How to Quickly Hire Project Management Staff

Hiring Project Management Staff is Getting Harder!

I spoke with a CEO today and he was certain that hiring for staff is getting harder in Central Texas and especially in the Austin Metroplex.  While he was not speaking solely of project management staff, he was right.  Salaries and rates are up in many urban areas, demand is up, and job descriptions have not kept pace.  The out of control online job posting, scraping, and application process is a mess.

This post discusses our experience with hiring, staffing, contracting, and counseling thousands of project management staff, developers, and interim managers and executives.  Contact us if you want help hiring some great PM’s, BA’s, Tech Writers, and more.

How to Quickly Hire Staff

First of all, using the big job boards quickly becomes an exercise in frustration.  This is frustration for both your current staff and new candidates who expect personal communication.  Even posting the opening on your website, if it is scraped, your opening may end up on countless consolidation type websites and email marketing lists that go to mostly the wrong people.  You should not waste time, energy, and money dealing with dozens to thousands of resumes submitted online.

Using recruiters who advertise and email their unknown contacts scraped from the internet is not the answer.

All those types of low-paid call center recruiters can do is automate the impersonal process using techniques like keyword matching and database searches.  This leads to employers adding more and more criteria to a position description in a futile attempt to reduce the number of applicants.  In confidential conversations, most executives admit that they do not need all the background they ask for.  They just want reasonably qualified people eager to work in their environment.

Culture is Key

The best project management staff will bring unique characteristics and diversity to your existing Corporate and Team Cultures.  It is much more important to judge who will fit in and be able to get things done rather than who matches the likely inflated huge list of job requirements and “preferred” hard skills.

Don’t mistake a person unskilled in marketing themselves as one unskilled in their profession.

Your hires have to mesh with your staff, put up with your governance, execute your processes, and buy into your philosophies in order to be high performing.  They can learn the ins and outs of your project work processes but it will be a low percentage bet to change their outlook and behavior relating to your culture.

Tailor Your Hiring Process to Project Management Staff

Project Managers, Business Analysts, Technical Writers, Data Analysts, and related project management staff are a bit different to hire and have different care and feeding instructions than operations staff.  They live less in the hierarchical, repetitive task world and more in the influence with unique and ever-changing task world, just as senior staff does.  They should be judged less on their hard skill ratings and more on their soft skill abilities.

So what do you do to hire these types of folks quicker?

Step 1: Refine Your Job Description and Performance Expectations.
Step 2: Streamline Your Hiring Process.
Step 3: Work With A Trusted Staffing Partner.
Step 4: Make Your Offer and Negotiate.

A prior post lays out “4 Steps to Quickly Hiring Contract or Permanent Staff” that provides more information on how to save time, money, and frustration hiring.  https://www.dataanalysis.com/blog/4-steps-to-quickly-hiring-contract-or-permanent-staff

Here are tips to avoid the current project management staff hiring maelstrom.

1. Ask your best people who they know of equal or better skill in their or related areas.
2. Visit local professional association chapters.  Many have a way (green dot/blue dot) to match those seeking opportunities with those firms with open positions.
3. Ask candidates as they go through the interview process to refer great colleagues.
4. Work with a trusted staffing partner who will, on a position by position basis, review your culture, position description, current staff, workload, and do a personal match to those people they actually know.

Quickly Hiring – Your Thoughts?

Let’s hear your tips on quickly hiring well.  We will add your tips to our best practices!  Good luck and keep your eye out for good people, if you don’t need them now you soon will!

Your path to business success.