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How to Identify Soft Skills in IT Job Candidates

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As IT departments are called upon to play larger, more public roles in today’s businesses, the skill set of the ideal IT employee has changed. How can companies identify whether a job candidate has the ‘soft skills’ to bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the business?

IT is out of the backroom and in the front office – so it’s time to hire candidates who match that new reality.

This presents a vexing problem for both recruiters and employers alike. In a recent survey, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that employers look for candidates who are decisive, can solve problems, are good communicators and are analytical.

That need is the same for technology hires. Given how the role of IT has changed, employers see soft skills mattering more than ever.

“IT is no longer in the back room with the lights off writing code,” says John Reed, senior executive director at Robert Half Technology, an international technology recruiting and staffing company. “IT is in the room with the business leaders when decisions are made.”

It’s also important to consider whether your IT people are working directly with customers or internally with other employees, says Tammy Browning, senior vice president of U.S. field operations for Yoh, a consulting organization that provides IT talent.

“The heads-down IT person who’s just programming is becoming less and less attractive to employers, because you have to be able to communicate with your business partners or their customers,” Browning says.

What Soft Skills Do IT Workers Need?
Reed says you want your IT people, whether they’re servicing external customers or employees within the company, to be able to communicate efficiency, understand business issues and offer resolutions, and possess problem-solving skills.

A separate survey conducted by the Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College found that 60 percent of employers say applicants lack “communication and interpersonal skills.” According to the report, this is up 10 percent from two years ago. “Many people tell me they’re looking for someone who has almost a customer service mindset,” Reed says.

Browning says she looks for candidates who can act almost like consultants – people who “can really coach non-IT people on how to articulate their needs.” She wants people who can reverse engineer a solution to a problem for someone, or even change the mindset of a person who says she needs A but would really do better using Z – even if Z hasn’t been created yet.

“In IT, it’s important to go to the non-IT people who don’t understand what technology can actually do,” Browning says. That’s where soft skills in an IT person come into play.
How to Identify a Candidate’s Soft Skills in the Interview?

This isn’t always easy. At the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Reed says he found that soft skills were a clear differentiator in tech candidates. But soft skills are hard to find.

Beyond asking potential tech hires about their hard skills and abilities, include questions that you’d ask people you’re hiring in any other part of the company. “IT should come out of behavioral interviewing,” Reed says.

In talking about past work experience, or suggesting hypothetical situations, follow up with questions such as the following:

“What was your approach to resolving that issue?”
“Talk to me about scenarios you’ve had previously where you’ve been put in this position.”
“How did you use your analytical skills to solve those problems?”

Reed says this is “a very different interview process for a lot of people in tech.” While you may ask a candidate to architect a tech infrastructure on a whiteboard, make sure to follow up with questions that will help you see how that person would work with a team or interact with customers. Spend as much time in the interview on both hard and soft skills, he says.
What About People Who Aren’t Actively Looking for a Job?

If you’re recruiting from a pool of people who aren’t active job seekers, you can also look at a possible candidate’s interests and activities outside of their work lives, says Pete Kazanjy. He’s the co-founder of TalentBin by Monster, a company that recruiters use to find what TalentBin calls “unfindable passive candidates” – people who companies want to hire but who aren’t actively looking to change jobs.

“Individuals signify this kind of information naturally by virtue of what they’re doing on the Web as opposed to a more artificial approach that’s associated with LinkedIn or posting a resume,” Kazanjy says.

For example, in addition to being part of an Oracle Database group on MeetUp.com, the person may also be involved in mentoring programs or active in Oracle forums helping other people solve problems. This indicates that he or she would be a good mentor within your company and open to problem-solving activities, he says.

At the same time, someone who picks fights on Twitter or blogs about hating his or her current coworkers may not be the right person to call in for an interview, Kazanjy says. “Those are the sort of things that may fall out in the interview process and reference checking.”

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Tech

New Technology taking control over IT shops

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IT computerization worsen shift in tech expenditure

A worldwide review of more than 1,000 C-level executives shows that IT group are losing power over new technology acceptance at their companies but are still held responsible for integrating the technologies securely into their company’s communications.

