Making the Right Hires

Computerworld - Tight budgets and heavy workloads haven't extinguished creativity in these IT departments. It's being sparked anew among IT leaders by their very best resource – their staffs.

After taking a long, hard look at commercial CRM packages for use in Humana Inc.'s call center, the company's executives found them too expensive. Then an IT analyst there came up with a creative solution based on in-house software, a few low-cost purchases and some custom programming.

Bruce J. Goodman, senior vice president and chief service and information officer at the Louisville, Ky.-based health benefits company, says the system "was better tailored to our environment than some of the packages. And it easily saved us millions."

He describes the analyst-cum-hero who figured it all out this way: "He was a thinking-out-of-the-box, be-creative, take-charge, deliver-what-the-business-needs kind of guy."

That pretty well sums up what Premier 100 IT Leaders look for in their employees. What these honorees evaluate before anything else are factors other than IT experience and technical skills. "We finally have CIOs who are thinking about behaviors as opposed to skills and knowledge," says Linda Pittenger, president of People3 Inc., a Gartner Inc. company in Bridgewater, N.J. "That's a major breakthrough."

Patrick Clancy, director of IT at The New York Academy of Medicine, says, "I am impressed first and foremost by a person's enthusiasm. I'm not talking about people just being bubbly in an interview, but about someone who really gets it about what IT does for an organization, and being excited about advancing the real mission of the organization. Almost never is the mission IT."

Clancy echoes the sentiments of other honorees in citing creativity as a top criterion when hiring IT recruits. "What creativity really means is taking vague ideas that our users have and turning them into something that is doable and practical from an IT sense," he says. "Those who get the big picture and are enthusiastic and flexible tend to be the ones who come through for you in the creativity department."

Chris Laping, vice president and CIO at GMAC Commercial Holding Capital Markets Corp. in Denver, evaluates recruits and new hires on five core values: education, experience, maturity, team fit and work ethic. "If you don't exhibit all five of these traits, you won't get hired," Laping says.

Candidates at GMAC are evaluated by six- or seven-person interviewing panels that consist of both IT and business people. The input of the business interviewers is vital, Laping says. "We have a customer service orientation, so it's really important to me that my customers like who's here," he adds.