Top IT exec recuiters weigh in on talent trends today

When I last dedicated an episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast to the state of tech talent, we were just coming out of a multi-year “sellers” market, and we could sense that we were hitting an inflection point. Fast-forward a year and things have changed significantly.

Two of the top executive recruiters in the CIO retained search space, Shawn Banerji and Martha Heller, joined me for the first episode of 2024 to share their insights on a range of talent-related issues, including hiring trends, hybrid work questions, and the critical skills companies are looking for at the executive level. Banerji is the managing partner for the Data, Digital & Technology Leaders Practice at Caldwell, recruiting such roles as CIO, CTO, chief digital officer, chief data officer, CISO, and the related leadership suites. Heller is a widely followed thought leader on technology leadership talent and is currently CEO of Heller Search, a premier executive search firm specializing in technology executive search.

After the show wrapped, we spent some more time discussing IT talent trends from the executive recruiter’s perspective. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: In our conversation during the podcast about the nature of work, Abhi Dhar, TransUnion’s chief information and technology officer, asked who you think will ‘win’ when it comes to the expectations mismatch between management and the workforce. He also wanted to know whether you think boomers retiring and millennials becoming the largest working cohort will have a meaningful impact on this mismatch.

Shawn Banerji: I’d say there isn’t as significant a delta between boomers’ expectations and some of the millennials’ expectations as we might think. I think they share many of the same desires as far as the experience of work and the covenant of how they work, where they work, and when they work because of this post-COVID world.

I would add that we are seeing a slowdown in boomers retiring. I’m seeing that there are boomers who want to, in some capacity, even if it’s part-time, remain in the workforce. For some, it’s an economic necessity; for others, it’s because it’s something that they want to do. The beauty of this may be that you’re hiring boomers whose attitude is, ‘I just want this job. I want to do this, and I want to be recognized and rewarded for doing it well. I don’t have a broader ambition of moving up in the organization or whatever that career trajectory may be.’ That is a different and, in some ways, easier dynamic to manage than millennials who may say, ‘I don’t want to come to the office, I want to work from where I work, when and how I work, but I still have career ambitions and expect the arc of my career to grow in certain ways.’

It adds another level of complexity to what the CIO leader is going to have to rationalize. Because in some cases it’s a mismatch, and in some cases, there’s an opportunity there. In one IT services company, for example, the leader is specifically targeting people who are in what would normally be considered a transition-to-retirement period in their lives because he’s found them to be fantastic, hardworking people without some of the other baggage that is brought to the table with people who need to be effectively developed and have expectations in terms of career trajectory.

Martha, you’ve talked about the divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in IT. Can you explain what that means and what you’re seeing in terms of both the talent and the broader implications for both kinds of companies?

Martha Heller: The have and have-not divide I see is between old companies who have starved their IT versus companies who have either kept up or newer companies that don’t have the same level of legacy.

In some cases, there’s a divide inside the company, where some people are working on the old IT and some people are working on the new digital stuff. I don’t really worry about that as much as the companies that, because they don’t have advanced technology, can’t attract the technologists and therefore are going to be left even further behind. Because I think we’re going to be in a vicious cycle where the companies that are dealing with a lot of legacy technology and have not been paying off their technical debt for years and years are going to have a hard time attracting skill sets, whether it’s AI or anything else.

For data scientists, what’s most compelling to them is that they have a lot of different kinds of data to work with and that they’re going to have a big impact. That means the nimble, cloud-native companies are going to be able to hire all the data scientists they want, because they’ve got exciting work for them to do where they can show the impact. An AI engineer does not want to go into a company where everything is so legacy and spaghetti that all we can really do are pilots that can’t scale.

Oshkosh Corp. CIO Anu Khare points out that the growth in activities involving analytics, cloud, and many other technology innovations and adoptions require new skills that are not necessarily taught in colleges. Do you see the role of a college degree diminishing in the IT talent market?

Banerji: IT has been a field where, depending on the organization and the role, the value of a formal degree has varied. I do have some clients who have a hard line in terms of, the person has to have a degree in order to operate at, typically, the executive level, and others that aren’t really that concerned. In many of the digital roles, we are seeing industry-specific certifications being the priority versus a generic computer science degree.

Whether it’s a Cisco, Microsoft, or AWS certification, or the myriad of others in security and areas of architecture, I think it creates a really interesting leveling opportunity for many people who don’t have the desire or the means for a formal four-year college degree to gain meaningful employment and earn an excellent income. In fact, we’ve seen community colleges, which I’m a huge proponent of in terms of the ecosystem of education, partnering specifically with certain organizations and offering these certifications as part of their curriculum, thereby virtually guaranteeing employment for their graduates.

