It’s the end of the college basketball season here in the US. At this time of year I get a little nostalgic for my former life as a basketball coach. I always enjoyed playing in March as that meant our team was doing well and advancing through the playoffs.
I recall one year while in graduate school at Washington State University when our basketball team was struggling. A couple of starters were hurt, another player suspended. We were relying on our backup players towards the end of the season. When asked about why the team was not performing well the coach said “we didn’t recruit these guys to be starters.”
Ouch.
That coach moved on soon afterwards, as most coaches tend to do for one reason or another. But that comment always stuck with me. As a coach myself I knew it was my role to find the best talent and assemble the best possible team. It was my job to not only find talent but to develop their skills. I would never walk into the athletic directors office and say “sorry we aren’t performing well, but I can’t seem to find any good talent out there, and the guys we have just aren’t developing fast enough.”
I can’t imagine I’d leave that meeting with my coaching job still intact.
Fast forward a few years (OK, decades) later and I see people comment frequently about how they can’t find talent to fulfill an IT role. DBA, server engineer, network admin. The list goes on but the feedback is the same: there seems to be a dearth of talent. “We can’t find any good DBAs” you will hear people say, and they will list out all the deficiencies for the candidates.
Most companies look to hire someone by employing recruiters, both internal and external, to work through their human resources department. These are your coaches. If they aren’t getting you the talent, then you need to go find the people that can attract and recruit talent. You can’t allow a coach or recruiter to keep telling you that the talent doesn’t exist. It does exist, it’s all around us.
Here are the three reasons I see as to why you hear someone claim they can’t find talent:
1. Expectations are too high
They are looking for the top 1%. If you want to only hire the top tier then you need to go after and recruit the top tier. If you expect to put up a HELP WANTED sign and have the top 1% of all applicants send in a resume then you are doing it wrong. As a coach I can’t hold out for a seven foot tall player, I need to go find someone that is shorter but can still rebound.
2. Silly requirements
I’ve written before about bad job requirements. If you list out four different roles in a job description (or have those expectations, see above) then you are likely not going to be able to find anyone. As a coach I can’t think of trying to recruit someone and say “OK, after practice I need you to take care of the team’s laundry, make their dinner, and then help them with their homework. Oh, and on game days you’ll be driving the team bus, too.”
3. Inability to coach or train
Let’s say you find someone but they aren’t quite in the 1%. You may hesitate to bring them on board because you don’t have anyone around that can help them develop into the role you need. As a coach I made certain I put players into places on the floor where they would be the most successful right away. Then over time I would work on developing their skills so that they could contribute in more ways. If you don’t have someone that can help coach or properly train, then you likely won’t take a chance on hiring someone outside of the top 1%.
It’s also possible that you are told that no good candidates exist because the people doing the interviewing don’t want to bring someone on board that is better than they are. Most good basketball teams are focused on winning, not playing time. Be mindful about the folks you have doing the interviewing and make certain they aren’t afraid of “hiring up” when possible.
The next time you hear someone say they can’t find qualified people to hire I want you to think about the real reason why. Chances are if you make a few adjustments in your hiring process, as well as your internal training, you may find that there are plenty of candidates that would be wonderful additions to your team.
4. Wanting top 1% but only willing to pay top 50% salary.
I’m laughing ’cause it’s true.
Darn, I was going to say that!! It’s so true though I’ve seen job descriptions where they ask for a SQL MCM and are willing to pay $100k (DC Area)! Are you kidding??
Agree with that one
Love it. So very true. Another thing you don’t mention but if a company tells me they only want the best then they had better be in that bracket themselves, otherwise they can forget it. From my experience companies that usually make these statements are mostly trying to mask how utterly bad they really really are.
I’ve heard that as well. It’s one thing to want to attract the best, but if you manage to get them in the door you have to show them why you are the best company they could possibly work for.
Also, most people don’t leave companies; they leave bad bosses. So if a company is having a hard time retaining specialized talent, they should take a hard look at which managers are losing the most people. Sometimes it’s just demand for the talent. But sometimes it’s a bad leader or a meh leader that is being compensated in a way that makes them not value their team.
Wise words, but fools don’t see it that way unfortunately. They keep saying that they’re better off without that person and that the company is great and it’s great to have new blood.
I agree with your article. I recently switched my job and DBA position was open for more than two months. When I initially started, it took them two months to decide to call me for a phone interview and then on-site. During the interview, I found out that there is only one other candidate that I am competing against and they offered me the next day. Mindful that this is a Fortune 500 company(A). This company has won best companies to work for many years.
Interesting enough, during the time I applied for this position, another Fortune 500 company (B)and a local health provider (C) had SQL DBA position were open and I applied for it too. Same thing happened. The company B recruiter contacted me, got all the info and then there was silence for 3 months. Samething with company C, recruiter contacted and after multiple attempts, was told that there are more experienced candidates in line so they are not going to consider me.
As soon as I accepted the offer for Company A, company B & C started contacting me to come for on-site interview. I had to decline them. I guess company C got so many rejections that they were willing to settle with less experienced person like me.
The problem I see is that companies take so long to respond that the top level candidates have already moved on and all is left is to scoop the bottom layer and then they complain that they cannot find talent. (Sorry for making the story so long)
I’m having that situation now from when I was looking at the end of last year. All I can do is reply, “Well, I’ve since taken a position, but thank you for your timely consideration…”
I wanted to share my experience here. In January, I was interviewed with a Fortune-30 company for a DBA position. It was a telephonic round and they said that they will get back to me in 2 weeks time. I did not hear from them in 2 months and out of curiosity emailed the person in March and the very next day he arranged my face to face round. I attended that but I was asked very few questions like on task manager, showing how to list all the indexes and tables etc. I was not sure if they were really looking for a database administrator with 6+ years experience. And not surprisingly, I never heard back from them. Premium companies do take candidates for a ride at times and my friends have been in similar situations before too.
Chandan,
It sounds like they didn’t know what they wanted, or needed. Sometimes an internal group just decides they need a specific resource, but they have no idea what to do with the resource when it arrives.
I would say #3 is the big one from my point, but it’s not just a matter of “coaching” and “training”, it is a matter of the process. The mistake is that people are look for “10x programmers” where the real game is building a “10x team”.
I worked for a place that tried very hard to recruit me and I found out that they hadn’t been able to replace me for six months after I left.
The build process was unreliable and took half an hour. If anything went wrong because of my actions or because of some bad decisions somebody made seven years ago, I might have to do it all over again. They gave me a piece of crap laptop which only had two cores. They gave me an off brand IP phone which wouldn’t ring when my boss called. I could never keep a development server in the data center, and logging into the data center was like the beginning sequence of “Get Smart”. It took 30 seconds of waiting to create a ticket in the ticket system and another 30 seconds of waiting to edit a wiki page.
If I brought any of the issues up I was told I was not being a team player or that we were in crisis mode and didn’t have time to do anything the right way. I was always getting bitched out for being slow and late despite the fact that the project was two years late when I started.
This kind of experience has made we wonder if I’d rather have my house foreclosed on than work a W-2 job.
Paul,
That sounds like a nightmare of a place to work. And I agree, that place has serious issues that runs deeper than just the hiring process.
Thanks for the comment!
Tom