Management Toolkit
Story: Women 'central' to saving UK tech industry
The crisis is in the recruitment "industry"
[[ new talent in the IT industry is "diminishing at an alarming rate" as enrolments in technology-intensive courses decline and women remain unconvinced of a career in IT. ]]
*Women* remain unconvinced??!
I am male and have been in the IT industry for the last 20 odd years and I would quite happily stand up in front of a crowd of school leavers and do my level best to convince them to chose something else as a career. I simply cannot in all good conscience recommend IT as a good career path for anyone except those who are so gung-ho they wouldn't listen to me anyway.
It is (as a generalisation) sexist (as per article), ageist (see copious other comments) and managed in many cases by people who know nothing about the technology and so nothing about what is and isn't possible and how long things should take; but think they do because they can grok Excel. The PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) in the Dilbert comic strips is only funny because it's so true you either laugh or jump off something very tall.
For those of us who have been doing this so long we don't know what else to do, we have yet another problem. The recruitment "industry" has dropped it's old approach of understanding the job, understanding the skills and desires of the applicants and fitting the two together to make a long term employee. That turned out to be far too expensive and time consuming. In common with many other "Lowest Quote Gets the Gig" situations, they now do the bare minimum and give the pile of applications to a child with no knowledge of the industry to pattern match the characters in the CV with the characters in the job spec and send through the closest 10% to HR, who do much the same.
Old timers, like me (at 42 !!!) don't stand much chance because an 18 year old "Executive Recruitment Consulting Engineer" sees us as fossilised relics of an earlier age. The youngsters don't get much of a look in either because they have no hope of surviving the pattern matching exercise having never dealt with these exact versions of these exact products. The folks in the middle? Well for them it's pot luck if they have (or have claimed) experience of version 2.3.456b of the Sproggit database server. Version 2.3.455 is no good at all. The character strings are different. The product is all but identical of course, but no, the version string differs so you're out.
Maybe I am exaggerating for effect, but if you are a manager trying to recruit for a new post; how much of the above do you actually recognise? If you are a recruiter, how long do you really spend getting to understand the jobs and the applicants? Mewling about the time it takes will not do, this is the actual job, anyone can pattern match, it's down to you to interpret and assess. It's why you get paid so much .. and that's a historical hangover from when all this fluffy pre-interviewing and getting to understand stuff was the norm. I'm old enough to remember it. In fact I got my second job through exactly this process and was there for 8 years.
IT is a massively diverse industry, there is SO much to know that nobody is going to know all of it, or even a very very small part. Surely we must therefore look for people *will* (future tense) be able to do the job without too much difficulty. We must find people who have a good grounding in all the relevant skills and good experience of similar or related products. The odd one who fits the bill exactly, straight off the CV, is going to give you a couple of months of profit over the ones who need a little while to catch up. But what about thereafter? You want to hope that they also happen to be a decent engineer, because after that head start is all used up, the others who were a near but not exact fit would have caught up and would now be showing their real mettle. Is that first couple of months REALLY so important that it outweighs the next N years? Come on now. We all see those same adverts running again and again for months and months! Admit it, it took you 3 months to get the paperwork round the system to recruit this post in the first place.
Full Talkback thread
