InformationWeek

Seeking The Right Skills

A good recruiter is nearly as valuable as a good candidate when companies seek to expand client-server expertise

By Bronwyn Fryer
Issue date: Feb. 6, 1995

Don Roudebush is star-struck. It's part of his job. As the information systems (IS) director at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Inc. in Woodland Hills, Calif., Roudebush runs a 360-node client-server system that operates a hospital for entertainment industry employees. But it's not Roudebush's proximity to stardom that other IS managers tend to envy. Rather, it's his ability to find client-server talent. The IS director uses professional recruiters to find the right technology personnel to staff his 256-bed hospital.

That IS managers must now look for help to fill open slots is no surprise. The market for analysts and developers trained in distributed-systems skills surpasses the supply by at least half, says Ann Peter, president of Instruction Set, a Natick, Mass., consultancy specializing in client-server training. Finding those with more than a smattering of experience in Smalltalk or the Sybase relational database management system (RDBMS) presents most IS managers with four options: retrain existing staff with legacy systems skills; follow up on other employee referrals; advertise; or seek professional recruitment services.

Talent Find
Referrals are the most popular way to find talent. According to a 1994 study of 600 technology managers conducted by Pencom Systems Inc., a recruitment firm in Dallas, tapping existing employees or other professional contacts for referral s leads to more than a third of all new hires.

But sooner or later, even those with the fattest Rolodex run out of qualified contacts. That's when many like Roudebush turn to recruiters. According to the Pencom survey, more than one in three IS executives rely on outside professionals to help them locate client-server talent. For related story on seeking client-server personnel click here

Not surprisingly, recruiters come at a steep price. Most companies use recruiters who work on a contingency basis, but others--mostly larger companies or those looking to fill top-level IS jobs--use recruiters who work on retainer. Both types of recruiters charge anywhere from 10% to 35% of the successfully hired employee's first-year salary.

Jim Hohorst, a senior VP with $6.5 billion First National Bank of Chicago Corp., contracts with contingency recruitment firms. He oversees 100 systems developers and programmers who construct client-server systems for the bank's foreign exchange and interest-rate derivatives trading group.

A few years ago, the group needed to hire six programmers with object-oriented skills to develop custom trading applications for Hewlett-Packard Model 712 and 735 servers and Next Computer workstation clients. Hohorst hired a contingency recruitment firm, and paid roughly 30% of his new employees' first-year salary. "For most positions, I'd be reluctant to put money on a firm that asked for a retainer," he says.

Pricey Recruiters
Some companies refrain from using recruiters because they are pricey. Some avoid them because they wonder how much they understand the technology. Indeed, some IS managers complain that the average recruiter possesses neither the necessary technical knowledge nor a clear understanding of their business needs or cultures. Finding a recruiter who is reputable, savvy, and effective enough to know the critical differences is difficult.

Of course, many recruiters don't fake technology savvy and leave the finer points of differentiation to their clients. "The firm I worked with didn't really know what to ask me on the technical side," says Satch Chada, a systems officer who was recruited last fall for his C++ development skills to help First Chicago develop its trading system. "They warned me the interviews would be very technical and told me to be prepared. But they seemed to understand the financial industry."

The biggest problem is that some recruiters carry a reputation that Ed Taylor, executive VP at Pencom, calls "nasty." Motion Picture's Roudebush spent three years working as a technical recruiter for such companies as Bank of America and Baxter Pharmaceuticals before returning to IS management. He unflatteringly refers to those in his former profession as "body slammers" that "throw as many people at a company as they can to match a position description. Ninety percent of the time, those candidates are nowhere near what you're looking for." The result: Some IS managers are hardly better off than if they sifted through piles of resumes on their own.

Blame Not Easily Assigned
Still, recruiters are not to blame for this state of affairs. Client-server technology is changing too rapidly. "It's hard enough for most IS directors to keep up with all the changes," argues Roudebush. "Can you really expect a recruiter to do it?"

With or without a recruiter, the employer still has to do homework. Indeed, no recruiting plan will succeed unless a company has a well-thought-out client-server strategy in place. "People sometimes try to hire when they're not sure of what they're looking for,"notes First Chicago's Hohorst. "It's tough to get good people when you do that."

It's also tough to get good people to work or relocate to certain parts of the country. Technology salaries are lowest in the South and Midwest, so people with the requisite skills in those regions can be more difficult to find. "It's not easy to attract people to Tennessee," notes Steve Mar kman, a VP in Pencom's New York office. "If you're outside San Francisco, Boston, Austin, New York, or Chicago, you have to sell things like company stability, the career track, and benefits."

Wherever there are needs, IS managers should take the time to adequately screen recruiters. John Bruns, VP of technology at NationsBanc-CRT in Chicago, employs more than 800 people worldwide. Bruns says that growth in the financial markets has forced him to do a lot of steady hiring during the past year.

Recently, Bruns's 120-person IS department added six object-oriented programmers and Sybase developers to help build a company-wide credit reporting system to run on HP Model 735 servers and Next workstation clients operating Microsoft Windows.

Careful Questions
Bruns says it was important to ask careful questions of potential recruiters and check their references. "If you don't take the time now to hire the right recruiters," says Bruns, "you certainly won't have the time later when you'r e trying to work with someone who was a mistake to hire."

But if a business does cast its lot with an outside recruiter, it's important to move quickly when that recruiter finds the right candidate. "If you have 10 criteria for a position, be willing to settle for someone who fills seven or eight," advises Kevin Steele, managing director at Winter, Wyman and Co., a client-server recruiting firm in Waltham, Mass. "If you find someone you like, make them an offer. Chances are other people like them, too."

But how can an IS director assess if a recruiter will find the strongest candidate? Unfortunately, most conclude that it's a trial-and-error process. "You just have to find out over time whether a recruiter will do the job for you," Hohorst sighs.

Fortunately, there are guidelines to help an IS executive find good recruiters. By talking to staff, colleagues, and friends about recruiters, and interviewing recruiters carefully, managers can separate the good from the mediocre. Good recruiters are the o nes with a solid client base of satisfied customers. They've been in business for a while. They can prove that they know more than buzzwords.

A little research can help businesses identify a recruiter's talents:

Find out the size of the recruiter's client base.
Ask how long he or she has been in business.
Find out if the recruiter has a particular business or technology market niche or specialty.
Review recruiters' position and salary-level descriptions for their previous three similar job placements.
See if you can try out the candidate on a temporary or contractual basis.
Find out how quickly the recruiter can find a candidate for you.
Speak with other IS managers for whom the recruiter has placed workers. Similarly, speak with people the recruiter has placed.
Ask the recruiter to describe the last project he or she worked on: What did it involve? How many lines of code were written? Which technologies and architectures were involved? How lon g did the project take to implement?

NationsBanc-CRT's Bruns believes that finding good recruiters is like finding a good job: It's all a networking game. "If someone on our staff has had a good experience with a recruiter, we try to hire that recruiter," he says. "I knew a recruiter who would call me every 30 days, whether I had an opening or not," Roudebush recalls. "So when I had an opening, I told him what I was after. He found me a great candidate in 72 hours."

Such responsiveness is key to quickly producing new client-server systems. The best recruiters, Roudebush says, are likely to be workaholics. "If a recruiter puts in 60-hour weeks, reads 150 pages of trade journals before going to bed, carries a cellular phone, and is always reachable, I figure he or she will work hard to make me happy."

Illustration: Michael Smolin

Comments on this story?