Recruitment and retention strategies: Your results may vary

I had the good fortune and privilege earlier this week to moderate a discussion group on IT recruitment and retention issues at IQPC's 6^th Annual IT Business Excellence Forum in Orlando. Although the weather in central Florida was unseasonably cool for this time of year, the discussion was anything but.

We had about ten people in our group, most of whom are IT managers for a variety of Fortune 2000 companies and government agencies. To get the conversation rolling, I decided to start by asking where everyone's biggest pain points are - in IT staff recruitment or retention. The reactions were all over the map, and their responses would soon indicate that the only unifying theme among this group are the challenges they each face in recruiting or retaining skilled IT professionals in their respective geographies.

One manager from a defense contractor pointed to the high percentage of senior programmers from his organization who are slated to retire in the next three-to-five years. Meanwhile, he faces the daunting task of trying to keep less-experienced IT staffers engaged and interested in working with older legacy systems that aren't nearly as hip as .Net.

Alan, a CIO for an American Indian tribe in the Southwest, spoke of the difficulties he faces in recruiting and retaining top-notch IT professionals in a rural area which boasts scenic vistas and quality skiing but little else. "We don't have any shopping malls or much of anything around here other than a Wal-Mart. It's a tough sell," he says.

Meanwhile, Carmen, an IT director for a Northeastern cosmetics and fragrance manufacturer, talked about how he prefers to recruit people who have an entrepreneurial spirit and "unusual" college degrees rather than computer science majors in order to help drive innovation throughout the company's business units. Still, he's vexed by the challenges of finding adequate funding to provide his staff with the technical training that they nonetheless require.

The experiences cited by these IT executives demonstrate both the differences and similarities they each face. Finding and retaining good, qualified IT professionals continues to be a big problem for a lot of IT managers, even in a lousy economy.

And it's not just the usual suspects that executives are having trouble locating like .Net, PHP and J2ee developers. Harriet, an IT manager for an international financial services firm in the Midwest, mentioned how it has taken her organization up to four months just to find Cobol programmers. Sourcing doesn't solve her problems since contract IT workers "don't provide us the business expertise that we need," she says.

To help lure and keep really savvy developers, Harriet and her group have reached beyond their traditional boundaries. After developers have been hired to work in the company's Wisconsin offices and have gotten to learn the ins and outs of the company, Harriet has allowed them to move out of state and work remotely if they so desire. A dozen programmers are now dispersed in different states and it's worked out well, she says.

Tough times call for creative problem-solving.