Jon Cairns, VP, Technical Services, Nexthink, provides insight into why traditional ‘bad hires’ may enable leaders to close the persistent skills gap in the IT industry, both through reskilling and upskilling.
The UK has been burdened by a skills gap for the past two years, with the technology and IT industry one of the sectors particularly impacted by this issue. Recent figures from the BSC (Chartered Institute for IT) State of the Nation report have shown that there were over 64,000 vacancies for UK tech jobs in the third quarter of 2021 –up 191% from 2020.
In this scarce talent market, employers are increasingly being pushed to make difficult decisions when it comes to hiring. Specialist talent consultancy, Robert Half found that 46% of senior decision-makers believe they have made a bad hire in the past 12 months. Specifically, three in five respondents felt that the main component in employing a bad hire was being forced to settle for a candidate whose skills did not match the role requirements.
However, while it may seem counter-intuitive, settling for IT candidates without the exact technical skill requirements is not necessarily an unfortunate decision for those in charge of hiring. In an evolving workplace where increasingly IT teams are progressing beyond the traditional service-desk model of the past, focusing on purely back-end skills is narrow-minded and will not build the IT department of the future.
A new frontier
The pandemic enforced a shift to remote and hybrid working and required a sudden and full rollout of different technologies. This transition was far from seamless: IT leaders struggled to deliver an identical digital out-of-the-office environment due to a lack of visibility and insight into remote systems. Nexthink’s Pulse survey found that 70% of tech leaders reported spikes in their IT ticket and call volume during remote working in the pandemic, with the top challenges reported by employees including VPN issues (77%), poor video calls (65%) and Wi-Fi connection (51%).
The experience that IT leaders are delivering often diverges dramatically from employees’ expectations of digital experience. With years of remote working under their belt, combined with the digital experience that Millennials and Generation Z, in particular, are used to, there is a clear ‘expectation gap’. With this context, IT leaders must change their approach in order to close this gap.
The answer lies in moving away from the reactive, ticket-based service desk, in which employees have to report individual issues. This slow manual approach not only drains resources, but also productivity and satisfaction among employees and IT teams alike. Instead, IT leaders must adopt a more proactive model, in which they preemptively solve problems before the employee even notices them, through targeted remote campaigns or alerts to encourage zero-touch quick automatic fixes.
For example, rather than IT teams manually resolving outdated devices or applications on an individual basis when a ticket is raised, proactive IT teams could remotely identify devices that required updates and deploy targeted restart alerts. A simple click by the employee could trigger a forced update, stopping the issue in its tracks before it could get started and save the IT team hours of productivity.
In order to do this, companies need deep insight into the digital workplace by gaining visibility into real-time analytics and the digital employee experience (DEX). By adopting technology which tracks the ways in which employees interact with tools and applications, connect with colleagues and access resources, teams can cluster employees into groups based on their day-to-day activities and technical requirements, rather than their job titles. This empowers IT teams to deploy campaigns based on specific needs, rather than assuming a standardised environment of the same needs for everyone.
Experience is king
This evolution is working in conjunction with another major shift in the way IT teams operate. Recently released research from Nexthink (IT in the Evolving Workplace) found that 93% of UK IT leaders see their role as promoting collaboration and productivity as ‘architects of flow’ rather than solely operating equipment. This follows research earlier in the year (Digital Sabotage and The Great Resignation) which found that poor IT experience was the third most popular reason for employee burnout or turnover.
This marks a tidal shift in IT and digital experience finally being recognised as crucial to employee wellbeing, productivity, satisfaction and job retention. Increasingly, the lines between HR and IT are becoming blurred and they must collaborate towards the common goal of achieving optimum employee experience.
In this new proactive and experience-driven environment, IT teams are required to harness more and more empathy and people-skills when it comes to how they approach solving employee problems. Coming from an empathetic and personable place will empower teams to take a more pre-emptive attitude to the day-to-day workplace experience. As such, those hiring for new IT roles need to shift their focus from traditionally ‘hard’ skills to ‘softer’ ones, such as communication and teamwork. Similarly, characteristics such as precise analysis, curiosity and independent initiative are crucial for IT teams to adopt a more forward-looking and hunting approach in which they sharply identify and solve potential issues.
Whereas coding and more technical skills are often only held by those with narrow IT experience, these ‘softer’ skills are possessed by more candidates in a larger hiring pool. As a result, IT recruiters need not despair when looking for new talent as they can draw on candidates outside of the traditional IT field.
Furthermore, where hard skills are necessary (from fixing equipment to navigating tech platforms), these can be trained and upskilled to new hires. Taking a more open-minded approach to IT skills also enables companies to invest in previously ignored talent pools, such as the under-represented older generation.
Golden opportunity
Rather than viewing candidates with an absence of hard skills as ‘bad hires’, the gear-shift in how IT is operating provides an opportunity for leaders to recruit a new type of employee. Taking this new attitude will enable leaders to close the persistent skills gap in the industry, through both reskilling and upskilling.
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