6. Hiring for the Longer Term

Hiring is such a critical long-term event that all too often doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.  Your success as a leader is so dependent on the people who work for you that you should view this as one of the most important things you do.  To hire successfully you need to truly understand your culture and what sort of person will fit in and what sort won’t.

Over the past fifteen years I have left the technical interviewing to my managers and senior technical people.  I have interviewed strictly for “fit”.  For example, if your department (and mine was by design) a collaborative one, then you should avoid hiring lone wolf type personalities.  They would get frustrated, as would the rest of the staff.  I also tried to hire people who had an interest in the business.  To me that is key.  We all know that technology is going to continue to change rapidly.  By having employees who understand and identify with the business, I had employees that adjusted to new tools and technologies.  If you hire people who identify with a technology and then change technologies, they are much more likely to leave because the basis for their identity is gone.  The total cost of replacing staff is very large,

It is easier to train people in a new technology than it is to train them in the business.  Having a temporary contractor who has expertise in a new technology and who is willing to share is a very efficient way to bring employees up to speed with new technologies.  I used this model with great success over the years.

Another advantage of having employees identify with the business is how well the user community receives them.   I constantly had new users tell me how impressed they were by the way my staff, even the most techie of them, would talk in business terms instead of techie terms.  Years ago a wise VP I worked for talked about having Business Smart IT and IT Smart Business.  If IT does the first part, it is much easier to get users to do the second part.  The result is a high performing engaged team and a company that maximizes their use of their IT investment.

My mental model of people and whether they can have a business focus is a normal distribution curve with the one tail being techies no matter what you do and the other tail being business focused no matter what you do.  The majority of people fall in the middle and will be either business-focused or techie-focused based on how you treat them.  Treat them as business people!