15 mistakes that make hiring IT talent harder

Hiring for IT talent is hard.

To start, relatively low unemployment in the US and other countries means more competition among companies in general looking to hire.

Then there’s the fact that unemployment rates for IT workers typically run even lower.

Yet CIOs and their hiring teams often use tactics that make a tough task even harder. Here are 15 mistakes and missteps you may want to avoid when attempting to shore up talent gaps in the IT hiring market.

1. Being overly reliant on the ‘post and pray’ approach to hiring

As part of its multiyear workforce strategic plan, the Office of the CIO at the US Department of Agriculture reconsidered its recruitment approach, determining that it was overly reliant on the “post and pray” method, says Arianne Gallagher-Welcher, executive director for USDA Digital Service.

This technique, in which hiring managers post open jobs and hope for good applicants, wasn’t yielding the diverse, digitally skilled IT pros the department needs, she says.

“There is a high level of competition for IT talent in general and in particular for a lot of the geographical areas where the USDA needs certain people with certain skills on the ground,” Gallagher-Welcher says. “And using traditional hiring tools was not working; they weren’t effective for hiring IT folks, particularly early-career IT people that we could help grow into positions.”

So the IT leaders branched out from that traditional approach, using digital channels such as LinkedIn and Handshake, special federal government hiring programs, and other strategies in addition to posting positions on USAJOBS, the federal government’s official employment site, as required by law.

“Now we’re using other tools we have to hire the people we need,” Gallagher-Welcher adds.

2. Leaving too much to HR

“IT can’t say, ‘Hiring is an HR process; I don’t own it,’” says Heather Leier-Murray, senior research analyst in the people and leadership practice at Info-Tech Research Group, adding that studies have found that recruitment for tech talent is much more effective when IT leaders are actively involved in the process.

Yet she says many CIOs still make that mistake, as they underestimate the challenges that HR faces in understanding and describing the unique roles and skills within IT.

She recommends that CIOs and their hiring managers continuously collaborate with their HR counterparts to craft an effective recruitment strategy as well as to accurately articulate role requirements and candidate qualifications.

3. Sticking with traditional criteria

Many CIOs continue to require college degrees, multiple certifications, and numerous years of experience, says Keatron Evans, vice president of portfolio and product strategy, instructor and author at education and training firm Infosec, a Cengage Group brand.

“CIOs should start hiring more based on skills,” he says.

He notes that IT work is changing so rapidly that old accomplishments, such as earning a bachelor’s, while indicative of some attributes, don’t necessarily indicate a candidate can do the work required in the open position.

Moreover, he says such criteria typically shut out a number of qualified applicants who lack paper credentials but still possess the tech skills and aptitude required for the job.

Evans advocates that CIOs do a 180 in the hiring process and require skills first and then consider degrees and certifications as value-adds.

4. Crafting bad job descriptions

“Hiring managers and HR teams need to be more careful in what they’re sending out for job descriptions,” Evans says. “When you look at a job description and then the jobs’ actual day-to-day tasks, it’s sometimes like day and night.”

Evans says he often sees job descriptions that list a dozen or so duties when in fact the role has responsibility for only a few of them.

Lack of good communication between IT and HR can also lead to a mismatch between the description and the actual job, he says. “A hiring manager might just give a job title to HR and HR matches it to the closest description in its database,” he explains.

Other times hiring teams go with the language used in previous searches, despite the fact that roles have evolved.

The solution for crafting better job descriptions, Evans says, is to validate that the job description for an open position accurately reflects the tasks the new person will do once they’re hired.

5. Failing to consider the local job market

Similarly, CIOs sometimes fail to understand how job descriptions should be tailored to local job markets.

Stephen Watt, senior vice president and CIO at software company Hyland, learned that when his company started to hire globally. At that time he saw that hiring posts yielded great candidates in some locations but none in others. For example, he found advertising for “solutions engineers” worked well in some regions but not in all. Similarly, he found that requiring a combination of business analyst and platform development skills yielded a healthy pool of candidates in some areas but not others.

Watt wanted to know why and discovered that there were variations in job titles and roles from one region to the next.

“A list of duties might be appropriate for the US market, but it may not be right in other areas,” he says, adding that he now adjusts open positions to match the expectations of the area where he’s hiring “to be appropriate for the teams we’re building in each locale.”

6. Failing to consider future needs

Evans had a conversation in early 2024 with a CIO who said AI could never write code, a clear indication that the CIO wasn’t keeping up with technology advances. That in turn impacted his hiring strategy, which was also behind the times, Evans says.

Evans acknowledges that most IT leaders know that generative AI can be used to write code, but he says he still works with many who don’t have a deep enough knowledge of emerging tech to adequately inform the skills they should be seeking in the market today to be ready for tomorrow.

“They have hiring strategies that don’t account for technology innovations, which leads to not hiring the right people; they’re hiring people with skills they won’t need in a year, because they’re not close enough to the innovation to know what to envision 12 or 18 months out,” he adds.

7. Thinking too short-term with interns

Watt acknowledges another hiring mistake he has made, this one involving his company’s internship program.

He explains that the program had lacked a plan to convert promising interns into actual employees with adequate speed.

Like many internship programs, the one at Watt’s company involves college students working over the summer — and sometimes over multiple summers. But the company waited to make offers close to an intern’s graduation date, only to find that many already had other job offers.

Watt worked with his HR department to craft a long-term workforce plan so that IT leaders could identify earlier what skills they’d need and which interns would be good hires.

As a result, hiring managers can extend job offers to interns at summer’s end, knowing that they’ll have a role for them when they graduate 10 months later.

