Finding Talent Inside Your Organization

Unless your name is Google, Facebook, or Amazon, you may not have candidates beating down the doors looking for jobs.

Finding the right employees is a challenge for nearly every enterprise, data center company, and cloud services provider. For most organizations, a combination of strategies is required. It can be difficult to maintain the high-level workforce required.

If there was an IT talent gap in recent years, it’s only gotten worse as the economy has gotten better. Unemployment in the U.S. is at a 17-year low 4.1% and the E.U.’s is steadily falling, too. Available IT professionals are being snatched up as quickly as they move on from a current employer or come out of colleges and training programs.

Improve the Recruitment Process

Unless your name is Google, Facebook, or Amazon, you may not have candidates beating down the doors looking for jobs. To maximize your market pull, first refine the recruitment process. Find out what draws employees to your company over others and make sure to promote those features. Also be sure to eliminate as much friction as possible. Interested and qualified individuals should find themselves working for you soon after they submit their résumés, rather than waiting around for another stage in a frustrating screening and onboarding process.

Plumb the Internal Depths

Only so much talent exists on the open market, but there are other resources available—inside the organization. Many employees want to move up, and they want to “future proof” their careers with more training and skills attainment. Companies that can offer these opportunities stand to retain more of their valuable staff and create the talent they need.

Outsource Strategically

The smart enterprise should also take note of what talent it needs to own and what talent it can “rent.” It’s an extension of the transformation already underway at many businesses to identify the functions that differentiate versus those that are important but don’t drive competitive advantage. At Uber, for example, accounting is non-strategic; the best possible ride-sharing app is the key to growth.

The more non-strategic tasks that can be standardized and even handed off to others, the more focus can be devoted to the core business—and to securing the talent required to excel where it matters most. A third party maintenance provider can help. A company like Park Place Technologies maintains a staff of specialists, networking experts and storage aficionados and server whizzes.

Why send the HR department scouring the globe for individuals who can configure Dell servers, others who know Cisco networking gear, and still others who are familiar with IBM, HPE, or other equipment in the environment? Engaging a third party maintenance provider is one “flip of a switch” decision that puts all of these experts—and more—at your fingertips.

It may be one of the few easier solutions for today’s talent crisis.