The Naked CIO: Recruitment nightmares

Lying on CVs, exaggerated skills and inflated egos are the petty recruitment problems facing our embattled CIO, newly arrived at a largish company. The bigger problems run deep and are crippling the IT industry.

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It's time to wage war on home 'workers'

Is it just me or are applicants for IT jobs at an all-time low? Their experience is never applicable - and what happened to key non-technical skills? If that weren't bad enough, measured against some fairly basic requirements their track-records generally rank as dismal.

Some of the roles at my new company have now been available for more than four months because I am not prepared to fill a vacancy with individuals who do not meet the basics.

I have begun to ask myself why this is. It could just conceivably be the way we recruit staff at all levels - but we have tried many different methods.

You have to take your hat off to those companies with graduate training programmes. That seems the perfect way to get certain skill-sets into an organisation. Unfortunately, we don't have a graduate scheme although I am seriously considering introducing one.

There is no consistent basis for evaluating individuals. That is a huge concern for me and should be a major worry for the entire industry.

Technical training is valid but it does not identify if someone can perform key job-related functions. The two winners in our industry are Prince and Itil standards which inspire a great deal of confidence in me. But others I treat with distrust because I find their standards of industry certification extremely inconsistent.

Yet that is just one of the problems. Another issue is the general arrogance of potential applicants who think they are God's gift to IT. Why does the IT industry develop this character type at a far faster rate than other fields?

Not that I am averse to hiring someone with great levels of confidence - but I do find a sense of humility endearing.

Other unattractive traits are falsification - or sometimes blatant lying - on CVs, overstating job-related responsibilities and exaggerating proficiency in technologies where quite clearly there has been only marginal exposure. All those failings are symptomatic of today's IT recruits.

But the profound malaise is an attitude that just about everyone sees themselves as a freelancer, whether a permanent employee or not. There is no longer any sense of loyalty for the job - the focus is on money and salary.

This means organisations are having difficulty managing payroll-related costs to try and meet the demands of these over-inflated applicants.

This in turn puts pressure on IT management to control costs in the face of poor performance by untalented and marginal recruits. If this appears harsh - it's because it is meant to be.

I honestly believe over the next three years one of the greatest challenges for the IT community will be the appropriate recruitment of staff to fill necessary roles in IT departments.

The importance of this cannot be overstated as these people are the foundation by which successful IT delivery in the organisation will be measured.

We need to establish better guidance to achieve a sense of consistency in skills and roles. We also need to establish a better best practice for the recruitment of effective and skilled staff. If our people are the future of our industry, then the time to act is now.