It has been a interesting week for articles on Computerworld I must say. It's been a while since I read it mainly because I've been very busy on a customer assignment and I was in recent times a little disappointed at the accuracy of some of the reporting. So I'm certainly finding some of the more controversial articles quite interesting this week.
Another one that stands out is this article on Poaching Talent, profiling comments on Simpl's CEO Bennett Medary's new Blog. The article quotes some interesting comments such as:
Medary says "vendors with the deepest pockets target and 'buy' specific talent required for immediate deployment to meet new or unfulfilled commitments. This often has the secondary effect of wounding the competition (and their customers) — killing two birds with one stone.
"Neither response is good for the industry or its credibility with customers!"
In a remark that appears to be targeted at Gen-i he comments: "Vendors with 50 - 60 vacancies each month do not have time for graduate programmes and other long term training/recruitment approaches! We have had a number of key staff specifically targeted by one large vendor recently, and my industry colleagues assure me that we are not alone."
Medary concludes offering to sign mutual non-poaching clauses with anyone "and publish who is and who is not willing to do the same".
Signing non-poaching clauses is no solution in my book. I think companies (and this is not targeted at Simpl) have to think seriously about how they look after and develop their staff. Medary starts to hit it on the nail with the comment "Vendors with 50 - 60 vacancies each month do not have time for graduate programmes and other long term training/recruitment approaches". I think this is exactly right - IT services companies must be putting in plenty of time and effort in keep staff by developing them. I think as long as someone is getting good money and good development then most people generally don't leave where they are working. Me personally I've found many of the large NZ SIs I've worked at are actually quite poor at growing peoples careers or they only do it with a small "key" subsection of their staff.
My experience as a manager in this industry is that if you don't provide challenge for good workers they will end up leaving for challenge somewhere else. When I ran the Microsoft practice at Optimation this was one of my primary concerns - get good work for people that’s a bit of out the box and make sure people have specific tailored career development programs for the individual. It's definitely no use taking a once size fits all approach. One tool I used quite a bit was learning profiling - i.e. working out the ways people learn knowledge. I figured that if I could work out how people learn, then I could probably work out a good development program. Some examples of this practically: One team member who learnt by working on the job doing super challenging customer work and had no patience for training and another one who liked solid work, but preferred structured training courses as he typically could apply better if he had the underlining theory drilled into him. As you can imagine I put together quite different development programs for each person.
A wise man in this industry once taught me that when people come work for you that if you develop them for their life careers then they probably will want to stay working with you for a good while. I truly believe this from firsthand experience and I honestly believe this is the best way to stop poaching. Oh and share options don't hurt either not that any System Integrators in NZ have caught onto this.