Prioritizing IT Hiring Criteria: The Changing Role of Tech Certifications

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CISSP. PMP. MCSE. A+. MCPD. CCNA. CCNP.

There’s a lot of acronyms in IT certifications land. Do they mean the job candidate sitting across the desk from a hiring manager knows his or her stuff, or might all those abbreviations really translate into SUCKER?

The answer obviously matters. The market for IT education is now estimated at the stunningly this-paper-must-be-worth-something figure of $1.1 trillion, according to a new report on IT training and certifications from CompTIA. Obviously, somebody — rather, a whole lot of somebodies — think that IT certifications are worth it.

With all that money being spent on IT certifications, and with the job market slimmed down from the go-go dot-com era, you’d think that the right skills would be easy to find, right? Wrong. Eight out of 10 U.S. hiring managers say it’s tough to find IT people with the right skills, according to CompTIA’s report.

What makes it so difficult is that these days, the vast majority of IT bosses know better than to hire based on certifications or college degrees alone. That shows up in CompTIA’s research, which found that 97% of U.S. IT hiring managers cited “Quality of experience” as their top factor when evaluating IT job candidates. That factor was followed in the priority list by “Experience in very specific areas,” “Record of steady growth/accomplishments,” “Total years of experience,” and “Programming languages/technical skills.” The criteria “IT certifications held” shows up as only the sixth most important hiring factor.

What we found when we interviewed IT hiring managers: Certifications matter most to those businesses that need certified employees for specific reasons, such as partnership requirements or to satisfy client requirements. We also found that the happiest situations result when employers test potential employees before actually hiring them—in other words, before the employer lets potential know-nothings get their hands on the toys. Read on for their horror stories as well as tips on how to have happy hiring endings.

Who Cares About IT Certifications?

All other things being equal, Howard Sherman will choose a candidate with a certification over one who lacks it. But that, admits the managing member of an online tech support firm called RoyalGeeks.Com, is “Spoken like the MCSE, MCSA, and CCNA that I am.”

In contrast, Rob Koch, Vice President of Technology at Empathy Labs and holder of exactly zero certifications, couldn’t give a fig about his employees’ acronym laundry list. “A lot of our work comes from inbound referrals. It’s taken us beyond needing that type of credentialing,” he said. “If I was hiring Bill Gates, I wouldn’t care if he had a certification or not. I think there are certain people, at certain levels, at thresholds you cross, with regards to both business trust and the product you’re purchasing from a company; the threshold is that certifications no longer apply.”

If you’ve guessed that much of IT certifications’ appeal lies in the eye of the beholder, you’re onto something.

In fact, even though Koch himself doesn’t require certifications in his hires, and even though his clients don’t care if his consultants are certified, Koch is now going though the certification process for partnership reasons. In its November 2010 rollout of Microsoft Partner Network, Microsoft decreed that certification is a must, Koch said—a growing trend with other companies, where, he said, certification “seems to be a new gating requirement many are putting in place” for partnering.

Empathy Labs is a Microsoft Partner, and Koch is asking a few developers to take the MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer) test. But he’s still not requiring that certification of anybody he hires. “I more care that they actually know how to complete the work appropriately, more so than they have a piece of paper that shows they know how to study a specific way for a test,” he said. He believes that potentially, at a lower level, certifications are a safeguard employers purchase to make sure candidates have met some minimum criteria. “But the majority of what we do is well beyond that,” he said.

Lesson No. 1: You Get What You Pay For

Terry Hanrahan, owner of TD3 Products LLC, doesn’t just shy away from trusting IT certifications; he flat-out doesn’t hire anybody with advanced degrees, specifically PhDs. That’s because, like most anybody who has a little experience with hiring IT employees nowadays, he’s been burned.

Three-or-so companies ago, Hanrahan hired a “really nice guy” with a PhD in a technical area; Hanrahan remembers it as being either Computer Science or Electrical Engineering.

Hanrahan might be fuzzy on details because his traumatized psyche is blocking the memory. He put the PhD in charge of organizing code files. The manager of the code group soon came back to Hanrahan and said it wasn’t working out.

“He can do a lot, but not in my group,” the manager told Hanrahan.

When Hanrahan dug deeper, his team found out that the PhD had knowledge of technical areas—knowledge being a much different animal than actually being able to turn out code.

“We thought we’d get a lot more out of him, but that wasn’t the case,” Hanrahan said. So they put the PhD in charge of the bug database, a practice commonly referred to as “putting a skirt on him” by those who prefer not to be quoted.

This is the reason that IT certifications are now ranking down at No. 6 in the list of priorities for IT hiring: Everybody has a story like this.

What should have tipped off Hanrahan and his IT group: The PhD was looking for a fraction of what Hanrahan’s company was ready to pay. They got him for a salary in the $80-90K range, whereas somebody with a PhD at the time should have been pulling in something around $125K. “$90K is still a good-paying salary, but with a PhD, we should have expected more from him,” Hanrahan said.

