Why Your IT Hiring Stalls and How to Fix It
Forget skills, forget resumes: hire for competencies, promote relentlessly, and build the pipeline yourself.
Twenty-two years ago, I was part of the team launching Texas A&M’s branch campus in Doha, Qatar. We had a small core of IT staff, expatriates from the United States, but the rest of the department needed to be built from the local economy. My managers were struggling. They couldn’t find people with the qualifications we thought we needed, and the refrain kept coming back: can we just bring over more expatriates?
It didn’t sit right with me. After all, I was where I was because someone, Bob Mann, had once taken a chance on me. I didn’t have the right skills or experience, but I had drive and motivation, and that was enough. I told the team we needed to take the same chance on others, to invest in people the way someone had invested in me.
I picked up the first resume in the stack and said, “Here, lets interview this person.” That person was Mohammed Bilal Babar. Today, 22 years later, he still works at the campus. He had the drive, the initiative, the willingness to learn, and the humility to grow with the team. He’s been promoted more times than you can count on your hand.
Every time I’ve hired for competencies like that, it has worked. Every time I’ve focused on skills and experience, my batting average has been far, far lower. In today’s Dispatch, I want to talk about how CIOs can build real talent pipelines, hire for the right competencies, and stop chasing the illusion of plug-and-play employees.
The big picture
Too many IT leaders in higher education complain about how hard it is to find and keep good staff. The truth is uncomfortable: most of this problem is self-inflicted. If you are trying to hire mid-career or senior IT professionals from the outside or retain them when they consider other opportunities, you are already doing it wrong.
The only sustainable strategy is to hire people at the entry level and then aggressively promote from within. Every mid-career or senior-level vacancy is a promotion opportunity for someone else. Anything else is an illusion. Why?
Salaries in higher ed will never compete with industry. Private companies can always pay more, especially for experienced engineers and managers. No amount of budget gymnastics will change that.
Cloud services reset the technical playing field every few years. Today’s technical expertise becomes obsolete quickly with cloud technologies. Nobody walks into a new job with all the technical knowledge already in hand.
The real advantage institutions have is culture, continuity, and development. A university offers stability, mentorship, and a sense of mission that private industry rarely provides. By cultivating talent in-house, you create people who know the institution, trust the leadership, and understand how to get things done.
When you follow this model, you always have capable people ready to grow. You create a pipeline of talent that is loyal, skilled, and aligned with the mission. If you don’t, the result is predictable: you end up recycling hired guns from somewhere else, paying them more than you should, and wondering why they never stick around.
Rule 1: Always Promote From Within
Every time a mid-career or senior position opens, you should have internal candidates prepared to step in. That isn’t a luxury; it’s the bare minimum standard for leadership.
How does this work in practice?
Run a quick, fair process. Hold some targeted interviews, look at recent performance, and test how each candidate thinks about the role. You don’t need weeks of search committees to figure out who is ready.
Appoint an interim. Give one candidate the interim role and let them try it on. Allow them to grow and demonstrate how they handle the pressures of leadership.
Treat this as succession planning, not favoritism. Promoting from within is not charity or automatic seniority. It’s a deliberate strategy to develop your people so that the organization always has a pipeline of leadership talent.
If you cannot name two people who could credibly move into each of your mid or senior roles, the problem isn’t the market or your salary ranges, it’s you. It means you have neglected to cultivate the next generation, to give them the experiences they need, and to create a culture where people see a future for themselves.
Promoting from within isn’t just good for the institution, it’s good for morale and culture. When staff see that advancement is real, they invest themselves fully. When they see leaders always hiring from the outside, they stop imagining a future there. They may not leave, but they treat it as just a job, not a place where they can thrive.
Rule 2: Hire Entry-level Only, Based on Core Competencies
Forget technical skills, what lasts are competencies. Cloud platforms and vendor-managed systems change so fast that today’s technical expertise is tomorrow’s trivia. The people who succeed in higher ed IT are not the ones who come in with the most certifications, but the ones who can grow, adapt, and lead when everything changes.
The five competencies that matter most:
Communication Skills
Clear writing, active listening, and professional presence are non-negotiable. IT staff who cannot communicate end up isolated, misinterpreted, and ineffective, no matter how strong their technical knowledge is.
What to look for:
Do they answer questions directly, or do they wander?
Can they explain something technical in plain language?
Do they write clearly and without confusion?
Interview questions:
“Tell me about a time you had to explain something complicated to someone unfamiliar with the topic. How did you approach it?”
“Give me an example of a message you wrote, an email, a report, anything, that needed to be crystal clear. What steps did you take to make sure it was understood?”
“Think about a time when communication broke down around you. What did you do to get things back on track?”
Accountability
Accountability means owning outcomes instead of making excuses. In higher ed IT, where resources are limited and the work is visible, you need people who do not wait to be managed.
What to look for:
Do they finish tasks without repeated reminders?
Do they take responsibility when things go wrong, or do they shift blame?
Can they demonstrate a track record of following through?
Interview questions:
“Describe a situation where something went wrong and how you handled it.”
“Tell me about a commitment you made that turned out to be harder than you expected. What did you do?”
“Have you ever missed a deadline or let someone down? How did you handle it afterward?”
Willingness to Learn
Curiosity plus resilience beats any degree or certification. The technology will keep changing, so you need people who will lean into the change rather than resist it.