8. Overdoing group interviews

Having candidates meet teams is pro forma these days, as is having candidates interview with multiple people at the same time. Like other execs, Watt sees value in such meetings as they provide opportunities for both candidates and existing employees to determine whether they’ll work well together.

However, Watt says he learned that group interviews can go too far.

In the past his IT department had groups of current employees — a half-dozen or more — meet prospective candidates and pepper them with technical questions to ensure the candidates truly knew their stuff.

The candidates had a poor impression of the experience, describing it as intense and off-putting. One candidate who was hired admitted that he considering declining the job offer because the experience was so unpleasant.

Watt has since shifted tactics to ensure he doesn’t lose good candidates. He still schedules group interviews to determine whether candidates would work with the team, but he has reduced the number of people in the room. And he retains time during the vetting process to determine whether candidates have the technical skills the role requires, but he no longer combines that with the group meeting.

“The group meeting is more like ‘get to know you,’” he says.

9. Overlooking the overall candidate experience

Candidates typically face negative experiences when looking for jobs, from intensive interviews like Watt describes to being ghosted after interviews. Such experiences can lead candidates to decline job offers and warn colleagues off from applying.

Leier-Murray says CIOs should not overlook the candidate experience, noting that research has found that about 50% of job seekers would decline a job offer due to a poor candidate experience.

She advises CIOs to consider how candidates view the end-to-end process and each touchpoint such as ease of submitting a resume and communication with managers. She also recommends CIOs consider the onboarding process, too, and manage that experience to ensure new hires stick around.

10. Looking for a clone

Another common mistake is hiring to replace the individual who previously held the open position, rather than hiring a person who can do the work that needs to be done, says Leier-Murray.

“If you’re looking for a duplicate person, you’re just putting up barriers for yourself,” she adds.

Why? Because that approach often means an organization has set the qualifications for the role too high, given that the departing employee probably built skills and experiences while employed — qualifications that a new hire won’t need on Day 1.

Leier-Murray says organizations should be more circumspect about what a candidate needs to have to be successful in the role as it exists now and in the near future. As she explains: “Every time you have an open position, it’s an opportunity to reevaluate the work you need done.”

11. Setting vague hiring standards

Matt Grove, head of operations and principal consultant with Recruiting Toolbox, which provides training and consulting for corporate recruiters, recruiting leaders, and hiring managers, hears many hiring managers talk about “raising the bar” on talent or “making great hires.”

Problem is, he says, “they never define the bar, they never say what ‘great’ means.”

For example, some IT hiring managers may interpret “great” to mean someone who is a technical genius and will hire for that, even if that candidate is abrasive at work. However, others may consider “great” to mean a fabulous team player.

Grove says neither of those definitions are right or wrong; moreover, hiring generally involves tradeoffs, where some skills or traits are so important for getting work done that the organization willingly forgoes other desired attributes to get a capable worker in the role.

“Most interviewers tell us that they don’t know what they should be hiring for. They say they’re just told to find someone good. But if no one has defined what ‘good’ means then everyone on the team can say what it means to them,” Grove adds.

IT leaders need to determine what they value most and what tradeoffs they’re willing to make and then turn that into a framework that managers can use to guide their hiring decisions, he says.

12. Relying on faulty assumptions about what makes a good hire

Similarly, many enterprise leaders don’t have a way to quickly evaluate whether the right hire was made.

“A lot of leaders we meet use noise as a metric for quality, as in, ‘I don’t hear any noise about who we hired so we must have made a good hire,’” Grove explains. “They figure if they don’t hear about a problem, then the manager made a great hire.”

But maybe a great hire is someone who comes in, makes noise, and shakes up the team, Grove says. “Greatness may mean someone on the existing team isn’t comfortable.”

Grove says the root cause of this mistake is the fact that organizations don’t define what “great” means for hiring managers, who are afraid of failing at a task where they don’t know what objectives to hit. So they “drift toward safety,” in which the candidate who won’t rock the boat becomes the top choice by default.

13. Assuming managers know how to conduct effective interviews

Although HR pros typically have learned how to conduct effective interviews, Grove says most others do not. They ask questions — “Can you tell me about yourself?” — that waste time and do little to show whether a candidate will perform well at the organization.

On the other hand, Grove says companies that consistently make top-notch hires invest in training interviewers, who learn how to effectively engage candidates and assess their qualifications.

“They learn how to get evidence rather than just having a conversation and gravitating to people they like,” Grove says, adding that some companies require a license of sorts before letting their managers interview to ensure they’re able to select candidates in a fair, consistent, and effective manner.

“But that’s very rare,” Grove says. “Most companies just turn their managers lose.”

14. Glossing over the challenges new hires will face

“You don’t want new hires to walk [unknowingly] into a fire,” Watt says. “That is not a good way to bring a hire on, and it makes it hard to retain them after they start.”

Watt says he is upfront with new workers about the challenges facing the teams they’re joining so they can anticipate what to expect.

“I sell them on how they can help,” Watt says. “You want to be upfront about the challenges, so they can see how they fit into the whole picture and they know where they add value.”

15. Having no accountability in hiring

Companies with great hiring records typically have accountability built into the process, Grove says.

They define what makes great hires, communicate those objectives to hiring teams, teach managers effective interviewing skills, and have a review process after every hire so they can identify what went well, what didn’t, and whether the great candidate decided to go somewhere else.

Grove acknowledges this type of hiring program requires a high level of resources; however, he says the ROI is there, given how much money and time it takes to hire IT professionals today — and the high costs that come with making the wrong hiring decision.