Creativity is key to recruitment

For Katherine Spencer Lee, creativity is one of the hallmarks for finding and hiring quality IT staff. Lee, executive director of IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology, saw that belief come to life when she sat down this summer in her local movie theater to take in the latest Star Wars epic. There, in the mix of preshow advertisements, was an ad from a company seeking IT help.

"That is a thing of beauty," Lee says. "It's thinking about where these people are. If you are a sci-fi, technology junkie you are in line to go see this movie."

While it appears it would take a lightsaber battle to get director George Lucas to film another such hiring opportunity, IT executives will likely have to turn to other avenues in the coming months to find quality staffers.

In a survey of 1,400 CIOs conducted last month by Lee's firm, 16% of executives polled plan to hire full-time IT staff in the fourth quarter of 2005, while only 4% plan to reduce personnel. The net 12% increase in hiring is the largest net increase since the third quarter of 2002.

But in this employee search, IT executives will have to battle over what surveys show are fewer and fewer qualified applicants.

Click to see: Katherine Spencer Lee

The number of college students who have declared their major in computer science has declined for the past four years and is now 39% lower than in the fall of 2000, according to the Taulbee Survey of the Computing Research Association.

Federal laws that cap the number of foreign workers also might limit the number of candidates. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last month said that the 65,000-person cap on H-1B visas for fiscal 2006 has already been reached. While that could mean more job openings for American students, the number of qualified students needed to fill jobs might not meet demand, considering the decline in computer science programs enrollment.

As a result, IT executives are taking inventory of what type of personnel they need and where they will find it. They say that while creativity helps, old-school methods seem to fit more with today's IT requirements.

"Executives today need to look beyond traditional technical skills-really what they were looking for in the '80s and '90s," says Jerry Lufman, an executive board member with the Society for Information Management (SIM), a professor at Steven Institute of Technology and a former CIO at IBM. "Now we are looking for skills for effective communication, interpersonal skills and project management skills. Those are the kinds of things that are really high on the list of consideration."

Lufman says you can't find those traditionally non-techie qualities on a résumé. "You have to get out and meet with job candidates, see how they relate to you, how effective they are in marketing themselves."

He says that tapping into professional networks, such as SIM, to find and meet potential candidates can do that. "With SIM, if somebody in my network that I have a lot of confidence in identifies a candidate for me then that is going to forgo a lot of the work that I have to do," Lufman says.