Catching the right hire for Enterprise IT should not be a matter of chance. We compete for talent capable of breaking new ground, innovating to differentiate, and quickly conceptualizing plans and actions. However, their wings can be clipped in a workplace overburdened by mundane tasks and administrative overhead. Further, with rigid KPIs and pay scales, they are always open to greener pastures, putting organizations at risk of losing them sooner rather than later.
We obsess over experienced hires, but experience does not assure future performance. If it ever did, technology obsolescence, cultural challenges, and team dynamics would not be disturbing factors that can lead to early departure. Some employers shy away from hiring fresh graduates, perceiving them as short-staying job hoppers seeking pay rises and high-sounding titles. Yet fresh graduates can bring energy and new perspectives to established workplaces. How do we spot the right ones?
Catching the right hire requires a paradigm shift: moving away from textbook interviews and experience bias towards scenario-based assessment of Systems Thinking, Enterprise Mindset, and Intellectual Honesty—collectively defined here as the True Competencies for technology professionals.
Systems Thinking
Any business automation or technology solution is a web of interoperable technology components, including network equipment, servers, storage, databases, appliances, software, users’ devices, and ironically, the users themselves, with mixed levels of IT literacy. It is a huge undertaking for teams with diverse specialties to design and construct a resilient system across these components, and to pinpoint the root cause when it fails in operation.
As defined in Wikipedia, systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it into its individual parts. In technology management, people who practice systems thinking consider systems through their individual components, how each interacts with others, and how each may potentially impact the rest.
Like a spider web, impacts are multidimensional, coming from upstream, downstream, or lateral components. For instance, a stalling system can be caused by a sudden surge in users, network latency, an ill-formed database query, erratic coding, an unresponsive server neighbor, or possibly a mixture of these.
Our experience helps correlate system issues with related components, but it rarely uncovers the true root cause or captures the finer nuances of a problem. As our experience grows over time, we tend to trust it even more and overgeneralize causes without sufficient proof.
In practice, system thinkers can rationalize the specifics of each component—the subtlety between active and logged-in users of an application, hit rates versus concurrency in a database, or normal versus abnormal network latency, for example. This helps contextualize failures and their causes down to the component level and its configuration specifics.
Systems thinking is a lifelong cognitive skill that remains vital as enterprises increasingly embrace black-box components such as AI, cloud platforms, and specialized appliances. It compels us to think in terms of components and the specifics of each one that may potentially cause it, or others, to fail.
Enterprise Mindset
Technology, like soccer, requires brilliant individuals and overarching teamwork to win the league. Apart from recruiting the personal attributes requisite for technical work—such as meticulousness, diligence, and perceptiveness, finding individuals with an enterprise mindset who act in the best interests of the enterprise, rather than their own functions, is few and far between.
An enterprise mindset shapes how individuals prioritize organizational success over their own. They balance the longevity of the enterprise with the reality of workforce transience, ensuring that knowledge survives individual turnover. They actively seek to understand cross-team functions and challenges to broaden their horizons and improve system design and operations. They are proactive in contributing problem-solving ideas beyond their assigned portfolios, even at the cost of taking on additional workload and responsibilities.
An enterprise mindset is not solely about individual contributions and sacrifices. Enterprise leaders must also take responsibility for cultivating and sustaining a fair reward system and equal growth opportunities to inculcate a positive mindset across the workforce.
Intellectual Honesty
Honesty is about truthfulness. Truthful debate and open exchange during crisis management are essential to promptly identify root causes and apply fixes to crashing systems, corrupted data, software bugs, network anomalies, security breaches, and so forth. It is often a prolonged and painstaking process for a team of specialists who may be clueless and lost at the beginning.
In a failing system with many moving components, we must challenge ourselves to simplify and untangle complexities rather than confuse the team further with ambiguities or peripheral possibilities. Intellectual honesty is a positive character trait in those who admit what they do not know, abstain from making things unnecessarily complicated, and distinguish likely causes from speculative ones rather than prematurely assigning faults.
Conclusion
The “experienced” AI models at our fingertips could certainly outsmart many job prospects, and we should no longer spend interviews simply revalidating claimed experience. Instead, we should assess candidates through workplace scenarios to understand their thinking processes and character traits, using questions that reveal patterns of thought rather than expecting correct and complete answers.
Given the highly sophisticated technology environment, we should assess and hire those who can demonstrate systems thinking, prioritize the enterprise over transient individual interests, filter out noise, and share specifics candidly to aid problem-solving.
Copyedit: ChatGPT