Are you noticing a shift toward hiring fewer specialists in tech roles and more generalists—individuals who are adaptable, open to development, and who bring greater diversity to the team? How is this trend affecting your hiring strategies? In the past, your talent pipeline may have focused on candidates with computer science degrees straight out of college. What qualities are you prioritizing now, and where are you searching for new talent?

IT trends come and go and so do the corresponding specialists. I've always preferred to recruit for attitude; a willingness to learn and be self-starting, with general technical competance regardless of how it was achieved. New technical skills are always easy to teach then attitude, and contractors are for those times you immediately need the deep specialism.

We notice currently that juniors seem to be a big asset to add to existing teams. Education within IT lanes like networking, development and Data specialists seem to be wel organised with big companies like Cisco and Microsoft delivering educated people that are easy to integrate in existing teams with direct benefits.

I’ve been lucky to have a fabulous internal IT recruiter, but my best hires recently have come from the business. They already know the business and are really excited to learn the technology. I’m looking for people who are eager to learn and can bridge the gap between business and technology.

Right now, I’m hiring for good managers. I have highly technical people who climb up to tech lead, but the only place to go is into management. What I’ve found is that when you take a highly technical person and put them in a management role, about 70% will fail and 30% will succeed. This often results in poor managers trying to manage highly technical teams. So I’m hiring more for management and people skills, with the idea that I can generally grow someone technically. For true software development roles, I still need to hire coders, but for other positions, I’m looking for good managers and people from the business, as they seem to be better at managing technical teams.

I'd hire a culture fit over an expertise checkbox.