Increasingly, expenditure and control of technology budgets are moving out of established IT organizations, the survey commissioned by technology consulting firm Avanade found.

Non-IT division control more than 37% of project technology costs, and that number is likely to grow over the next few years. Some 71% of C-level executives believe they can make technology decisions more quickly and effectively than IT organizations, the survey found.

The movement, driven by the growing availability of cloud services, mobile technology and the overall computerization of IT, is fueling some real worry between IT organizations and the broader business.

“What’s interesting about the survey is that people still trust IT,” said Matt Joe, chief technology innovation officer at Avanade. Business units still want to partner with the IT group and would like to tap into its skills and expertise when adopting new technologies.

However, what they clearly do not want to do is wait around for IT, Joe said.

The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research for Avanade, a managed service provider owned by Accenture and Microsoft. The research firm, which used an email invitation and an online survey of C-level executives, business unit leaders and IT decision makers, was conducted between Feb. 10 and Feb. 26.

One in 5 corporations already have a boss digital officer who is divide from the CIO. At some companies, chief promotion officers are just as likely to be considered for the role as a technology expert.

“It really is a patience thing. Do you want to wait for IT or do you want to light up Azure yourself? Is it going to be faster and easier going to a [third-party] to build a mobile app, or do you do it in house?” Joe said.

The situation poses some tricky challenges for IT organizations. While many would like to innovate, they continue to be bogged down with the need to keep the existing infrastructure running. The survey found that IT staffs spend some 36% of their time managing and maintaining legacy systems. Not surprisingly, fewer than one in four of the respondents said IT suggested new or innovative technology projects of their own.

What has emerged is the need for a sort of two-speed IT organization — one that manages the legacy work while also being nimble and innovative enough to accommodate technology change at the speed of business, Joe said.

The best way for IT to remain relevant in the rapidly transforming enterprise is to become technology adviser and services broker.

“IT needs to up their game,” Joe said. The goal should not only be on keeping the lights on, but also on lending IT best practices and consulting expertise to business stakeholders.

Many IT organizations already have the experience and the expertise with technology integration, vendor management and contract management that business units will likely struggle with on their own, he said.

Importantly, most C-level executives are already comfortable with the idea of the IT staff interacting directly with their customers and partners in a consultancy role, Joe said. In more than one-third of the companies surveyed, IT departments have already begun serving primarily as service brokers to solve specific business requirements.

The responses in the Avanade survey reflect a trend that has been going on for sometime but appears to be picking up speed with the emergence of new mobile and consumer technologies.

In a survey of 119 CIOs by Constellation Research earlier this year, about 44% said they would like to spend more time on innovation but were stuck maintaining infrastructure. Meanwhile, tech-spending patterns have shifted. While companies are spending more on technology overall, IT organizations have seen little of that increase.

In 2014, technology spending by line of business will grow between 17% and 19% compared to last year, said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. Meanwhile, IT budgets will grow by a modest 5% at best after dropping by about 5% last year, he said.

“A lot of the tech budget has shifted to the line of business. That’s marketing, HR, operations, supply chain and logistics,” Wang said.

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Tech

Weighing the IT implications of implementing SDNs

Software-defined anything has myriad issues for data centers to consider before implementation

Software Defined Networks should make IT execs think about a lot of key factors before implementation.

Issues such as technology maturity, cost efficiencies, security implications, policy establishment and enforcement, interoperability and operational change weigh heavily on IT departments considering software-defined data centers. But perhaps the biggest consideration in software-defining your IT environment is, why would you do it?
Prove to me there’s a reason we should go do this, particularly if we already own all of the equipment and packets are flowing. We would need a compelling use case for it.
— Ron Sackman, chief network architect at Boeing

“We have to present a pretty convincing story of, why do you want to do this in the first place?” said Ron Sackman, chief network architect at Boeing, at the recent Software Defined Data Center Symposium in Santa Clara. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Prove to me there’s a reason we should go do this, particularly if we already own all of the equipment and packets are flowing. We would need a compelling use case for it.”

[WHERE IT’S ALL GOING: VMware adds networking, storage to its virtual data center stack]

And if that compelling use case is established, the next task is to get everyone onboard and comfortable with the notion of a software-defined IT environment.

