HR Pulse

Employee management in the IT industry: Part 2

Employee management practices – as I indicated in the first instalment of this series – need to be adapted to your staff. The IT industry employs a very special type of person - someone who is dynamic, thinks out-of-the-box and craves flexibility, and as such the employee management practices in IT need to cater to the employees' needs. The big question is: how do they get this right? Sage VIP regularly conducts employee engagement surveys so that they aren't tempted by the first good offer that comes along. Another significant player in the IT industry has this success story to tell...

To feel part of an organisation, employees need to connect with someone or something in your workplace. If this doesn't happen, they'll treat working for you as 'just a job' rather than a career, which means that they'll take the first job opportunity that is offered to them, for example more money or better hours.

In the IT consulting industry, where consultants have to spend varying amounts of time at clients' premises on a project, it becomes extremely difficult to maintain their connection with the consulting company. Vanessa Raath - general manager of IT recruitment specialists, Its About People - paints a picture of what she hears from the candidates she recruits: "Many people I've interviewed say that they've been sitting at a site for three years and during this time their consulting company has changed so many times that they don't even know to whom they report . They say that the only thing they know is that they submit a timesheet at the end of every week."

To get around this problem, the ISPartners group – which Raath's company forms a part of – has overhauled their HR function and has renamed it the 'people management' function in an effort to get on top of their employee management practices.

When a consultant joins the group, he or she is assigned a people manager who is their point of contact. As the life of a consultant is ever changing, their people manager is the one constant who keeps them in touch and engaged with their company. Emma Durkin, people management lead at ISPartners, explains more: "We are definitely not the traditionally understood HR department – we are people focused. All of us, in the people management department, have psychology degrees and backgrounds. Our focus is on, for example, career growth as well as continuous feedback throughout the year."

When Raath recruits candidates for the group, she sells the people management system as one of the big advantages of working for the company. And it seems that this system is one of the main things that keeps people working at the company. "Recruiting in IT is not about mass recruitment. As IT skills are so scarce, being successful in recruiting for this industry is all about having a large network you can tap into regularly rather than a static database. The danger of having a static database is that IT professionals change jobs regularly so your database becomes stale very quickly. To keep it current, you'll have to waste a lot of time updating it when you could be using that time placing candidates."

Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company.