What should a company do to ensure it attracts and retains the cream of the tech staffing crop? We've offered a few tips and begun a search for Australia's best employer of IT talent.

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With the current shortage of specialist technical skills, many IT professionals now have the luxury of being able to pick and choose where they work. Due to lack of internal career paths and more attractive prospects elsewhere, traditionally, there has also been a high turnover among IT people, and replacing staff is an expensive business, both in direct and hidden costs.

As a result, both IT companies and user organisations have to compete hard these days to recruit and retain the best people, and several are trying to establish and promote themselves as an -employer of choice".

The term is one that a number of people claim to have coined, and equally, according to Peter May, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's national director, HR, different definitions abound.

There are some generally accepted characteristics of an employer of choice, the more obvious ones being total remuneration and rewards, exciting and leading edge work, and training and career development opportunities. However, May believes an employer of choice is essentially one where an employee freely chooses to belong and is willing to be part of, and this, he says, comes down to the organisation's culture.

-In order to attract and retain talented people, employers have to position themselves in the hearts and minds of potential employees. IT professionals, in particular, tend to be bright and like variety and challenging projects. Fast paced companies are likely to have an open, flexible and collaborative culture that supports this. What's really important, though, is that reality backs up the rhetoric," May says.

Indeed, many companies like to think they are an employer of choice in the same vein that they state their employees are their greatest asset and then the next day retrench a third of them. The best measure, of course is an organisation's ability to actually attract and retain talent, and this is a self fulfilling cycle; the more a company can attract and retain, the more it will do so as staff morale rises and word gets around the industry that it is a good place to work. And once it has a successful track record to back it up, it can promote itself as such through advertising and its recruitment programs, even to hardened IT professionals.

However, May admits it can take large organisations five to 10 years to change their culture.

-Becoming an employer of choice is hard work. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and most don't know how to or how hard it is. Neither can you rest on your laurels. [To remain one] involves continual monitoring and innovation," he says.

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Who are Australia's best IT employers? ZDNet wants you to identify Australia's best employers of IT talent. If you work for or know of a company that goes the extra yard to ensure its tech employees are appreciated and rewarded, we'd like to hear from you. Simply email your nomination for Australia's best IT employer to nominations@zdnet.com.au , along with a few lines giving your reasons why the company should make our list. The organisation you nominate doesn't have to be a player in the IT industry. It can operate in any sector, including retail, finance, entertainment, government - just as long as it appreciates good IT talent. So get moving now and send your votes to nominations@zdnet.com.au.

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