You're Not Still Hiring By Check Box Are You?

This is a serious question!

The national unemployment figure is a bit fuzzy. What the number actually is depends on the source one goes to in order to get the number.

Supply And Demand Reality

One thing that is certain is that the job market of 2015 does not look like the job market of 2009. At this moment, Cybersecurity, Risk, Compliance, Privacy and Information Technology professionals who are great at what they do are generally gainfully employed. There is no shortage of demand for Information Security / Cybersecurity skill sets in the private and government sectors of employment.

Yes, there are exceptions to this idea that there is full employment for technology professionals but even when a talented technology professional is not employed, they don’t stay unemployed very long if they really want a job, if they have done a good job of managing their career and if they have a strong resume to share with the marketplace.

The Market Has Changed

Despite the fact that the 2015 job market for technology professionals does not resemble the recession plagued job market of 2009, many employers are still treating job candidates as if there is an endless supply of job candidates.

Many companies are sitting on talented candidate’s resumes for months. Even after successful interviews and promises of a job offer, job candidates are frequently still sitting for weeks waiting for corporate processes to produce a job offer.

Check Box Hiring

Many employers are still hiring by check box. These employers create job descriptions that ask for 3 years of this, 5 years of that, 2 years of something else, a certain educational background, a certain certification and so on. If job candidates do not match up to the laundry list of “we want”, “we need”, “we expect” (repeated 3 times), they are eliminated by gate keepers and never get to the interview playing field.

Time for Change

When demand for job candidates is high and supply of qualified job candidates lags behind demand, it is time for employers to learn how to hire talent and capability and not just hire by check box.

Employers need to learn how to sell their jobs. Employers need to write job descriptions that not only ask for what they need; job descriptions need to clearly let gainfully employed job candidates know what’s in it for them to leave the comfort and known risk of their current role to take on the potential high risk of a new role in a new company with a new manager.

Sure, every position has a certain level of skill and competency that someone needs to walk in the door to satisfy. However, when filling technology positions, leaders will build much stronger teams if they concentrate on hiring people who bring enough of the skill they need today while giving the job candidate room to stretch and grow.

If a job candidate brings everything to the table that an employer wants and needs, why would they leave the comfort of their current role to take on the risk of a new role if there is nothing more than money in the new role for the job candidate to gain?

It is critical to hire people who can not only perform today’s job; a hiring strategy must consider job candidates who have the capability to learn and grow in line with a company’s plans to innovate and advance if employers want to attract and retain the industry’s top talent.

Are You Still Posting Cyber Security Jobs On-Line?

That's not what this article is all about. This article is about a deeper topic than competition. This article is about increasing risk by showing your cards.

Let's say my search result on one of the job boards mentioned above produced this job title connected to a particular company. If you or I can run a search on a job board, anybody can run the same search from anywhere in the world. That includes people who have bad intentions.

Chief Information Security Officer

Are there any hackers out there paying attention? I bet there are. Imagine this dialogue in a group of connected cyber criminals.

Check this out!

This company just posted a need for a Chief Information Security Officer. It appears that they have nobody in place who is providing strategic leadership around protecting the company’s data.

Let’s see if they have any other open Information Security Jobs or Cyber Security Jobs on the company’s website.

Bingo!

There’s an opening for an Information Security Architect. For this position, they need someone who has a strong background in hardening UNIX and LINUX servers. I bet they haven’t been keeping up with security patches. This might be low hanging fruit. Add this company to our prospect list.

There's More

This same company is also asking for someone who understands how to protect their Software Development Life-cycle. I bet they don’t have a solid plan for protecting their web applications. They want someone to come in and teach their software engineers how to write secure code.

By the time they get that figured out, we could be in and out and nobody would even know we visited.

While they don’t have any strategic leadership and they appear to have multiple holes in their cyber armor, maybe we should put this company on our target list to see what kind of damage we could do while nobody has their eye on the ball.

There’s So Much Opportunity Out There

I bet if the three of us were to spend just one hour on job boards, we’d find hundreds of potential targets for our dirty work. This is so easy. Let’s all collect data and we’ll meet here after lunch to work on our strategy.

We’ll use our research to decide which industries are the least secure. Then we’ll drill deeper to figure out which companies in those industries appear to be lacking strategic cyber security leadership.

Then we can drill really deep and figure out which companies are lacking defense in areas where we have all-star skill on our team.

This is going to be fun and maybe profitable too!

How About That Risk Idea I Started With?

You could hire a Security Recruiter to do your recruiting for you. Alternatively, you could ask an experienced and deeply skilled Security Recruiter to work with you as a consultant during the time when you need to hire Cyber Security Talent.

In an arrangement like this, the outside recruiter could manage your job postings for you and could post jobs without your company's name attached. You could tap into this recruiter's highly specialized expertise to involve them in your candidate screening and interview process.

There are many ways to attract Cyber Security talent without letting the world know that you have holes in your armor.

