A Hire Calling: How to Assemble an IT Dream Team

A Hire Calling: How to Assemble an IT Dream Team

Hiring IT candidates who possess specific core attributes can help CIOs create a dream team of talent.

Deceptive employees can sink a team—or an entire organization. Look for inconsistencies/exaggerations as candidates tell their story during interviews and/or in their resumes/cover letters.

Find out whether potential hires can blend in effortlessly within a team of diverse personalities and backgrounds. Assess whether they shirk from opportunities to work with people from outside IT, or relish such occasions.

Does an applicant take initiatives (handwritten thank-you letters, for example) that others don’t? That’s the sign of potentially valuable self-starter.

Ask direct questions that force candidates to reveal key moments of failure, and what they did to come back stronger.

The best IT employees have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. During discussions, provide plenty of opportunity for interviewees to ask good questions. Examine what they’ve done to incorporate continuous learning in their professional lives.

Do candidates think only in terms of tasks and technologies? Or do they understand how tasks and technologies contribute to organizationwide processes and strategies?

Potential team members should immerse themselves into the needs of business, and convey an in-depth understanding of industry trends and challenges. Determine whether their relationships with business influencers are deep and meaningful, or shallow and opportunistic.

Can candidates deal with novel, complex situations for which there is no industry, corporate or department history—and make sound decisions without a roadmap?

Find out how a potential recruit recognized an unaddressed need, and then overcame obstacles to get the best possible product/services to customers and stakeholders.

Do candidates avoid challenges in the interest of playing it safe? Or do they seek to raise the bar of accomplishment through knowledge-supported risk-taking?