Catch me if you can

How have skill requirements changed at the top level?In my experience, in the last 10 years, certainly the last half a dozen years, companies have moved away from technical IT backgrounds and onto people who have some background in IT, yes, but with primary focus on their business skills. The classic CIO now sits on the leadership team, so they’re not one or two down in the pecking order. I think most CIOs, if they’re honest, will want to be near the CEO or to sit beside the CEO. A lot of organisations have recognised the rewards of that. I think a lot of CIOs who report to CFOs aren’t always happy with that reporting line and they feel a bit shut out of that decision making process. It’s becoming more prevalent to report directly to the CEO. I placed a CIO two months ago – he has no staff. Another organisation might call that an IT Manager, but this organisation, which is a government organisation, calls it a CIO.How do you make a distinction between an IT Manager and a CIO?Well, personally, my definition would be "a reasonably large enterprise with a substantial budget and a substantial team of IT professionals working underneath them”. Then again in some CIO roles, everything’s outsourced, so they’re like a vendor manager; they’re managing their suppliers into that organisation, managing the service levels that they’ve signed up to, and being more strategic, so that’s looking at the future, looking at trends. The CIO of your Telecom, of your Fonterra, of your Air New Zealand, is the more classic CIO notion, which is again strategic, but with a much wider, broader role, with much bigger budgets, much bigger staff responsibilities, much bigger project deliverables. Increasingly CIO roles are becoming more project driven. What trends are you noticing in the roles coming available within the market?Everyone would agree the market is picking up, but I’d temper that by saying it’s still slow going and it’s still patchy in certain areas. Certainly in the last three to six months there’s been a gradual pick up in demand for IT staff. I think that as the recession becomes more of a distant memory, confidence is slowly picking up and again I mean slowly. So there are certain pockets of IT that are very much skills short, particularly in software development, but in other areas you could certainly say there are more people than positions going around. In general, companies are having more budgets released, which is providing more funds for projects which have perhaps been put off during this last 18 months of the downturn.Have you noticed that IT has taken a backseat to other areas of the business?Very much so. It was pretty much stripped to the bones. A lot of middle management roles were taken out in IT departments - team leadership type positions. Companies tended to keep the doers as opposed to the team leaders or the managers in certain organisations. I think they chose that time to become leaner in their operations in terms of gaining efficiency. I think it’s worked at some organisations and others have found themselves a bit light on resources. The workload has caught up, but the resource isn’t quite there, so they’re now hiring again. From a market perspective there’s certainly a lift in confidence.To what extent does a CIO get involved in the recruitment process?Ordinarily you wouldn’t think so, but my experience is that they’re getting more and more involved because they’re trying to improve the cultures of their organisations. I know some fairly large organisations who might be hiring for relatively junior to intermediate technical IT roles. They’ll go through the process, but the last stage of that will be the CIO. "He wants to meet you please,” we say, or the HR department says.  Sometimes candidates can get a bit of a shock from that. The whole reason is that they’re trying to mould their teams, to mould their culture and to marry their values.Gone are the days where being able to fix a PC meant you’d get the job, you’ve also got to be able to speak to the customers, you’ve got to be able to relate to your team mates and you’ve got to provide good customer service. It’s that softer side, as well as the technical side, that CIOs are really taking a hands-on approach to looking at.Any business owner will tell you that IT is a service. All they’re doing is providing service that is meant to enable the business, so if you can’t communicate with your customers, whether they be internal or external, you really are no longer deemed to be that useful from an IT perspective, so you’ve got to have the whole package. That’s difficult, because IT people generally speaking can be quite reserved or insular sometimes, so their challenge is to overcome that and to work on the people side of their communication abilities.How does your selection process bring that side of people out?We face-to-face interview every candidate. I think it’s absolutely essential. We see ourselves as an HR arm of our customers, so we’ve got to understand what each of our customers’ requirements are technically, operationally and culturally. It then becomes our task to match that in the candidates that we’re servicing. It’s challenging because everyone is different and everyone’s got their own ideas of what makes a good candidate, so the key is knowing your client. There’s no two ways about it, you’ve just got to understand what their hot buttons are, what they’re looking for in the candidate.Candidates who come into our office and display energy, enthusiasm, positivity, sound ability to communicate at a good level, are the ones who instantly put their hand up in our eyes as better candidates than those who have equal ability in the technical space, but who just don’t have the people skills. That’s been a big change in the last few years and that’s going to be ongoing.I understand that some of the technical courses in the institutes and universities have specific areas focusing on that now, as opposed to just the technology. It’s thinking about the customer and how to handle that customer. IT departments get a bit of a bad bat and I know from personal experience, if you get a good person you just do not want to lose that person; they’re worth their weight in gold if they can relate to you, respond to you, talk to you in layman’s terms and get things done in a quick and efficient manner. That’s what people are looking for.With that message