e-Skills: Fit for culture

Traditional IT talent acquisition focuses primarily on the person being fit for purpose. Do they have experience of Oracle 10G? Have they worked in equity derivatives? With that approach you can distil IT recruitment down to buzzword matching, hence the development of online recruitment.

But what about cultural fit? Putting an aggressive candidate into a collegiate organisation will cause friction and an erosion of the talent investment.  As will the converse.

This is often overlooked. Few recruitment consultants meet with the real customer (within the IT function). Typically they deal with the talent procurement function (within HR). Or worse still they work through an outsourced recruitment function that liases with an internal recruitment function that liases with the IT function.

Similarly there is typically very little contact between the recruitment agency and the candidate.

This presents an opportunity for recruiters that move beyond selling purely on fitness for purpose. The associated time investment is significant, but the rewards are high.