Resourcing
and recruitment
overview
This
topic starts with IT resource planning, a difficult area if it is your ambition to plan for more than about six
months ahead.
Resource
planning
Diaz Research has seen many
headcount forecasts provided by HR managers. Our
experience is that these usually underestimate the actual IT headcount. This
is true even
when the forecast is only for a nine to twelve month look-ahead.
Headcount
is of course only one aspect of resource planning: forecasting the numbers of
particular skills is even more problematic.
The problem is that to forecast headcount and skills accurately you first need a fixed plan of exactly what systems
and system enhancements are needed in the year(s) ahead. That is not realistic in the real-world business
environment.
The
wise HR or planning manager will therefore avoid getting heavily involved in detailed bottom-up resources and skills forecasting systems. A
broad brush forecasting approach, with a flexible approach to training and
retraining works better.
Resource
allocation
Resource
allocation is of great interest to many IT and IT HR managers. Some see it
very much in terms of efficiently deployment of people across multiple
projects, where some form of dynamic allocation is needed to maintain high
levels of employee utilization. Other see it as simply making sure that
the resources are going to the right projects: those with the biggest
business impact. A third group sees resource allocation in terms of
developing people, and keeping people motivated.
But
whatever the starting point the issues tend to be similar:
Who
owns the IT resource?
How
can we match our workstream and
priorities to our resources?
What
data do we need and what systems
can help us?
There
is a very wide range of approaches to this area. At one extreme is where the
line manager 'owns' the worker, who can only move jobs by applying for an
advertised internal vacancy, or perhaps by the intervention of their
boss's boss. At the other extreme is resource pool working where a
resource manager 'owns' the resources and lends them out for agreed
periods to line managers
or project managers; here, the resource manager does the performance
review.
Some
think these two options are the only options but in fact there is a vast
range of other options or sub-options. These might include Skills Groups,
Master Practitioners, Resource Allocation Managers and a host of other
roles.
Recruitment
IT
recruitment was very muted in the few years until 2005, when it recovered
somewhat from the record lows of 2002-2004. But what are the current
trends in recruitment?
The
first trend is away from recruiting trainees. Trainee recruitment has
recently recovered a little and we expect this recovery to continue but on
the whole when IT functions recruit they tend to be looking for skilled
people, not graduate trainees.
The
second trend is towards online recruitment (e.g. job-boards), which our
research tells us is a skill that many companies have yet to fully master.
As recruitment levels build up it will be interesting to see whether the
economics of using agents and job boards, sometimes quite inefficiently,
will cause some companies to once again retain their own specialist IT
recruiters.
Underlying
this whole area is, however, a big question about the exact nature of the
career proposition that is on offer to graduates. Our research has shown
that many companies do not have a
clear and credible proposition that stands up in the era of offshoring.