“The willingness to accept abstraction is kind of a trade-off between control of people and hardware vs. control of software,” says Andy Brown, Group CTO at UBS, speaking on the same SDDC Symposium panel. “Most operations people will tell you they don’t trust software. So one of the things you have to do is win enough trust to get them to be able to adopt.”

Trust might start with assuring the IT department and its users that a software-defined network or data center is secure, at least as secure as the environment it is replacing or founded on. Boeing is looking at SDN from a security perspective trying to determine if it’s something it can objectively recommend to its internal users.

“If you look at it from a security perspective, the best security for a network environment is a good design of the network itself,” Sackman says. “Things like Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs backstop your network security, and they have not historically been a big cyberattack surface. So my concern is, are the capex and opex savings going to justify the risk that you’re taking by opening up a bigger cyberattack surface, something that hasn’t been a problem to this point?”

Another concern Sackman has is in the actual software development itself, especially if a significant amount of open source is used.

“What sort of assurance does someone have – particularly if this is open source software – that the software you’re integrating into your solution is going to be secure,” he asks. “How do you scan that? There’s a big development time security vector that doesn’t really exist at this point.”

Policy might be the key to ensuring security and other operational aspects in place pre-SDN/SDDC are not disrupted post implementation. Policy-based orchestration, automation and operational execution is touted as one of SDN’s chief benefits.

“I believe that policy will become the most important factor in the implementation of a software-defined data center because if you build it without policy, you’re pretty much giving up on the configuration strategy, the security strategy, the risk management strategy, that have served us so well in the siloed world of the last 20 years,” UBS’ Brown says.

Software Defined Data Center’s also promise to break down those silos through cross-function orchestration of the compute, storage, network and application elements in an IT shop. But that’s easier said than done, Brown notes – interoperability is not a guarantee in the software-defined world.

“Information protection and data obviously have to interoperate extremely carefully,” he says. The success of software defined workload management – aka, virtualization and cloud – in a way has created a set of children, not all of which can necessarily be implemented in parallel, but all of which are required to get to the end state of the software defined data center.

“Now when you think of all the other software abstraction we’re trying to introduce in parallel, someone’s going to cry uncle. So all of these things need to interoperate with each other.”

So are the purported capital and operational cost savings of implementing SDN/SDDCs worth the undertaking? Do those cost savings even exist?

Brown believes they exist in some areas and not in others.
We’ve got massive cost targets by the end of 2015 and if I were backing horses, my favorite horse would be software-defined storage rather than software-defined networks.
— Andy Brown

“There’s a huge amount of cost take-out in software-defined storage that isn’t necessarily there in SDN right now,” he said. “And the reason it’s not there in SDN is because people aren’t ripping out the expensive under network and replacing it with SDN. Software-defined storage probably has more legs than SDN because of the cost pressure. We’ve got massive cost targets by the end of 2015 and if I were backing horses, my favorite horse would be software-defined storage rather than software-defined networks.”

Sackman believes the overall savings are there in SDN/SDDCs but again, the security uncertainty may make those benefits not currently worth the risk.

“The capex and opex savings are very compelling, and there are particular use cases specifically for SDN that I think would be great if we could solve specific pain points and problems that we’re seeing,” he says. “But I think, in general, security is a big concern, particularly if you think about competitors co-existing as tenants in the same data center — if someone develops code that’s going to poke a hole in the L2 VPN in that data center and export data from Coke to Pepsi.

“We just won a proposal for a security operations center for a foreign government, and I’m thinking can we offer a better price point on our next proposal if we offer an SDN switch solution vs. a vendor switch solution? A few things would have to happen before we feel comfortable doing that. I’d want to hear a compelling story around maturity before we would propose it.”

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Microsoft, Tech

What the cloud really means for your IT job

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As companies adopt cloud services, is there more or less of a need for IT workers?

Depending on which survey or story you read, the cloud can be either a good thing for IT workers and their job security, or it can be terrifying.

For example, a study by Microsoft and IDC recently predicted that cloud computing will create 14 million jobs internationally by 2015. But those aren’t just IT jobs, they are jobs spread around the entire world, across all industries.

For IT shops, the news may not be as bright: A study by IT service provider CSC concluded that 14% of companies reduced their IT staff headcount after deploying a cloud strategy.

