The gap between the number of people with the appropriate skills for your e-commerce project, and the reality of having to get it all up and running as quickly as possible, continues to widen. David Hellaby assesses what this means for companies recruiting staff, and how to find the skills you really need.

If research is correct, companies are scrambling to find the staff they need for their e-commerce projects. Last year the Business Council of Australia (BCA) estimated there would be a 90,000 shortfall in the number of graduates with e-commerce skills over the next four to five years.

Last year, there was already an estimated 30,000 shortfall in skilled IT workers and the situation was predicted to get worse. That was before the economic downturn in the US, which was partially spurred on by the dot-com crash.

Since then, some sectors of the IT industry have gone into decline as the global economic conditions took their toll. However, the general consensus among recruitment agencies is that while the skills shortage is no longer at crisis level, it is still hard to find good e-commerce skillsâ€"and it is not going to get any better in the short term.

While one Melbourne agencyâ€"which did not want to be publicly identifiedâ€"said the dot-com collapse meant there were now plenty of skilled people available, others in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane disagreed. Although Sydney and Melbourne have experienced some easing in demand, Brisbane employers are reported to be scrambling to find any skilled staff and the situation is getting tougher by the week. As the economy picks up, so too will the demand, and recruiters are predicting a renewed surge in the market in the fourth quarter as companies resume their shelved or paused e-commerce programs.

Companies under pressure

Non-technology companies are under increasing pressure to have an e-commerce presence, but they face more problems than just a shortage of skills.

E-commerce is not just about putting up a Web site. It requires its own well-designed business plan that will integrate and enhance a company's core business. It has to have project goals and proper management as well as a broad range of skills, and that invariably means having to employ more than one person. E-commerce requires a combination of business and IT skills and it is that combination that is such a rare commodity.

Ideally, companies look for people with five to six years experience, but in Australia that does not exist because e-commerce has not been around for that long. So companies are being forced to compromise and often to accept less experienced workers, or to review the project and outsource it. Even once the site is up and running they are faced with the question of whether to employ someone with the skills to maintain it or to train existing staff.

Short-term solutions?

The problems faced by companies are not going to go away in the short term. And they are worse for the non-tech companies that are often at an added disadvantage because they are not conversant with the technology they require and are therefore in danger of employing the wrong people.

That can be both disastrous in terms of the finished product and extremely expensive in terms of lost investment in both personnel and infrastructure.

Last year's study by the BCA which looked at the problems faced, found that as of June 2000 nearly 58,000 businesses with a Web site (56 per cent of all businesses with a Web site) reported not being satisfied with their Web site's e-commerce or e-business functionality. According to the study, much of that dissatisfaction was caused by a lack of e-commerce skills by the people responsible for the sites.

Looking for solutions

Nor do SMEs always have the big budget to outsource their recruitment requirements to an agency which may charge the equivalent of between 15 and 22 per cent of the salary of the workers they find for employment.

However, it is important to seek advice before they go ahead with their e-commerce project.

Brad Argent, who heads up Web developer Spike, says many of the dot-com collapses were a case of the employer not knowing that what was being done by their IT staff was wrong.

-It is always a challenge to find the right skills particularly in the Internet arena, because you are not drawing on an extensive body of knowledge as you would if you were looking for a COBOL programmer or a mainframe administrator."

According to Argent, the first problem any company wanting to get onto the Internet faces is cost. Despite a 30 per cent drop in demand, IT people are still expensive.

Use your own Web site

While there are several ways of finding staffâ€"such as going through the standard recruitment processâ€"one of the cheapest methods is to use your company's existing Web site.

-That will automatically give you a filtering process, because if somebody applies for a job online at least you know they use the Internet," Argent says.

The site can be used for carrying out much of the recruitment process, from receiving an applicant's CV to carrying out psychometric tests before there has to be any face-to-face interview with the prospective employee.

Argent backs up his advice with statistics from the US, where analysts estimate that hiring an employee via the Web costs an average of US$183 per employee compared to US$1383 through traditional recruiting channels.

Saving time

One of the best examples of a company using the Net for employment is Cisco Systems which last year hired 66 per cent of all its new employees and received 81 per cent of all resumes via the Net, cutting the average time taken to fill a job from 113 days to 45 days.

