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Making Contract IT Staff Successful: 6 Essential Considerations
1. WHITE PAPER
Making Contract IT Staff Successful:
6 Essential Considerations
A Staffing Services White Paper | September 2011
A B ST R AC T
IT staff augmentation has become a routine requirement in an increasing number of IT shops—primarily
because it represents a ready means of controlling labor expenses.
This white paper takes an in-depth look at one of the many options available to those seeking to supple-
ment their internal IT resources—technical staffing agencies that specialize in IT contractors.
There is a multitude of firms that specialize in technical staff augmentation, with little differentiation
from one another—making it challenging for any hiring IT manager to know with certainty the quality of the
resource being recommended.
The white paper discusses 6 characteristics—increasingly being regarded as staffing best practices—that IT
professionals should look for in any technical staffing firm under consideration.
The white paper discusses 6
characteristics—increasingly being regarded
as staffing best practices—that IT
professionals should look for in any techni-
cal staffing firm under consideration.
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2. TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
A small number of IT staff I N T RO D UC TI O N
augmentation firms are creating a IT staff augmentation has become a routine requirement in an increasing number of IT shops—primarily be-
new hiring paradigm,that places on- cause it represents a ready means of controlling labor expenses. There are many options available to those
staff senior IT Solutions Architects in seeking to supplement their internal IT resources: general staffing agencies that also supply technical
charge of screening and talent; technical staffing agencies that specialize in IT talent; independent IT contractors that seek direct
recommending talent in their areas of contract work; outsourced IT resources; and insourced IT professional services firms.
competencies.
The scope of this white paper precludes a comparison of the many staffing augmentation options listed
above. Rather, it takes an in-depth look at one—technical staffing agencies that specialize in IT contrac-
tors—and discusses 6 considerations IT professionals should make to ensure that any contract IT staffers
hired are successful at meeting their company’s goals.
1 . M A KE I T PRO F E S S I O N ALS R E S PO N S I BLE FO R PL AC E M E N T
IT staffing firms typically use career recruiters to screen and place senior IT talent. Such firms use a
fundamentally identical qualification process, which matches a specific technical skill set with a similar
spec originated by the hiring company. When responding to a client’s query, recruiters typically search vast
databases and seek matches to the stated technical skill set.
While such an approach is widely practiced, it is not without its problems— a career recruiter can never
match the technical knowledge of a career IT solutions architect. Such architects have seldom been in-
volved in IT staffing recommendations in the past, but they are becoming involved now.
A small number of IT staff augmentation firms—namely those part of a larger IT professional services
firm—are creating a new hiring paradigm, that places on-staff senior IT Solutions Architects in charge of
screening and recommending talent in their areas of competencies. An Architect will interact with the IT
professional responsible for hiring, understand the job requirements, write the job spec, then personally
screen, select, and recommend the most appropriate talent.
This new paradigm has three sets of skilled IT professionals—client, staffing agency, and contractor—com-
municating with one another, from establishing the job spec to recommending the best-fit candidate, and
is very likely to result in higher consultant success ratios in less time than ever before.
2 . G O B E YO N D T EC HN I C AL E X PE RT I S E
Historically, IT job specs—both those originated by the hiring client and those generated by IT staffing agen-
cies—have concentrated on technical skill sets, including levels of seniority and number of years’ experi-
ence. A typical technical job spec for a Senior Network/Security Engineer working with team members to
architect, design, and deploy solutions that involve Network and Security might be as follows:
»» Cisco and NetScreen administration, consulting, or integration experience
»» Experience with switching, routing, firewall, intrusion detection/prevention, and network load balanc-
ing infrastructures.