As businesses embrace the cloud, experts say there will still be a need for IT staff in the enterprise, but there will be a need for different types of IT workers. Instead of managing infrastructure, tending the help desk and commissioning server instances to be created, IT workers of tomorrow are instead more likely to be managing vendor relationships, working across departments and helping clients and workers integrate into the cloud.

RELATED: Study: Cloud will create 14 million jobs by 2014

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“The No. 1 reason most enterprises are going to the cloud is cost savings,” says Phil Garland, of PricewaterhouseCooper’s CIO advisory business services unit. The largest line items in enterprise budgets are traditionally labor, so as enterprises deploy the cloud, it will reduce the number of staff needed, he says.

But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that IT jobs are gone with the wind. In fact, while 14% of businesses surveyed by CSC cut IT staff, another 20% actually increased staff.

“It really depends on what the enterprise is doing in the cloud,” Garland adds. “In most cases, it’s a shift of responsibilities instead of wholesale cutting or hiring.”

Take the example of Underwriters Laboratories in Illinois, a 9,000-person company that provides third-party inspection and certification services to more than 50,000 businesses around the world with its trademark UL symbol.

In August, the company transitioned from an in-house managed deployment of IBM communications systems Lotus Notes and Domino, to a cloud-based SaaS offering of Microsoft Office 365. “We needed something that would be much more elastic,” says CIO Christian Anschuetz. The company has executed a handful of mergers and acquisitions in recent years, and it expects more in the future. Anschuetz wanted a simpler way of deploying increased instances of communications systems without the need to add infrastructure to support it.

The migration to the cloud took about eight weeks and it created an almost immediate shift in the firm’s IT needs. UL no longer needed workers to manage its communications platform, email servers and chat functions. Despite cutting in those areas, Anschuetz says his investment in cloud personnel has tripled since the cloud adoption.

“Most people think that with such a deployment we would be drawing down our services to make them more cost-effective,” he says. “Our internal IT is growing.”

The greatest need for services in UL’s new system is for customer-facing employees that can help UL clients integrate into the company’s platform. As a firm that oversees product development and manufacturing, Anschuetz says customers want UL workers to be involved in the product lifecycle as early as possible. A cloud-based system, he says, allows UL to work more closely with customers on product development. Instead of a face-to-face meeting, or emailing documents back and forth, now documents are hosted in a cloud environment that both UL and the customer have access to, allowing for greater collaboration, he says. “UL has realized the elasticity that the cloud provides us is of great value in the marketplace,” he says. “It allows us to develop new applications and regenerate relationships with customers.” Because of the value it creates for the business, UL is adding workers that help manage the cloud integration efforts.

This is the reasoning IDC and Microsoft used in its study claiming the cloud will help create 14 million jobs in the next five years.

“By offloading services to the cloud, you increase the amount of budget you have for new projects and initiatives, which are the things that truly lead to new business revenues,” says John Gantz, an IDC research who studies technology economics.

Three-quarters of IT spending today, he says, is on legacy systems and upgrades, with the remainder on new products. If an enterprise cuts system management costs, that creates additional resources for new projects and initiatives, which drive revenues and can potentially create jobs. Although, Gantz stresses, those may not be in the IT department.

In the short term, cloud deployments can create an increased need for IT staff to manage the transition and monitor the new cloud system and vendors. In the long term, however, the cloud generally creates efficiencies and reduces IT staffing jobs in an enterprise, he says. On a macroeconomic level, Gantz doesn’t see the cloud having a macroeconomic impact. Some of the jobs lost in individual companies could be offset by increases in staffing needs by cloud vendors, he says.

David Moschella, global research director for the Leading Edge Forum at CSC, agrees that IT investments usually lead to a drop in staffing needs for a company.

“Businesses can be run with less people because of technology advancement,” he says.

Traditionally there has been an argument that when jobs are eliminated in one area, they can be increased in another. Moschella believes that will be the case, but he says it’s too early to tell exactly which areas will be the beneficiaries of the job boom the cloud can provide.

What is expected is that traditional IT roles of managing software and hardware will no longer be needed in the new cloud-heavy world.

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