And that, says Argent, can have a major impact on productivity.

One of the other advantages of using the Web is that it is reaching a global market and while the skills being sought might not be available in Australia, they may be found in Ireland, UK, Europe or the United States.

Peter Stokes, business development manager for tmp Worldwide in Brisbane, agrees with the online strategy.

-You absolutely have to be online," he says. -You must have an Internet strategy for finding your staff. The majority of our applications come across the Net because people in the IT sector are more Internet savvy."

However, he admits that it still may not find the staff you are looking for.

-What you find with Internet employment portals is that the people they attract are the ones who are looking for work," Stokes says. -It may be that the person or people you want are already employed, which is when you may need to call in a recruitment consultant."

Searching out talent

She says her own research has shown that IT people generally do not read newspapers and do not frequent the same job Web sites as the rest of the job-seeking population. They have to be hunted in their natural habitatâ€"universities, Internet cafes, professional organisations, chat rooms in sites deemed cool and in networking groups.

-You have to go where they hang out," she asserts.

The chances of finding the skills and experience the employer wants are still slim.

-Even when you find the people you need, they want an incredible amount of money because they know they are so much in demand," van Til says. -Invariably a lot of smaller or newer companies do not have the capital to be able to invest in that kind of talent.

-Companies tend to get very young applicants who can program, but have no commercial experience. But they sit down in front of the employer with four contracts and say 'well, I've been offered this, this, this and thisâ€"what are you offering?' " van Til believes employers are saying, -Hell, we don't want to have to go through this every time we want to employ someone". But the skills are very scarce and our universities are not turning out technically proficient people quick enough.

-Employers are seeking maturity that does not exist because the skills have not been around that long. It is a very unusual circumstance," says van Til.

Who should you employ?

Ironically, as more people become available as a result of the dot-com crash, employers have become wary of employing them. According to van Til, this is a credibility issue. -Employers are saying to themselves 'do I want to employ somebody from a company that has crashed?'. There may be no foundation to itâ€"the person may not have been responsible in anyway for the collapseâ€"but employers are wary."

Recruitment companies play down claims that the IT industry is rife with staff poaching. However, it is hard to deny that employers sometimes go to great lengths to lure staff away from other companies. It is one of the reasons why many skilled IT workers with 10 years or more experience have changed jobs on average every two years.

Executive director of IT training and HR consulting organisation Spherion, Peter Johns, says he doesn't think the IT industry is any more prone to staff poaching than accounting, finance or banking.

Johns explains that there is a difference between the IT industry and other sectors. He says that if you look at the resume of a bright 30 to 35 year-old IT person they have probably had five jobs. And the employer who is looking to take them on for the next job would expect them to have had that number of jobs. -It simply means they have moved and enhanced their technology and got new skills. In other industries if you said you had had five jobs in 10 years employers would say you have moved around too much."

However, this frequent turnover of staff makes having the right retention strategy just as, if not more important, than finding the staff in the first place.

Coping with a crisis

It is a problem that has been highlighted by industry analysts IDC. Michael Boyd, program manager for IDC's human resourcing strategies research program, says companies not only have to deal with a momentous lack of skilled IT workers, they also have to learn how to manage a significantly changing workforce.

Boyd says the way work will be accomplished this millennium will be very different than in the past because of a very different workforce.

-Generation Xers don't seem willing to make the traditional commitment to a business enterprise and work as the highest priority in life, and baby-boomers are leaving the corporate life at an increasing rate. Their relationship with a company is based more on an individual than a group agreement. Only those firms that understand and meet the expectations and needs of workers at the individual level will continue as long-term business entities," says Boyd.

Ironically, while the IT industry is synonymous with high paying jobs, remuneration is not the highest priority for workers. Instead, it is often things like having access to the latest technology or lifestyle benefits that will rank equally or ahead of a fat pay packet.

Johns says IT workers are most excited about the technology platform.

-It does not come down to money or the size of their office or any of the things that might be important in other industries. The key criteria for an IT worker is staying fluid and alive with technology that is changing quickly. They are very much focussed on staying ahead of the pack, what they are going to be working on and what the technology outcome is. Then it is about how the organisation is going to implement the project they have been employed for and how they are going to make it work from a business point of view.