»» Systems consulting experience with security/networking technologies
»» Experience with f5 LTM and GTM
»» Experience with Link Controllers
»» Experience with Juniper products, firewalls, SSLVPN, intrusion detection, routers and switches
Such technical consideration is important, because without such expertise, a contractor would not begin
to qualify for a given assignment. However, technical skill sets alone are an inadequate predictor of a
candidate’s ability to be successful onsite. A superior approach would require a job spec that goes beyond
technical expertise to enumerating the precise work that must be accomplished during the assignment. So
for the Senior Network/Security Engineer, a competent statement of work would also include:
»» Deliver medium to large size, single or multi-product projects, could include multiple computer environ-
ments where design is fairly straight forward to extremely complex
»» Perform Network/security audits, assessments, utilization studies, and security reviews
»» Assist in pre-sales consulting when required
»» Estimate time frames, quality and quantity of resources required to successfully implement project
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3. TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
The job specification that outlines specific »» Submit customer incident details in problem management system and centralize documents on-line
work to be accomplished as well as the »» Provide Knowledge Transfer and informal training to Customers
technical expertise required would certainly
appear to result in more highly qualified The job specification that outlines specific work to be accomplished as well as the technical expertise
candidates—and can seldom be written by required would certainly appear to result in more highly qualified candidates—and can seldom be written
a recruiter. by a recruiter. It requires the intimate knowledge of a senior IT professional who has personally done such
work before, more than likely, many times. As noted in Consideration #1 above, such professionals are most
often available to guide staffing recommendations when they work in IT professional services firms that
also offer IT staff augmentation.
3 . RE Q U IR E F I R S T- HAN D K N OWLE D GE O F CO N S U LTAN T S
Most IT staffing firms—especially those with a decade or more experience— have extensive databases with
resumes on thousands of consultant candidates. Those whom they have placed in the past have been rated
for their job performance, and these ratings are part of their record. For firsttime placement candidates,
reference checks from former employers are undertaken and associated with their record.
This typical placement process works to recommend what appear to be right-fit candidates with a history
of the best job-approval ratings. Such a system that rewards highest-rated candidates was considered best
practice until recently, when an even more definitive approach has surfaced. This newer approach is only
available in IT professional services firms that also have IT staffing capabilities, because it requires that
potential staffing candidates have worked along-side the recommending IT professional in an actual client
engagement.
So, for example, if the IT professional services firm were hired to plan and implement a data center migra-
IT staffing firms that can recommend tion project, the project team would routinely involve a lead Senior Solutions Architect overseeing a team of
consultants with a first-hand knowledge full-time and contract Systems Engineers. If later there were a request for a contractor with migration expe-
of that consultant’s proven ability to do rience, that same lead Senior Solutions Architect would intimately know if the capabilities of the contract
the work, have the potential of being able System Engineer and able to judge if that individual would be capable of handling the migration assign-
to make better-fit recommendations than ment. IT staffing firms that can recommend consultants with a first-hand knowledge of that consultant’s
firms relying only on third-party evalua- proven ability to do the work, have the potential of being able to make better-fit recommendations than
tions and ratings. firms relying only on third-party evaluations and ratings.
4. SO FT S K I LLS M AT TE R
The great majority of IT staffing firms balance “hard skills”, such as the ability to perform specified job-
related tasks and/or technical expertise, with “soft skills”, such as personality and work ethic. For the Senior
Network/Security Engineer, for example, such skills might include the following:
»» Be able to communicate and work with members of several teams responsible for different functions
and technologies and exhibit diplomacy in coordinating/leading project efforts
»» Be capable of learning new products and technology and understand how they fit into the overall
strategy
»» Have a high level of initiative and sound independent judgment
»» Demonstrate a disciplined and conscientious outlook, good planning and organizational skills
»» Have excellent presentation and communication skills to provide effective knowledge transfer
The sophistication and thoroughness with which soft skills are judged, however, varies considerably from
firm to firm, and person-to-person doing the evaluation—but they have as much bearing on potential suc-
cess as do hard skills.
Many firms rely on face-to-face interviews and reference checks to get at success-defining (or defeating)
attributes. The challenge with gaining an accurate assessment of these softer skills, and their likely positive
or negative effect on the work to be performed, is that such assessments are usually subjective. Some IT
staffing firms seek to remove such subjectivity through more a more formalized testing process. Some have
even developed their own proprietary tests, which may be proven to correlate with higher success rates over
time. Be sure to ask any IT staffing firms you are thinking of working with if they utilize formalized testing,
and ask to see the tests. Also ask what correlation they have experienced between specific test results and
placement success rates. It is very likely that those firms having a testing track record that is predictive of
a consultant’s onsite success will be able to recommend best-fit candidates far more efficiently that those
without such capability.
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