Are you noticing a shift toward hiring fewer specialists in tech roles and more generalists—individuals who are adaptable, open to development, and who bring greater diversity to the team? How is this trend affecting your hiring strategies? In the past, your talent pipeline may have focused on candidates with computer science degrees straight out of college. What qualities are you prioritizing now, and where are you searching for new talent?

I’ve been lucky to have a fabulous internal IT recruiter, but my best hires recently have come from the business. They already know the business and are really excited to learn the technology. I’m looking for people who are eager to learn and can bridge the gap between business and technology.

Right now, I’m hiring for good managers. I have highly technical people who climb up to tech lead, but the only place to go is into management. What I’ve found is that when you take a highly technical person and put them in a management role, about 70% will fail and 30% will succeed. This often results in poor managers trying to manage highly technical teams. So I’m hiring more for management and people skills, with the idea that I can generally grow someone technically. For true software development roles, I still need to hire coders, but for other positions, I’m looking for good managers and people from the business, as they seem to be better at managing technical teams.

I'd hire a culture fit over an expertise checkbox.

For more technical roles, we’re looking to our AMS partners to bring in talent, while internally we’re focusing more on generalists who can marry business processes and technology. Most of our internal hires are analysts or business analysts who work closely with the business. This approach allows us to scale up or down as needed, depending on business conditions.

We’ve found great success hiring from the business. People who already know the business and are excited to learn technology have been some of our best hires. They bring business knowledge, relationships, and eagerness to learn. We’re also seeing our parent company run rotation programs for rising stars, typically lasting six to twelve months, to groom them for leadership or expose them to other areas. Sometimes, after a rotation, people find a team they love and stay there, which is fantastic.

When it comes to management roles, though, finding that unicorn who is both a good manager and understands technology well enough to lead technologists is a real challenge. There are plenty of good managers with soft skills, but technologists want to look up to someone who can also give them technical guidance. The best managers I’ve found often come from the business, but those who can bridge both worlds are rare.