What to look for:
Have they taught themselves something hard outside of formal schooling?
Do they show curiosity in how things work?
Do they keep going when learning gets frustrating?
Interview questions:
“Tell me about a time you had to learn something quickly without formal training. How did you do it?”
“What is something you taught yourself recently that wasn’t required of you? Why did you do it?”
“Describe a time you struggled to learn something. How did you push through?”
Team Orientation
The best IT staff succeed because they can work with and for others. Lone wolves rarely thrive in higher ed, where the culture is collaborative and success depends on shared outcomes.
What to look for:
How do they talk about past colleagues?
Do they position themselves as part of a team, or as the hero?
Can they articulate what good teamwork looks like?
Interview questions:
“What role do you usually take when your team is under pressure?”
“Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you didn’t get along with. How did you handle it?”
“What does a successful team look like to you, and how do you contribute to that?”
Humility
Humility isn’t weakness or false modesty. It’s the ability to learn from mistakes, listen to others, and keep ego from derailing progress. Higher ed is full of complex organizations where no one person has all the answers.
What to look for:
Do they credit others instead of taking all the glory?
Can they admit when they were wrong?
Do they balance confidence with openness?
Interview questions:
“Tell me about a mistake you made and what you learned from it.”
“What’s something you’ve changed your mind about in the past few years? Why?”
“Give me an example of when you asked for help because you didn’t know what to do.”
Technical skills can always be taught. But if someone lacks communication, accountability, curiosity, teamwork, and humility, no amount of training will make them effective. These five competencies are what make IT staff in higher education not just capable, but trusted and promotable.
Rule 3: Interview Wide, Hire Fast
When you hire externally, you cannot afford to think small. Too many searches collapse into a handful of résumés and a couple of interviews, which almost guarantees a compromise hire. The right approach is to cast a wide net: interview more people than feels efficient. You’ll quickly filter out the majority, but widening the pool is the only way to find the few candidates with the right foundation.
Remember, you aren’t looking for skills or certifications. Those change too fast to matter. You are looking for the five enduring competencies: communication, accountability, curiosity, teamwork, and humility. That combination is rare. Which is why when you find it, you should stop. Hire that person immediately.
Dragging out the process creates risk. You might lose the candidate, or worse, you send the signal that you cannot recognize talent when it is in front of you. This is where many managers stumble: they let process and consensus override judgment.
Hiring is not about endless comparison. It is about recognizing fit and acting decisively. When you find someone who demonstrates the competencies you value, bring them on board. You can teach them the technical skills later.
Rule 4: Train for Skills, Not for Character
With cloud platforms, every technical skill has a half-life. What seems essential today will be outdated tomorrow. That’s why you should never hire for skills, you hire for character and competencies. Skills can be trained.
As a rule of thumb, spend at least 4% of your budget on training and development. Anything less leaves your team falling behind. But the best training doesn’t happen in classrooms or webinars. It happens on the job. Growth comes when you give people responsibilities just beyond what they think they can handle. Your role is to be the guardrails: offering guidance, catching blind spots, and ensuring they succeed.
Managers often make the mistake of “protecting” staff from tough assignments, but that only stunts development. Real progress comes from pressure that stretches people without breaking them. You cannot train someone to be humble, accountable, or communicative. But you can train them to master tools, systems, and problem-solving skills by putting them in situations where they must grow to succeed.
Rule 5: Act Quickly When It Isn’t Working Out
Even with the best hiring process, sometimes it doesn’t work. A candidate looks strong in interviews, but in the day-to-day work the gaps show up: missed commitments, poor collaboration, or simply a lack of drive. The mistake most managers make is to rationalize, delay, or hope it will somehow improve. It rarely does.
That is why the probationary period matters. It is the window where you are expected to make the call. If it becomes clear that the person isn’t a fit, do not drag it out. Waiting only makes the problem harder and more costly to address.
When you do let someone go, do it with dignity and honesty. Tell them plainly that it isn’t a match. Respect their effort, treat them as a professional, and avoid blame. A failed hire does not make them a bad person, and it doesn’t make you a bad manager. It simply means the fit was wrong.
Then start again. Reset the process, go back to the core competencies, and find the right person. Acting quickly is not cruelty, it is stewardship. It protects your team from carrying dead weight, it preserves the culture you are trying to build, and it ensures that resources are used to grow the people who can thrive in the work.
The bottom line
The challenge in higher ed IT hiring isn’t about budgets and salaries. It’s about chasing the wrong thing. Too many look for the “perfect” hire with the exact skills and experiences they imagine they need. That strategy almost always underperforms. It results in hires who are more expensive, create salary compression that demoralizes long-term loyal employees, and often leave as soon as a bigger paycheck comes along.
The hard truth is that this obsession with “plug and play” hires is a clear signal of hiring immaturity. It comes from leaders who were never taught to build, develop, and trust their own people. Strong managers create pipelines; weaker ones buy resumes.
If you want to hire and keep good IT people in higher education, stop chasing the impossible. Build from the ground up. Hire for competencies, not for skills. Invest in training, stretch assignments, and culture. Promote relentlessly, and hold yourself accountable for always having the next one or two people ready to step in.
That is how you create teams that thrive and grow. Not one that constantly churns.