WINNING THE WAR FOR TECHNO-TALENT

As businesses of all kinds advance into the new Millennium, their employee base is becoming dominated by brainworkers. And Information Technology brainworkers are especially in demand. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, openings for skilled IT workers in all industrial categories is 65% of America's total employment market. And by 2005, the Department of Commerce predicts that a million new IT jobs will have been created -- with
only about 400,000 qualified people to fill them. Those figures mean (a) that you're going to have to fight hard to get the best, and (b) the best know what they're worth in today's job market and are looking for the best possible deals they can get.

In the 1970s and early '80s when unemployment was running at 12-15% and talented job seekers far outnumbered the positions available to them, it was a buyer's market. It isn't like that anymore. Talented, techno-savvy job seekers don't have to sell themselves to companies anymore. It's the companies that have to do the selling now. As the corporate scramble for top IT talent grows steadily fiercer, more and more business leaders are coming to realize that money alone isn't going to attract the very best. If your company isn't also known as a place where employees are respected, talent is nurtured, and new hires are provided with genuinely challenging work, you'll never get the chance to sign-up the top people you need. You may not even get the chance to interview them. Here are ten strategies to help your company win the war for techno-talent:

1. Give talented people open-ended job offers ("A job's waiting for you whenever you want it").

2. Hire top talent when there isn't a job opening -- and create a job to fit the person.

3. Consider a wholesale talent acquisition (hiring an entire technical team from another firm).

4. Speed up the time it takes to hire by letting managers make on the spot job offers.

5. Conduct focus groups with top IT people to find out what their hobbies are, what they do for fun, which Web sites they regularly visit. Then gear your recruiting to reach others with similar habits -- by running ads with certain types of movies, for example, or sponsoring certain kinds of events. Cisco targets passive job-seekers (people who already have jobs) by hiring space on other Web sites where "passives" tend to hang out--the Dilbert Web page, for one, TravelQuest, the reservation service for another.

6. Develop relationships with students early. Offer high-school students internships, invite grade schools to visit your company, and sponsor university events. Deal with college recruits in a very straightforward manner. They're turned off by company propaganda. They want honesty and specific examples.

7. Conduct your on-campus recruiting with people who do the work -- programmers, engineers, and systems managers -- company volunteers who (preferably) have graduated from the school you're recruiting.

8. Benchmark your e-recruiting efforts by study other top companies' sites. Find out what the competition is including in the way of messages, graphics and attention-grabbing features. Oracle, for example, includes a Web feature that allows prospective applicants to follow "a day in the life" of one of its employees so they can see for themselves what it "feels" like to work there. Texas Instruments' site has a self-assessment page that gives prospects a chance to evaluate in private their own potential compatibility with TI's culture.

9. Sell your cultural "sizzle." Netscape's website begins with: "Words cannot capture the spirit of working at Netscape, so picture yourself at events like these . . ." What follows is a variety of snapshots of its employees drinking beer at the All-Hands Staff Party and enjoying themselves at the Second Anniversary Jazz Festival. Intel's "jobs" page highlights the fact that the organization ranked 4th overall in FORTUNE'S 1998 survey of most admired companies and 32nd in the best-100-to-work-for stakes.

10. Make the recruiting of techno-talent a part of everybody's job. Give referral bonuses to employees, send "want ads" to employees' homes and get their families involved, ask new hires which people they would recruit from their former companies or schools. Southwest Airlines even made customers part of their recruiting effort by offering a referral bonus to any passenger recommending an IT worker if it turned into a hire for SW.