Lesson learned: You get what you pay for. “Guys who can demand more can support that salary in the marketplace,” Hanrahan said.

Lesson No. 2: The Proof’s in the Pudding

The happiest hiring happens when, instead of assuming that an IT certification equates to being able to do the job, employers actually give candidates a trial run.

Having learned the hard way not to trust paper tigers, Hanrahan developed a test for IT candidates. One of his colleagues came up with a test that includes 10 things a job candidate should know. Two or three of those items, depending on the position, involve doing actual work, such as writing a quick 10-20 lines of code for a given solution.

That simple type of programming test gives Hanrahan insight into a candidate’s logic process when it comes to solving a problem. Mind you, this isn’t the same as getting candidates to do pro bono work, which Hanrahan noted is “the latest rage” in the engineering and industrial design worlds. “Firms are getting people to design for spec, turning them down for the job, and then running with their proposals or derivatives thereof,” he said.

In contrast, legitimate testing with the actual intention of hiring somebody who can do the work is a vital step in weeding out know-nothings. “To write a few lines of HTML code or C++? You ought to be able to do that,” Hanrahan said. “And to show that you can understand syntax and follow the logic of statements as you write them. That’s simple stuff; that doesn’t even separate the wheat from the chaff.”

An example: Hanrahan at one point was looking for a product manager for disk drive products. When he had three top candidates, he sent them away for the weekend, telling them to come up with a review of the market for a product category.

Two of his candidates came back and said, basically, “This is what I found at Best Buy,” he said. The third candidate came back with a “stellar” assessment of the market, including a sophisticated assessment of competitors’ products, including weaknesses and potential market opportunities.

“Yes, I hired her,” Hanrahan said. “Anything that came after that [type of assessment] would have to match what she gave us.”

For his part, Sherman’s horror stories include having hired an individual certified as an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) on Windows XP. The MCP called him in a panic and had to have his hand held throughout a client call: any IT firm’s nightmare.

“This guy was saying, ‛Now what I do in this scenario?’” Sherman recalled. “He was calling me at home. He said, ‛I did this and that, now what do I do?’ I was on a trip at the time, phoning back and forth for two hours. The client was totally put off.”

Thanks to that type of experience, nobody sees a client or walks through the front door until they’ve showed Sherman they really know their stuff. To make sure they do, Sherman set up a test lab where candidates are given real-life scenarios to solve with servers and networking issues. “Nobody gets out with a client or goes into the field unless I’m satisfied” with the work they demonstrate in his lab, he said.

Lesson learned: Whatever the job, be it coding or knowledge of a given product market, have them do some sort of work that reflects the actual work you’d expect them to do on the job.

Still, many employers believe in playing it safe. Hanrahan is just one of many who, even if he’s hired somebody who did well on a test, keeps new hires on 90 days probation.

Why IT Pros Should Still Get Certified

For IT professionals, the question of whether or not to get certified is obviously up in the air. Perhaps the firm interviewing you wants its clients to be assured of its employees’ credentials, or perhaps their reputation for hiring top-notch talent is so secure, they don’t need to sweat your certifications. But one thing’s for sure: Your hands-on experience matters far more than any string of letters on your resume.

But let’s face it: We all know that businesses often put value on certifications because either the IT manager or the HR people conducting the job search don’t have a clue about the knowledge domain for which they’re hiring. We can see that reflected in CompTIA’s research, which finds that the highest level of regard for IT certifications is found among senior IT management or at the executive level (e.g. CEO); in other words, at the level most removed from the nuts and bolts.

And whether it’s defensible or not, IT managers have little faith in HR’s understanding of what IT certifications are all about. CompTIA found that only 40% of IT managers believe that their HR departments have a solid understanding of certifications, while 16% think that their HR staff has little or no understanding whatsoever. CompTIA’s survey of HR professionals bears this out: HR pros mostly know HR certifications, with PHR (Professional in Human Resources) topping the list and three other HR certifications showing up on the top six with which they’re familiar. One Microsoft and one Cisco certification sneak in to the HR Top 10 awareness list, but obviously, HR isn’t particularly fluent with technical certifications.

That unfamiliarity, whether it’s on the part of HR or senior management, works to an IT professional’s advantage. As long as you’ve got some letters after your name, you’ve got a good chance of impressing a good number of the gatekeeping people in the hiring process.

Having said that, it’s useful to note that many of the IT managers we interviewed agreed that certifications show that an IT professional is devoted to his or her career. This supports CompTIA’s findings with regards to hiring managers’ perceptions on certifications: 59% of hiring managers said that it showed a candidate’s commitment to a career in IT. Another 61% said that certifications show subject matter expertise, while 58% think certifications demonstrate initiative.

Those type of perceptions show that getting certified certainly doesn’t hurt. But even if you get certified and can talk the talk, don’t think that employers nowadays will sign off on hiring somebody with a certification who can’t walk the walk.