Bring new IT staff into the fold — fast

The last few years haven’t been kind to many IT departments. While the downturn hasn’t hit IT as hard as other industries, staffing has been been flat or down in “nonstrategic” areas related to infrastructure (you know, the jobs that make things run). No surprise, really, that few businesses were interested in adding positions in the midst of terrible economic times — or that those who have jobs would be inclined to stick with what they have.

But that seems to be changing quickly. Dramatically increased project load, changing skill set requirements brought about by rapidly evolving technology, and the thawing of the economy (however slight it may yet be) are starting to incur turnover among many of the IT departments I work with. Long-needed new positions are being created and filled — and on the flip side, there’s a scramble to fill unexpected vacancies as staffers leave for greener pastures.

Turnover presents an enormous challenge for already overburdened IT departments: After you’ve worked overtime to find a quality candidate to fill the position, how do you integrate that new hire into the team while you’re trying to stay on top of an already crushing workload?

The dangers

In a perfect world, the new hire would get plenty of time to build the institutional knowledge necessary to know how your company does business and a chance to bone up on technologies that you use but they may not have much prior experience with. However, this world is anything but perfect; all too often, the “new guy” gets tossed into the deep end and is tasked with a long-overdue project or trying to troubleshoot a broken system that nobody has had time to fix.

Though this trial-by-fire approach may work in the long run, it can have a wide range of negative consequences. Unless the new hire has precisely the right experience to match what you’re doing, the chances that even the most skilled, well-meaning new hire is going to make a serious misstep in their first few weeks — either technological or political — is quite high. The last thing you want is your new hire’s confidence or reputation to be crushed within the first few months of employment. Likewise, tossing someone new directly into the rat race with no ramp time is a great way to ensure that they burn out early, significantly raising the possibility you’ll just have to start all over again.

However, “doing it right” would seem to mean that you’d need to divert a large amount of time from other IT folks to bring the new hire up to speed. That sounds great on paper, but in situations where everyone is already so consumed by their own responsibilities, it can be extremely difficult to allow this happen effectively.

A solution

The best way I’ve seen to integrate a new hire without distracting large amounts of resources from existing IT department team members is to task them with a documentation, testing, or monitoring project — you know, the things you know you should be doing, but may not have had the time to handle effectively. The great thing about tasking a new hire with these kinds of projects is that they present an excellent chance for the new hire to build experience with your environment while also handling an extremely vital assignment. They also tend to have very little impact on production, so an honest mistake isn’t likely to have serious consequences.

Given a task that requires a broad look at your environment, your new hire will also get a chance to ask a lot of specific questions of other members of the team — making that face time much more effective than a show-and-tell approach. You may even find that a lot of the questions they’ll ask (many times resembling “Why did we do it this way?“) could open up possibilities that you or your team hadn’t considered before, allowing you a chance to see how to leverage specific strengths they bring to the table. You’ll also learn a lot about your new hire’s ability to communicate, be self-driven, and stay on task — very useful to know in the first weeks.

Of course, the trick with this approach is convincing management to allow this process to play out, when they may expect immediate results from the new FTE they just gave you; this challenge is further compounded if the new hire replaces someone who left without much warning. However, if you can overcome that hurdle, allowing a new hire to learn your environment and produce something useful at the same time can give you a much better feel for what they’re capable of, while also ensuring that the rest of the team stays productive — a rare win-win scenario.

This article, “Bring new IT staff into the fold — fast,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.