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I was at a dinner event a few months ago and entry level hiring in IT was the topic of the night. The discussion focused on “best practices for on-boarding and developing new talent”. As the various tables pondered and discussed the question, it was amazing to see that in the end all 6 tables came up with the same solution - 3 year rotations and internships. Someone identified this as the investment banking world model for bringing associates in from undergrad programs.

In investment banking, new employees are hired straight out of college and do a 3 year rotation with a firm. The company knows that they have the graduate for just 3 years, so they design roles and responsibilities to get enough value in that time frame to justify the cost. They do not build the business case based on long term retention or succession planning.

The new hires understand this is not a long term commitment, and since the programs are branded, they feel compelled to stick with it. If your resume shows you didn’t finish your program at Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan, it raises flags.

It was uncanny to see all 6 tables at the dinner function all identify the same solution to the business case question. I hope we will see some form of it adopted within IT.

What investment banks have going for them is that attracting candidates is easy. It is incredibly lucrative for recent grads to do the three year program at Goldman Sachs, it ensures their career, gets them into a good MBA program and a job after graduation. Working in a fairly dated IT organization for three years, if coming straight out of college, is going to be a hard sell.

In addition, generational research has found that Generation Y is driven by two things:

1.) The team. They want to pick up and move around as a group rather than on their own. They are into social networking so they are used to being connected and moving as a group.

2.) The need for their work to have meaning. The group entering into the work force is growing up post 9-11. It happened when they were first entering the adolescence. That has created a profound shift in their meaning of life and their purpose. (more info on these findings)

All of this leads to three challenges/questions we must answer to get the model for entry-level programs working and delivering value:

1) Finding talent - Can we attract people to our organization?

2) Training talent and putting them to work - Can we effectively use OTJ (on-the-job training) and do we have the supervisors and managers required to make it work?

3) Gaining value from the investment in talent - How do we measure value?

Student project consulting run out of schools has been around for a long time and has the potential to be a solution to all three parts of the problem.

Side note and short plug: i.c.stars has tried several versions of this model and we are landing on a solution built on partnerships. We are partnering with technology companies who commit to using methodologies that can get predictable results using entry level staff as part of the onsite project team mix. We call this our Fellowship Program. You can read more about it (here).

Marrying student project consulting and the investment banking model might look like this:

1) Conduct regular paid student consulting projects at your organization (can solve the recruitment and management challenges)

2) Roll the best project teams into full-time positions for a 3 year branded program (can solve the value challenge).

Discussion
I have many questions coming out of all this:

1) What is the trigger to get started? What is the price going to have to be for that 5-10 year experienced Developer or BA or PM such that the CFO says, “Okay CIO/CTO, you need to start doing entry level hiring again”

2) Can we effectively brand the 3 year programs to get retention for that duration and achieve our business case value proposition?

3) Can we adapt to Generation Y and hire teams instead of individuals?

4) Can partnerships with Technology providers address the need to make student project work more value-added and remove the initial management/supervisory burden from the CIO/client organization?