The Pinged Hobbit

In the fast paced and ever changing world of IT one thing is surer than anything else. Staff turn over is damn high. This is one thing i can testify to from exprerience, with all the oppertunities out there for people wanting to work in IT (a list thats always growing) its very easy for some one to jump ship.

This can be annoying for two reasons; One side is that recruiting new staff is costly, it costs to advertise, it costs to use a recruitment agency (and boy does that cost!)

The other side is that every company has its own setup, its own way of working. Staff you already employee already have this knowledge, they know how you work, they know the procedures, they know how your IT infrastructure fits together. This knowledge (sometimes called Domian Knowledge) can take a lot of time and training to aquire, its not something you want to have to teach to a new person every 12-18 months. Having to do so is inefficient.

With that in mind, it obviously makes more sense to retain your current employees, both from an time saving and cost saving point of view. The question is how do you increase your staff retention, how do you keep the people you’ve spent time getting to the level where they are useful to you? Alan Skorkin over at Skorks.com has quite a few points that as a person who has to recruit and try to retain IT staff I can agree with.

Looking through his list, the only one I would add from my own experience is listen to what your IT/Technical staff tell you. You employee them and ask their advice for a reason, nothing pisses off a person more than asking for their opinion in their field of expertise and than ignoring what they tell you. It is quite infuriating, especially if the person who decides you are wrong has absolutely no idea about how IT works!