So I think the need for a formalized college degree is likely going to diminish, and specific, vendor-based industry certifications will continue to play a broader role in filling the gaps. Because there’s still a tremendous need, and many of the roles that companies are recruiting for cannot be filled with just someone with a four-year degree in computer science; they’re looking for specific platform experience that certifications will address and a four-year degree may not necessarily.

Heller: And when you hire for a certification, you get that skill set. But what’s the next tech coming down the road that you need this person to reskill for? We have a new professionals practice where we are placing candidates at lower levels than our executive search practice, and there is not a demand for a college degree when compared to actual on-the-job work experience. What everybody’s looking for is the ability to work, whether you learned that in college or not, because the skill set for today is not the skill set for tomorrow. We don’t want to swap out our technologists every time there’s a new flavor of the year.

But one thing I would say is, when do MBA programs start having an IT track? Because on the one hand, we say that we must have college degrees for our engineers. But on the other hand, you can have an MBA and know nothing about IT.

Kirk Ball, the recently retired CIO of Giant Eagle, is a great example of someone who’s made a successful transition to the next phase of his professional life, but he’s observed that many struggle with this ‘season’ of life. What’s your advice to CIOs who are considering opportunities to stay professionally active after leaving their daily operational roles?

Heller: I advise these CIOs to consider, first of all, what are the big buckets? Do you want a full-time job? Do you want to be an operator? Do you want to lead a team? Do you want multiple jobs? Do you want to be on this board and an advisor of that? Do you want to travel? The first question is, What are the big buckets of what you want to do? That helps determine the path that you take.

One role that I love for CIOs who have been there and done that is an emerging one that’s been around for a while but is really picking up steam now, and that is the private equity operating executive. If you’ve been a CIO and you have the experience of being in multiple industries, you love the coaching and mentoring, but you don’t want to be a consultant because you don’t want to sell, be a private equity operating partner or executive where you do due diligence for new acquisitions and mentor all of the portfolio company CIOs to achieve their value creation plan. Now, it’s not for the faint of heart. You’re going to travel around; you’re going to be busy. But whether you work for the private equity firm itself or whether you do this as a consultant to private equity firms, that can be a very exciting and rich post-CIO existence, among many others.

Banerji: The best advice I can give is this: Don’t retire. Hold on to your operating job for as long as you can, even if it means compromising on what that ideal role might be. Operating partner, advisory, and board roles are achievable, but the truth is that, unless one is locked down while the executive is still in an operating role, attaining these positions can prove elusive. I have known too many CIOs who having been in roles of penultimate operating influence find that their professional stock does not hold up as they would have hoped or expected once they move out of their operating day jobs. Friends at former vendors don’t return calls as promptly or at all, operating exec peers aren’t as interested in their opinions, requests for content and invites to conclaves aren’t so readily forthcoming.

It’s not that the career ends when one moves out of an operating role, but the practical reality is that the number of opportunities for CIOs to commercially contribute does diminish. Despite the litany of examples to the contrary, this is sadly compounded by ageism and amplified by the misguided belief that tech is a youthful domain. If the CIO maintains the will and corresponding constitution, retiring from a career as a functional business operator is a decision that needs to be made with the utmost clarity and a clinical understanding of the consequences of that decision, not just financially but also in terms of one’s personal/professional worth and purpose.

Shawn has this Hericlitus quote on his LinkedIn profile: ‘Out of every one hundred, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and will bring the others back.’ What does that quote mean to you from your perspectives as tech recruiters?

Banerji: We deal with so many people, and our clients are are so discerning. They have to have whoever the very best person is, and the truth is, there’s only a limited number of those people, and everyone either wants them or wants to keep them.

Heller: And then there’s the culture and the context of the company itself, which is also going to narrow it down.

Banerji: That’s been a big change, right? It used to be that a person who worked 20 years at IBM, Coca-Cola, you name it, could write their ticket to do anything they wanted. Now, there are a lot of organizations that say, How much of their success was their ability to navigate the protocols and social avenues of that organization versus being able to come here and really adapt into our world? As a recruiter, there are all these different pieces of the puzzle you’ve got to put together.

Heller: In the end, we could talk about AI and the robots, but it’s people. There are people at play here, with their human flaws and their personalities, and that’s still what we’re dealing with — which I enjoy.

For more insights about the state of tech talent from executive recruiters Shawn Banerji and Martha Heller, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.