Acquiring and retaining talent in entrepreneurial IT firms

Abstract

Over time, all businesses have started to incorporate IT subsystems into their core operations for reasons of efficiency. Due to increasing corporate dependence on IT to achieve both operational excellence and strategic advantage, there is agreement that the effective utilization of IT depends on the availability of IT professionals to plan for, develop, maintain, and integrate information systems applications.IT has been a high growth sector through the last decade or so. There has been a big buzz about entrepreneurial activities in IT industry in the country. Many enterprising individuals have jumped out of regular jobs, considered safe options earlier, and have started ventures on their own. Most of the times the core team is a group of people known to each other either as colleagues or from college days. Once these organizations complete initial few months and start looking for growth, one of the issues that they face, is the talent or human resource. The IT profession possesses some unique characteristics, including rapid changes in technology that quickly render existing skill sets obsolete. The idea of a work force is rapidly changing to that of a talent force . While headlines are filled with stories of massive layoffs and abrupt bankruptcies, CIOs still struggle to find and retain skilled employees. The ability to attract IT professionals with desired skills and to retain them so they provide productive contributions is an outcome of the human resource and work practices utilized by an IT organization. Conventional wisdom suggests that in order to retain productive employees, it is necessary to pay them well and give them interesting work. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom does not always appear to apply to IT! Often, even organizations that offer competitive salaries and work with leading-edge technologies, experience high levels of dissatisfaction and higher than desired turnover among their IT staff. The IT professional as well as the IT profession possess characteristics that could circumscribe the practices that are most effective for recruiting and retaining them. For example, during recruitment of IT professionals, firms seek a mix of two very different skillsets: IT skills and business skills. Further, the demand-supply asymmetry for IT professionals is constantly in a state of flux. Despite the problems experienced by large numbers of firms, a number of companies have been able to successfully find and retain the best IT talent. This project aims at arriving at best practices to hire and retain, in the presence of high growth challenges, in entrepreneurial organizations.