Recruiting and Retaining IT Staff: How Indiana's tech services office is hiring, and hanging onto, top employees.

• Author: Greenberg, Pam
• Position: HUMAN RESOURCES - Indiana Legislative Services Agency's Office of Technology Services management of information technology workers

The high-tech workplace is known for competitive salaries, great benefits and fun perks like casual dress codes, free food and giveaways aplenty. They often receive cutting-edge training and get access to the latest technologies.

Government just can't compete with that, right? Wrong. Offering benefits and perks more commonly seen in the private sector is among the creative strategies one legislative information technology agency is using to attract and retain top talent.

Government's Challenges

A strong economy and a low unemployment rate have made it difficult for state agencies to land engineers, technicians and information technology professionals, all of whom are in high demand in the private sector. In a new report, the National Association of State Chief Administrators identified several reasons the states' task has become more difficult, including changes in workforce expectations and the reduced appeal of "lifetime employment" among younger generations, less-competitive salaries, and negative perceptions about working for government.

Legislatures face the same challenges. Legislative IT directors and chief information officers said in a 2017 survey that the only thing harder than "finding and retaining skilled IT staff" was "keeping up with security threats."

About six years ago, the Office of Technology Services at the Indiana Legislative Services Agency started expanding as technology in the legislature grew in importance. The office was developing a suite of legislative applications and updating others all while maintaining its existing systems and providing customer support.

Cues From the Private Sector

To improve recruitment and retention of IT employees, agency leaders supported several innovations suggested by their technology team. They adopted C-suite titles (chief operating officer, chief technology officer, etc.) and "lead" positions (team lead) common to the private sector. They agreed to hire workers with H-1B visas and went to area universities to recruit. They redesigned their office space to foster collaboration and gave IT staff access to the equipment best suited to the work they were doing.

They even found a way to provide "free" food when team managers personally funded a snack pantry for employees.

The agency did salary surveys and was able to offer more competitive pay for most IT positions. And, finally, it created career ladders so that employees can earn promotions with associated pay increases over time.

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