, you’ll ensure better employee recruitment and retention.
We believe there are three components to getting the right people on the team:
- “The Ideal Team Player” by Patrick Lencioni
- Philosophy
- Outcome Formula
Find the Right Mindset
At a recent ConnectWise’s IT Nation, author and employee retention expert Patrick Lencioni discussed how to identify, hire, and support essential team members. According to his book, “The Ideal Team Player,” great employees are humble, hungry and smart.
- Humble: Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less. Employees who exhibit this trait will be better team players.
- Hungry: Do they have a passion to learn? Will they go above and beyond? If employees are willing to trade in meaningless things for meaningful ones, goals and objectives will be met more readily.
- Smart: A high IQ is great, but a high EQ, or emotional intelligence, is what makes an ideal team player. Those who are aware of how their actions affect others’ emotions can communicate more effectively and efficiently.
Focus on Philosophy and Formula
Do you know what drives your team? Their internal currency? Discovering this can result in better performance and less burnout. As Simon Sinek said, “Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress; working hard for something we love is called passion.”
Once you’ve built your ideal team, and are focusing on what drives them, be aware of those who can drain the energy you’re working so hard to create and maintain. In John Gordon’s “The Energy Bus,” he introduces a helpful formula to determine how to identify “Energy Vampires.”
E + P = O (Events + Perception = Outcome): In other words, you can’t change events, but a change in your perception can drive a positive and opportunistic outcome.
