Intelligent CXO Issue 17 | Page 28

FEATURE

Why IT ‘ bad hires ’ may be good after all

Jon Cairns , VP , Technical Services , Nexthink , provides insight into why traditional ‘ bad hires ’ may enable leaders to close the persistent skills gap in the IT industry , both through reskilling and upskilling . senior decision-makers believe they have made a bad hire in the past 12 months . Specifically , three in five respondents felt that the main component in employing a bad hire was being forced to settle for a candidate whose skills did not match the role requirements .

The UK has been burdened by a skills gap for the past two years , with the technology and IT industry one of the sectors particularly impacted by this issue . Recent figures from the BSC ( Chartered Institute for IT ) State of the Nation report have shown that there were over 64,000 vacancies for UK tech jobs in the third quarter of 2021 – up 191 % from 2020 .

In this scarce talent market , employers are increasingly being pushed to make difficult decisions when it comes to hiring . Specialist talent consultancy , Robert Half found that 46 % of
However , while it may seem counter-intuitive , settling for IT candidates without the exact technical skill requirements is not necessarily an unfortunate decision for those in charge of hiring . In an evolving workplace where increasingly IT teams are progressing beyond the traditional service-desk model of the past , focusing on purely back-end skills is narrow-minded and will not build the IT department of the future .
A new frontier
The pandemic enforced a shift to remote and hybrid working and required a sudden and full rollout of different technologies . This transition
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