-Technology people have moved very much into the core of business rather than being adjunct or a service centre. They very much see themselves as making a difference to how a business operates and I think the organisations that are succeeding in keeping good people are those that understand their people need to see the technology being utilised and being successful," he says.

Retaining staff

-It used to be all about options and it was all money focussed," he says. -But these days they tend to be more focussed on levels of autonomy. They see themselves as professionals and experts in their field so they like a certain amount of autonomy in directing activities. They like a lifestyle so they may want to work from 10 till six as opposed to nine to five, or they might want to work four 10-hour days instead of five eight-hour days."

Van Til says lifestyle is one of the reasons why Queensland, particularly Brisbane, has becoming so popular with IT workers. Housing and accommodation are cheaper than Melbourne and Sydney and workers can enjoy a -fabulous salary" with low cost of living and great weather.

She says not enough attention has been paid to the issue and particularly to the different requirements of baby boomers compared to Gen Xers.

-The retention hot buttons between the two are often quite different. Basically there are hard, soft and futuristic elements to any retention policy.

-When you talk about the hard feature you are referring to remuneration, performance management and so on; soft features are more to do with culture, values and immeasurable elements; while the futuristic elements are the perceptions of the longevity or the future of the project or system.

-When you are dealing with Generation Xers they often have a sort of 'me, me, I' syndrome and the solution you have to come up with to retain them is often futuristic and very one-to-one," van Til explains. -Conversely, baby boomers have a more mature profile and are looking for ongoing predicability and job security, so there is no one formula.

-Typically, e-business and multimedia professionals work long hours and do not spend much time at home. They are often awake and chatting to people in other countries when the rest of the population is asleep. As a whole, they do not eat well and are not concerned with health and fitness."

Offering the right incentives

Based on this, van Til believes offering employees traditional benefits, such as a gym membership, are not incentives. -However, offers such as lifestyle managers appeal to this segment of the population because they do not have time to do mundane tasks for themselves. They are primarily looking for elements that complement their lifestyle and want to learn while at work."

-Nowadays remuneration ranks third behind lifestyle and workplace stimulation," says van Til.

It is generally agreed that part of that stimulation has to be workplace training. Not only must employers be prepared to train the IT staff they have employed from outside, they are often going to have to train traditionally non-IT staff to operate their e-commerce operation once it is up and running. In fact, for SMEs in particular it is seen as the most commonsense approach, particularly as many IT workers have no business training.

-When it comes to e-commerce training," says IT&T Skills Hub executive director Brian Donovan, -we feel that people with existing business skills are the ones to concentrate on rather than try to turn those who have chosen a technical career paths into business managers. They tend to have chosen those paths because they prefer that rather than management.

-It is easier to give someone who has the business experience and acumen some technical training than to get a leopard to change its spots," he says.

Looking for help externally

Companies sometimes find they need to look beyond their own four walls to find the staff with the right skills to make an e-commerce project fly. Why do businesses investigate this route?

When initially planning their e-commerce strategy many companies will ask themselves -Why can't we do it ourselves?".

In the case of technology companies with in-house expertise in database operation, HTML coding, Web design and Web project management, it may be a simple matter of ensuring they have sufficient staff.

But for non-technology companies, the potential benefits are outweighed by the potential pitfalls and an e-commerce site that is not designed and built properly in the first place can become an expensive disaster.

The disadvantages include:

* Having to take up to six staff away from their core job for up to two years and retrain them in skills they are not necessarily suited to. (Experts say it takes three to six full-time staff with different skills to create a successful e-commerce site.)

* Training takes time and does not produce staff that have essential job experience; as a result the project can take much longer.

* The cost is often more than outsourcing or employing.

The benefits include:

* Having complete control over the project and its successâ€"or failure.

* Being able to provide the business acumen specific to your core business. (However, this can also be done by close collaboration with IT staff you have employed or contractors and suppliers the job is outsourced to.)

Once the site is operational, the logistics change. It makes sense to use existing staff rather than continue to employ expensive IT experts. Maintaining the site requires fewer people, less expertise, and it can usually be done as a core part of the business, meaning that existing staff can be trained in-house to do the job.

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