As a CIO, how do you view your role in talent attraction and retention?

It is critical.

First of because of the team culture and more specifically, it's impact. Setting a positive, inclusive, cooperative culture where leaders are servants and not authoritative micromanagers. This is what I strive for and make sure all my leadership team abides by.

This obviously serves well for retention, but it's also extremely useful for attraction. When interviews are made with candidates, we make sure to include 3 people from different ranks (myself, the team manager and one other employee in that team). It would be hard to describe, but the way we interact between each other during the interview (which is our typical way of working together) is not something candidates usually see (And I have been told numerous times afterwards by interviewees) and it makes our team shine amongst many others.

Second, the CIO has to fight tooth and nails so that the business can provide competitive salaries and perks. Not easy when you are comparing yourself with video games companies who offer free beers after 5 and a ton of other cool things. This one is probably the most difficult, as we always face the issue of being "fair" to the rest of the business and most requests get rejected. So you end up having to create some inventive scheme to appeal to candidates and keep them. No easy tasks.

The CIO's role is key. You have to be able to sell what it is that you do to both get people in the door and to retain them. Having a clear and consistent strategy and vision, and letting people do their jobs while offering mobility and growth are key.

This can be achieved by 5 factors
Freedom to think and excute
Freedom to speak
Regular A&R
Creating scope for learning
Respect

I hosted a CTO roundtable a couple of months back about hiring and retaining talent, and the CTOs—who can be a proxy for CIOs—were scattered all over the country in different business sectors. One CTO said that they're having problems with the coastal companies retaining talent. So, this CTO got creative and went to a four day week. He recognized the fact that people are putting in excess hours and burnout is a real concern. So they said, “If people are going to work like crazy during the week, why don't we just make it a four day week? Then people will be more inclined to step away.” I thought that was an interesting approach.

Shopify went full remote in May of 2020 so we are permanently remote. The interesting thing is, there's a loud minority that is not thrilled about it. Which is interesting because I have peers that are at Asana, for example where they’ve taken a strong stance on folks coming back to the office but they're losing strong candidates because of it. Remote work is not a perk anymore, it’s almost a requirement of the role.

It's also interesting because at New Relic we had already started hiring a few remote folks prior to the pandemic because of competitive salaries in the Bay Area. We just weren't able to compete, so we had to look out of state and out of region to get the talent we wanted. The game has changed around remote work. It's one of the reasons why I even considered Shopify, because the ability to stay remote was attractive. If you live in the Bay Area, you're familiar with the commuting aspect of living here, which is pretty arduous at times.