Harvard Business School CIO's hiring process

When Stephen Laster is looking to hire someone into his IT department at the Harvard Business School (HBS), a candidate's technical skill is the last requirement on the CIO's mind. Foremost is whether a candidate will create another strong link in his 100-plus person team.

Building a cohesive IT staff is paramount for Laster, who has served as Harvard Business School's CIO since October 2006. His IT department is responsible for developing and supporting an IT infrastructure used by 1,900 MBA and doctoral students, 1,300 faculty and staff and more than 9,000 participants in HBS's executive education program. To meet the needs of these demanding stakeholders, everyone in the IT department has to get along with one another. They also need to cultivate strong relationships with the end users, especially the ones on campus.

But finding friendly IT professionals who are also intellectually curious, good problem-solvers and who can wear different hats isn't easy, especially in the Boston area, where there's so much competition for talent. To that end, Laster puts a tremendous amount of effort into determining whether a candidate is right for his organization. His hiring process is lengthy. He spends time with candidates outside of his office. He involves many stakeholders in his hiring process. And IT staffers play active roles in job interviews with candidates. They also have a strong say in whom Laster hires. His process, which he further describes in this Q&A, may seem onerous to some, but it helps him get exactly the right people and it helps build trust and respect between him and his IT department.

All of Laster's techniques and hard work on the hiring front pay off. Today, he oversees a staff that he truly appreciates. Of his IT department, he says, "I would just like to clone them all forever. They are truly nice, smart, skilled, adaptable folks."

What are your IT staffing needs and challenges?

We have a large catalog of Java-based applications running the school in a highly customized fashion. This lets us meet the unique needs of the business school. The challenge is that we have to commit to having a very sophisticated development staff to keep pace with all of those custom-made applications. We need very adaptable, engaged engineers who can work both as applications developers as well as system integrators and system extenders. We are a midsize shop and people have to wear many hats, so being adaptable is key.

The same holds true in our support organization, which is fairly large. We're about 35 or so folks in support, and we pride ourselves on really giving a high level of support. As IT is everywhere on campus, one could easily outstrip one's support capability if you don't get creative in terms of how you deliver support.

Boston is a really competitive market. I think we offer a competitive compensation package, and one advantage we have is that we are never going to go out of business. We also have the advantage that we are doing a lot of creative work with new technology. We've been fortunate that we have been able to fill our open positions, but in some cases it takes three, four or five months to find the right candidate.