Finding a good IT Manager [closed]

I am having a hard time finding a qualified IT Manager for the company I work at. We need someone with some really strong management experience with the technology skills to back it up.

We keep getting in people who are either all management or all technical. Does anyone know where I should go to find some good people? This is a HIGHLY selective position and is a nightmare for me to fill.

We are a small company, but are not afraid to pay for high-level talent. It is a small IT department, currently only 3 people, but we are really wanting to expand. We are a Wintel based facility that is really just looking to support the efforts of Graphic Artists and Software Engineers.

The manager would be required to maintain about a dozen servers, setup and administer IIS, SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory and all of the basic Microsoft products. Our current IT team is more of a small group of former Geek Squad employees rather then system administrators, so the person who comes in will have to get their hands dirty in both setting up the infrastructure and mentoring the current staff.

Just wanted to thank everyone for their insight. I guess my last question would be what is a good venue to go through for hiring this person? Are there specific websites that target this area that have job/candidate listings? For now we just have been using the normal careerbuilder and recruiter. I just checked and I guess we don't even have the position listed on our website, but I do welcome people to visit my user profile if interested.

Solution 1:

I think it's a pretty fair assessment to say that the more broad, deep, and current you want the technical skills of the candidate to be the less of a seasoned manager type you're going to be able to find. For an individual to stay current with technology it's difficult to do any job other than work with technology. Perhaps there's a good candidate out there who has changed up their career and worked earlier in their career as a manager and has moved into IT.

I wonder, also, if you're not looking for too many skills and qualifications for not enough money. The "HIGHLY selective" statement you make gives me that impression right off the bad, though I can't say why.

There's no one definition of what an "IT manager" does. I've been a contractor in a large number of companies, and I've seen "IT managers" who can't even name all the major systems in their enterprise, and I've seen "IT managers" who have their hands dirty doing day-to-day admin work in more things than one person can handle.

Edit:

Good edit-- thanks for the additions.

Based on what you said I don't think you need somebody who is equal parts technical and manager. It sounds like you need somebody who is basically technical but has a good head on their shoulders re: business and management (budgeting, basic accounting, employee relations), working with upper management, and being a mentor to the rest of the IT staff. They probably don't need "rock star" type technical skills (not that they wouldn't help-- more that it'll just make them cost more for you) since your infrastructure doesn't sound tremendously complicated or off-the-beaten path.

A lot of "techie" people don't get any of that business / management experience because they end up "siloed" because of their job. Whether it's in large corporate / government IT or in IT contracting, a lot of IT-only jobs don't expose technical people to the business side of the business. I'd advise you to favor candidates who has have already had a similar role at another Firm, but I'm not sure how to tell you to market the job to them.

I would also favor candidates who have had experience being a trainer. I know that I found that my 8 - 7 years as a trainer "on the side" really improved my communication skills with respect to being a mentor. Having said that, I've known trainers who were horrible at their jobs, too (just like any field), so having experience being a trainer doesn't mean they were an effective trainer...

(Maybe I should ask my wife if she wants to move to Orlando... heh heh...)

Solution 2:

Step 1. Interview PRIMARILY on managment and people skills.

Step 2. Interview SECONDARY on technical skills and aptitude.

If you do it the other way around you're going to end up with a "shy/introvert" who can't communicate and wants to do everything himself because he can "do it better" than his subordinates.

If you look for a LEADER who can LEARN while effecively COMMUNICATING... you've got a winner.

UPDATE:

I was by no means attempting to pick on or belittle introverts or those who are arrogant. I think most of us have been accused of being both... along with worse things. ;-)

After reading the poster's "clarification" it sounds to me like what you are looking for is a "sys admin" (first) with some people skills (second).

In that case, I think I'd let your existing techs participate in the hiring process so that everyone is happy and can get along as a team.

Solution 3:

I suppose there are a lot of opinions on the subject, but I will toss mine in as well.

Great managers are scarce. Great managers who are also strongly experienced and current in "IIS, SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory" are really really scarce - and are likely happily employed already.

In the sysadmin trades it seems that we largely get our managers by one of these two paths: either

• a technical person is promoted to the position without any management training/experience, or
• a management person is brought into the position without any technical training/experience.

Management is all about communication and compromise, of course. Sysadmin work tends to encourage lots of head-down concentration and/or after-hours work (few orgs want major reconfigurations done during business hours, whether they realize this or not). Additionally, the systems we admin tend to be a lot more brittle than people - there's not a lot of "give and take" in them. Our systems demand that we speak and listen to them very precisely. Many of us sysadmins begin expecting the same level of speaking/listening precision from all of our working colleagues, which of course gives us our famous reputation for being stubborn and hard to work with.

In this sense the two professions are somewhat orthogonal - especially if no cross training is applied.

Personally I think it is possible to have a techie grow management skills, or a manager grow techie skills, but I think it very unlikely you'll find a person who is great at both trades naturally. So I think it's wise to look for someone who gained one of the skills through career experience, and has spent some effort to gain the other skill via formal training.

I'm a techie who took management courses. I recall thinking how silly and commonsense much of that management training was, while I was taking the courses. And yet how often I now draw on that same training, and how often I watch people who haven't had such training make classic communications/management mistakes.

So my advice would be: find a good and gregarious sysadmin with technical experience to resolve your technical needs immediately, and have him/her do a formal course of management training during the first year of employment. It doesn't have to be a degree course - your local community college probably offers some sort of seminar series.

Please note, I think it's possible to go the other way as well - get a manager and train him/her up on the tech. But you probably have tech needs that are going unmet right now, and can't wait too long to get that technical expertise in-house. Whereas you probably do have managers in-house who can take your techie/manager-in-training under their wings for a time.

Good luck finding/nurturing your ideal person for the job!