Our last post looked at finding the next generation of mainframe talent for your organization. Here’s what to ask before you hire them.
Recruiting talented individuals to work on mainframes is an ongoing challenge for many organizations. With an aging workforce, few educational programs training new developers and technologists, and a shortage of young people pursuing the skills to work on mainframes, many organizations are turning to alternative sources of talent.
Outsourcing and hiring consultants can help solve many problems, but nothing quite replaces having skilled full-time employees. Many experienced mainframe consultants possess vast knowledge of mainframes but are happy to continue working on contracts with high per-hour fees. As a result, some of the most highly qualified candidates are not interested in full-time positions. In addition, outsourcing firms with remote employees from countries like Brazil and India can provide many of the needed skills, but it can be more difficult working with individuals who are not as well integrated into the organization’s culture.
Consultants and outsourced talent will never have as full an understanding of an organization as full-time employees. Therefore, despite the difficulties in recruiting, companies running mainframes have to find talent somehow, even if it means recruiting technologists with backgrounds outside of mainframe computing.
Job interviews are one of the key ways organizations can discover if a job candidate with a different background will be a good fit for the role. You have to be able to learn a lot about a candidate in a short period, as well as determine if they will be able to adapt and acquire the necessary skills to work on your mainframe. This interview process will become increasingly important to find out if candidates possess the skills and aptitude for the job, especially as you start recruiting from other fields.
To learn the right things about a candidate that will let you know if they are suitable for the role, you will have to ask the right questions. When interviewing candidates from other backgrounds, you will end up asking many of the same questions that you’d ask an experienced mainframe user. However, there are several additional questions you should ask technologists from other backgrounds to make sure they will be a good fit and have the aptitude to master the new technologies.
Here are a few ideas for interview questions to ask candidates without experience working on mainframes:
Why are you interested in working with mainframes?
It’s important to discover if the candidate is truly interested in working with mainframes, or if they’re just after a new job.
There are other questions you can ask to get at this answer, including:
- Why did you leave the ‘xyz’ field?
- What do you think the future holds for mainframe computing?
- What new roles do you see mainframes taking on in the future?
- Here’s another question that will help uncover a candidate’s ability to learn new skills:
- Is there a time you needed to learn a new piece of technology for your job? Tell me how you did it.
This is especially important when interviewing candidates without prior mainframe experience. As an interviewer, you will need to be able to assess quickly if a particular candidate has the aptitude to learn both the new technology and skills that will be necessary in the job. - What skills have you acquired in the last year that will be of most use in this position?
- Describe a time you asked a co-worker to train you on a new technology.
- In your last position, what new technology did you learn that was most beneficial to the company?
Finally, when interviewing mainframe candidates it’s always a good idea to determine if they’re familiar with any of the standard mainframe software tools — because even though they might not be encryption experts, for example, they very well may have worked with an encryption suite like MegaCryption.
Hiring enough engineering and technical talent has been a struggle for many technology companies for years. It is not a challenge unique to the mainframe industry. Recruiting is challenging, and always will be, but by widening the net and potential talent pool by seeking candidates with other technology backgrounds, organizations can recruit and train a new and efficient generation of mainframe workers.
