What are the key factors that impede businesses from attracting talent?

Reputation of the Organization and its culture

Salaries, benifets, working hours and flexibility.

Maybe the issue has less to do with the supply chain, and more to do with the people who need the supply. Maybe we're not doing a good job of telling people why this is a career they want to choose, and that when they learn this particular programming tool today, that's not what we care about most. I argue that when we hire people, we shouldn’t make them sit down and do a technology test to write code. At least, I don't. We talk to them about thinking logically and problem-solving, but then we put them in a job where they write code. We've forgotten that we hired them for their mind, and we keep rewarding them for their technical ability. So I wonder if the problem is with IT as an industry; we’re not making this attractive and valuable, and explaining why it's important.

To a certain extent, recruiting has always been broken, but it is more broken than ever. I bet that many of us rely on our network to fill many of the critical roles that we have, and it's unusual for an exec search firm to strike gold and find you that talent. As one of my financial advisers used to say, "Even the blind squirrel finds the nut every now and then." And that applies somewhat to recruiters as well. Sometimes, they just get fortunate. The traditional method of sourcing talent is not meeting expectations.

The issue is so complex and so nuanced that we really have to wrap our heads around it. As IT leaders, we're actually part of the problem, because in working with recruiting teams over the years, we kind of get into this rhythm of saying, "This is how things are done." We need to revisit the whole approach towards acquiring, developing, and training talent.