of staff as an asset, to what extent is recruitment happening internally within companies, rather than with agency assistance?Certainly there’s a mixture of both. You’ll always see internal promotions. People who can work up and down a business and be prepared to get out and meet their customers, i.e. the internal users of their organisation, they’re the ones who end up shining, putting their hands up and getting noticed. It’s the one who sit back and stare at their monitor all day and are reluctant to speak to their customers who are the ones often overlooked for promotion, generally speaking. Some people have mission critical jobs that don’t require a lot of communication at all, but they’re still deemed to be valuable to the organisation.By far the biggest movement is the people who can hold themselves well in a meeting, calm a customer down, set good expectations and follow up - it’s that sort of interpersonal skill that’s really sought after. Everybody wants to work for somebody they like, can relate to and get on well with. It’s no different in IT departments.What’s the state of the graduate market at the moment?I’m not sure what’s going to happen with this year’s intake, but for the last year or two, graduates have had a real rough time trying to find entry level positions. It’s been quite sad. We’ve had a lot of people come out of institutes and universities full of zest and really keen to put their education to good use and they’re coming up against a lot of closed doors. That will change as the economy starts growing again. It was all about cost cutting measures. I think the top tier of graduates will always be in demand, but by far the majority are finding it quite tough. Unfortunately we’ve lost a few people to the industry already. They’ve not been able to find things so they’ve had to go off and work wherever, a bar, a shop, just to keep things going.What roles are booming right now?A lot of people are looking to get into software development. There are a lot of people looking to get into IT in any way, shape or form. The infrastructure support side and networking are very popular places for young candidates to want to be in. On the flip side, the demand from the industry has been for more experienced candidates, in the intermediate to senior level range. Programmers in particular have been in big demand in the last six months; software developers, systems administrators and network engineers at a more senior level too.We have also had a lot of demand for software testers and business analysts which tells us that a lot of project work is starting to ramp up again. They’re almost the first people who are brought on, the business analysts at least, to scope out the initial phases of the project, so it’s a good time to be a business analyst in Auckland right now, as it is to be in the software testing space.Where it’s soft is probably at the higher end of the market. It’s harder for very experienced IT managers and to a certain extent, project managers, to pick up good roles at the moment. They’re clinging to what they’ve got and there’s less demand for those senior people. They carry a big cost and during the downturn companies shed a lot of those senior positions. They found they could get through quite well without the top-heavy approach that they might have had before. Responsibilities have been shared around.The weakest end of the market has been at the senior end. It’s a numbers game. In a fairly small town, you might have an IT shop of 10-15 people; there’s only one IT manager. They work hard to get there and they’re the kind of roles people want, so they tend to stay on and those roles come up infrequently now.Are IT people moving around much?They haven’t been by choice! I think after two or three years in a demanding, challenging position, that’s when people start to think about new challenges and generally that’s the time-frame for people to come in and start to affect some change. What tends to happen is that once that change is implemented, if there’s nothing big on the horizon, they’ll start looking for other roles. They don’t want to do a hand-holding role, "business as usual” role. They steer clear of those because there’s no interest, there’s no excitement, there’s no challenge in keeping the ship steady, so most people at the CIO level at least will be looking for transformational change, project implementation and delivery, something that really excites people and gets them worked up and fired up – that’s what they love doing.What we’re finding is that usually after two or three years people start asking questions and some will go contracting to get that delivery focus and flavour on a more regular basis, because that’s what contracting is really about. We’re seeing an upswing in the contractor market. That was always going to be the case as the permanent market picks up and resources get a little bit scarce again. Companies are opening their eyes to hiring contractors to tide them over while they find a more permanent solution, or if it’s just for a project when they need someone to come in and deliver, then get out. There’s more confidence to do that now because there’s more budget to do it.How are salaries faring overall?To summarise, it’s been fairly static this last year. There’s pressure on now on both hourly contractors and salaries because companies have been able to get away with paying a lot less in the past two years. Now the market is picking up and candidates are having more confidence to go out and look for jobs, it is creating a bit more competition. Companies that haven’t offered pay-rises in the last couple of years are finding themselves in a position where a lot of their staff are having a look around because of that, because they’re frustrated and if they can find a better deal elsewhere, they’re probably more open to thinking about it. Before they would hold tight because they just want to be secure in their position, whereas now they’re feeling comfortable to go out there and look again. We’ve seen many examples this year with candidates wanting to move, or indeed moving, for better conditions elsewhere. They’re in that situation where they’ve had a lot more put on their plate for no more recognition or reward and it’s got to the point where if the grass is greener they’ll go and have a look at it. That’s a risk for a lot of companies at the moment as the market picks up.