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7 interview mistakes that cost you key IT hires

February 1, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, dallas technology news, IT Job News, IT News/by admin

A subpar interview process is a chief reason why IT pros turn down job offers. Here’s how your hiring team may be sabotaging its chances of landing top talent in a tight market. If you were to call Sherlock Holmes to help you discover why top tech talent who you’ve interviewed declined your reasonable offer, […]

Measuring IT project success post-COVID—and 4 leadership lessons learned

January 5, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, IT News/by admin

Despite challenges, the pandemic has unearthed opportunities from both a technology and strategic standpoint and has introduced new ways to measure the business value of digitization projects. The pandemic has had a dramatic and adverse impact on companies of all sizes and geographic locations over the course of the past several months, including lost revenue, […]

7 interview mistakes that cost you key IT hires

February 1, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, dallas technology news, IT Job News, IT News/by admin

Measuring IT project success post-COVID—and 4 leadership lessons learned

January 5, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, IT News/by admin

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7 interview mistakes that cost you key IT hires

February 1, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, dallas technology news, IT Job News, IT News/by admin

A subpar interview process is a chief reason why IT pros turn down job offers. Here’s how your hiring team may be sabotaging its chances of landing top talent in a tight market.

If you were to call Sherlock Holmes to help you discover why top tech talent who you’ve interviewed declined your reasonable offer, he might call your mystery common. But the killer is not — as you might believe — the mercurial nature of candidates, a failure of education, or anything outside the room where the interviews happen. It’s more likely that your process or team are inadvertently undermining your own efforts.

“People blame the candidates, but the interview process is the main reason people turn down jobs,” says Barbara Bruno, author of High-Tech High-Touch Recruiting: How to Attract and Retain the Best Talent by Improving the Candidate Experience.

It could be the questions you ask, the people asking the questions, or a host of other missteps that telegraph a subtle message to candidates to move along.

I asked hiring managers, recruiters, and directors of talent what — specifically — hiring teams are doing to cost them those key hires they so desperately want.

You’re fishing with the wrong bait

Candidates end up in your interview room because they responded to your job description. That’s your bait. As with actual fishing, the bait you use has a lot to do with what you catch. You might want to check that you are targeting the right people and expectations.

“There seems to be a huge disconnect right now between traditional job requisitions — that are a laundry list of skills — and how candidates will be evaluated on the job,” Bruno says.

Bruno suggests ditching the laundry list and instead taking a hard look at what your team needs in this role. “I always ask employers, ‘Can you give me five performance objectives?’ or ‘How will the candidate be evaluated in six months?’” Bruno says.

Once they are forced to answer those questions, she finds hiring teams discover that much of their “must have” list won’t be needed in the position. Even worse? There are many more skills — like the ability to prioritize, problem solve, communicate, and ask for help — that aren’t in the job description but that anyone who hopes to succeed in the role will need to possess.

Step back from your shopping list and think instead about what success in the role would look like. Then come up with skills and experiences that would genuinely help.

Measuring IT project success post-COVID—and 4 leadership lessons learned

January 5, 2021/in Articles, Dallas IT News, IT News/by admin

Despite challenges, the pandemic has unearthed opportunities from both a technology and strategic standpoint and has introduced new ways to measure the business value of digitization projects.

The pandemic has had a dramatic and adverse impact on companies of all sizes and geographic locations over the course of the past several months, including lost revenue, reduction of staff and cuts in IT budgets and spending. However, as we look back, there were some positive aspects as well, and more to come as plans are put in place for a post-COVID recovery.

Most companies, for example, were able to quickly pivot to a work-from-home structure to support employee safety, sustain and even increase productivity, and for the most part keep business activities on track. The transition has been so successful that many organizations plan to keep a portion of their workforce remote for the foreseeable future, in part to provide resiliency in the face of uncertainties. Weaknesses in IT infrastructure, process, and resources also became very apparent during the pandemic, pushing many companies to reduce or eliminate legacy debt, improve security, and increase investments in cloud services.

One additional upshot of the COVID crisis is a significant increase in the pace of digital transformation activities that are rapidly changing business models and user behavior. The pandemic has not only accelerated digitization but has exponentially increased the adoption of a digital process. What we anticipated to happen in the next five years is happening now, and what we thought wouldn’t have worked in the past is now possible because of the pandemic.

Digitization becomes a must-have

The life insurance business, for example, often relies on face-to-face sales interactions. But the pandemic turned that business model on its head. While we were already working on digitizing the sales process, there were pieces that needed to be accelerated or there soon wouldn’t be a business model. For us, digitization activities moved from nice-to-have to must-have in a matter of weeks. If we can’t get data electronically, underwrite automatically, or deliver policies digitally we can’t do business in today’s world.

Since March, we have delivered in less than 30 days two key initiatives that would have taken months, if not a year, to deliver under normal circumstances. The first is an automated underwriting process that uses data to manage risk up to $3MM without requiring the invasive process of going to a client’s house to take and test blood samples. The second project allowed us to electronically deliver policies to our customers since we had a limited in-office staff who did not want to rely on ‘snail mail,’ and agents could not meet the client to deliver the policy themselves. We are now working on the third transformational initiative that was originally projected to span multiple years but will now be done in 18 months.