What It Takes to be a Leader

This factual information comes from my proprietary research.

While creating my career coaching and leadership coaching programs, it seemed to me that in order to create the best programs possible, I should go to the customers of security leaders to find out what the customers want, need and expect from security leadership.

There's more than what will fit on this graphic but this is what the business (your customers) told me they want from you.

Successful Negotiation Professionals Possess Specific Strengths & Emotional Intelligence

One of the many skills employers expect in executive level technology professionals includes the ability to negotiate. While negotiation might be a necessary skill for a technology leader to possess in order to gain sponsorship backing and budget to drive projects, where would a technology leader have been trained to negotiate? Are technology leaders even qualified to negotiate?

Let’s assume that technology leaders generally have a high IQ. Sometimes, people who have a high IQ like to prove that they’re right and want to win at all costs. Technology leaders who negotiate to be right and who negotiate to win at the expense of the other party to their negotiation losing may not be aware of the environment they’re creating.

If a technology leader is buying a widget and they get the lowest price possible and there is no further relationship required with the product vendor, this is one scenario where their natural tendency to need to win might work out in their favor.

However, if a technology leader is negotiating a contract with a service provider and there will be an ongoing human relationship and ongoing interaction with the service provider, it is far better for the negotiation to leave both parties to the negotiation standing rather than one party winning at the expense of the other party losing.

Given that most technology leaders are gifted with deeply Analytical strengths and they are typically not deep in Relationship Building and Influencing strengths, negotiating very likely does not come naturally to most technology leaders. This is not to say that negotiating skills can’t be learned, but the core skills required to effectively negotiate may not naturally be skills that a high IQ gifted technology leader possesses.

In order to negotiate in a manner than leaves both parties to a negotiation standing, skilled negotiators will possess Relationship Building strengths, Influencing strengths and above-average Empathy. Empathy allows a person to briefly step into another person’s shoes to see the world from their vantage point. Empathy is an Emotional Intelligence skill.

People who negotiate from the perspective of only relying on their deep Analytical Strategic thinking skills will very likely miss the boat when it comes to negotiating a well-balanced solution. Negotiators who possess the ability to consider other people’s needs along with relying on their strong Analytical strengths will be much more likely to create an environment where a win-win solution can be achieved.

The good news for technology leaders who are not naturally gifted negotiators is that their natural strengths can be identified, measured and objectively understood. Their Emotional Intelligence skills can also be identified, measured and adjusted through coaching.

The most successful people in the world in all disciplines of work have been found to understand precisely who they are, how they're built and how the can deliver their best performance.

These same people have also been found to be some of the most emotionally intelligent people in the world. They understand themselves and how they come across to other people.

Was That an Earthquake or Was That Our Leader Who Just Left the Room?

You've just left the room.  Your behavior in the room was your normal everyday behavior based on how you are wired, how you see yourself and how you perceive your impact on others.

When they hired you, they told you to show executive presence.  What they meant is that they wanted you to be able to naturally take control of situations and make decisions.  They wanted you to deal with conflict head-on and they wanted you to be direct and persuasive.  They wanted you to build an environment of trust.  They wanted you to operate with humility and they wanted you to show empathy from time to time.

You took the executive presence comment to mean that you needed to demonstrate executive presence all the time regardless of who is in your audience. 

In the room you just left, several people are shaking and one is in tears.  While you were in the room, these people felt like an earthquake was occurring.  Even after you left the room, they still felt the aftershocks from your earthquake-like presence.  These people sure didn’t interpret your presence as their perception of executive presence.

You showed presence alright.  But, did you know that several people in the room had great ideas to share and they really wanted to be heard in today’s meeting?  Did you know that several people in the room invested several hours each into doing research to create their presentations for today’s meeting?  You know, the presentations that were never presented because you consumed all the time in today’s meeting demonstrating your executive presence?

Did you do any listening while you were demonstrating your executive presence?  Maybe if you had listened instead of continually demonstrating your executive presence, you would have known that one of your key team members just learned of their spouse’s diagnosis with a critical illness.

Had you listened and considered what your team had to contribute, you might have learned that one of your team members stayed up all night fixing a problem that would have shut down the business today had they not sacrificed a night of sleep. You could have praised this person in front of the rest of the team.

It’s great that you are wired differently than your staff and for that reason, you have been placed in a leadership role.  However, being a leader gives you more responsibility than most people around you.  People around you want you to be honest.  They want you to be a man/woman of integrity.  They want to have reasons to trust you.

Your team wants you to listen.  They want you to occasionally step into their shoes and consider how they feel.  Your team wants to be acknowledged and to feel appreciated.  Making people feel this way is sometimes more important to your team members than what you pay them.

Treat your team with the utmost respect and give them the support they need to do their jobs and they’ll do great things for you as their leader.  In fact, treat your team with this kind of respect and they might even shock you with their performance.

Do you know how your executive presence is coming across to others?