Tuesday, July 29, 2008
IT Hiring Practices
IT continually disappoints the folks on the business. My thesis is that IT interviews is at the root cause as most test presentation skills vs ability...
Why does IT have to continue the HR facade of interviewing when the pendulum has swung too far towards emphasis on soft skills? Imagine if business customers were smart enough to figure out that the person running IT didn't actually know anything about IT or that their coveted very expensive enterprise application will fall apart in actually implementing it as the folks who sold it have never actually built anything.
Business/IT alignment cannot occur without having credible members on the team. This goes above and beyond their ability to present and there needs to be a common set of core skills that all within the enterprise has. If you are an employee of a large enterprise, have you considered asking each and every member of the enterprise architecture team what skills they 100% have in common?
The obvious answer of course is usage of Microsoft Office tools as we can draw pretty cartoons in Visio, our IDE is PowerPoint and we are more than capable of ranting via email and scheduling meetings of nebulous value via Outlook, what other skills do we all have?
If we all have nothing in common but soft skills, how can we concretely implement our strategy? How can we expect business customers to trust IT? Do we really think business customers are that dumb?
To make matters worse, we attempt to hire even more folks just like us. Have we ever realized that diversity should be embraced? The enterprise needs folks with soft skills. Likewise, we also need folks with technical skills and those who can hang technically with the best of them.
Nowadays, with the emergence of work from home strategies where face-time as a construct will become extinct, if we focus on soft skills, aren't we hiring to the past and not for the future?
| | View blog reactionsWhy does IT have to continue the HR facade of interviewing when the pendulum has swung too far towards emphasis on soft skills? Imagine if business customers were smart enough to figure out that the person running IT didn't actually know anything about IT or that their coveted very expensive enterprise application will fall apart in actually implementing it as the folks who sold it have never actually built anything.
Business/IT alignment cannot occur without having credible members on the team. This goes above and beyond their ability to present and there needs to be a common set of core skills that all within the enterprise has. If you are an employee of a large enterprise, have you considered asking each and every member of the enterprise architecture team what skills they 100% have in common?
The obvious answer of course is usage of Microsoft Office tools as we can draw pretty cartoons in Visio, our IDE is PowerPoint and we are more than capable of ranting via email and scheduling meetings of nebulous value via Outlook, what other skills do we all have?
If we all have nothing in common but soft skills, how can we concretely implement our strategy? How can we expect business customers to trust IT? Do we really think business customers are that dumb?
To make matters worse, we attempt to hire even more folks just like us. Have we ever realized that diversity should be embraced? The enterprise needs folks with soft skills. Likewise, we also need folks with technical skills and those who can hang technically with the best of them.
Nowadays, with the emergence of work from home strategies where face-time as a construct will become extinct, if we focus on soft skills, aren't we hiring to the past and not for the future?
