Recruit the Attitude All-Stars

If you want the Steve Waugh of IT management working for you, then you and your best players have to court him. This practice is called relationship recruiting.

Mandalay Resort's Austin hired a director she knew from a consulting company she had worked with while at Harrah's Entertainment and who continued to do work for her once she joined Mandalay. When Austin had an opening for a director, she contacted this person to tell him about the job. Because she had previously worked with him, she knew he had the right attitude for the job. He was an application architecture and development whiz; he had the desire and ability to teach others; he empathized with business users; and he was committed to learning and leading change.

When she learned this person was interested, Austin approached the principal of the consultancy and told him. Austin wound up with a top-notch director and hired a known quantity. And she maintained her relationship with this company because she conducted herself in a forthright manner. "By pre-identifying potential employees over a period of time, you don't make hiring errors," agrees Sullivan.

In addition, relationship recruiting can help CIOs get around the problems associated with being unable to get objective references. When Gevity HR's Zimmerman is looking to hire, say, an Oracle database administrator or a business analyst, and a candidate's resume indicates he has worked in Oracle shops, he and his staff will call the executives they know at Oracle as part of the reference-checking process to see if their contacts know the candidate. Zimmerman says that leveraging his contacts in the IT industry is a dependable way to get "good back-door information".

Winning the Game

Hiring is one of the most important aspects of a CIO's job. The value a CIO and IT bring to a company's bottom line is directly related to the quality of the individuals supporting the CIO and their chemistry. Taking the time to recruit the right people with the right skills and attitudes will vastly improve your hiring odds. Says Hofmann, "We're all going to be working together, so it's important that we have a very synergistic team."

SIDEBAR: Determining Fit Through Specific Questions

If the idea of psychological or behavioural assessments makes you nervous, there are other ways to evaluate a person's fit without the formality of a psychological test. San Francisco State University's management professor John Sullivan suggests that CIOs give candidates a sheet of paper with a list of 100 cultural variables or conditions such as fast-paced, collaborative, independent and competitive, and ask them to pick the top five conditions under which they work best and to rate them in order of importance. This type of quiz tells you essentially the same information as the Predictive Index tool, but it is less formal and intimidating.