Having the right hardware and software to keep your business running is useless without good people. Can you take a second- or third-rate staff and turn it into a winner? The supply of skilled AS/400 talent is not keeping up with the ever-increasing demand. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, between 1996 and 2006, jobs in IT will outpace all other careers and will more than double. Keeping good IT employees will become more challenging than fixing the Y2K bug. The following tips can help you be successful in finding and keeping staff members:

1. Get the word out. Use all resources—classified ads, employment agencies, employee referral bonuses, the Internet.

2. Make a good first impression. Sell candidates on the benefits of working for your company. Conduct your interviews in a neat, professional surrounding.

3. Sell the opportunities. Let candidates know about learning and growth opportunities. If you don’t have such opportunities, cultivate them. Give candidates information on your company, such as an annual report or a company newsletter.

4. Make quick hiring decisions. Too often, a company misses a good candidate because it waited too long after receiving the candidate’s resume or waited to interview more people.

5. Make a competitive offer. Know what offer it will take to get an acceptance. A good agency can help you pin down the right offer to get a candidate on your staff. Consider offering a signing bonus, which is becoming more widely used for programmers.

6. Cultivate career development for your team. Groom your people for the next step. Start a mentoring program by using your senior staff to help train your newer staff members. Encourage participation in your local user group. Make an effort to get your staff to COMMON and local IT-specific training. Develop a technical reference library.

7. Offer challenging projects. IT people are driven by learning and implementing something new. While you can’t implement new software every other year, there will always be key projects in which you might use a newer technology.

8. Empower your staff. Most people want the opportunity to show what they can do. Granting that opportunity builds confidence in your staff and makes you a more capable and confident manager. You are responsible for orchestrating IT functions, not micromanaging every individual and project. Learn to delegate, and you will build a loyal and capable team.

9. Give adequate and competitive salary reviews. After programmers have been with a company for a year or two and have gotten their token 4 percent to 5 percent raises, many managers think they should be content with their pay rate. In many cases, though, new staff members hired with the same skill sets as current employees may actually get higher salaries than do people who have been there two years. By the third year, companies risk losing their longer-term employees because they can get more money (sometimes 10 percent to 15 percent more) elsewhere. While turnover is a fact of life, you can minimize it by bending the rules on salary reviews. Having more title changes can help justify bigger salary increases.

10. Show your appreciation and compliment your staff. Some things are worth more than money. When projects are completed on time or ahead of schedule, let your whole staff hear about it. Find ways to reward your staff for a job well done. This can range from buying lunch to giving bonuses.

A conscious effort to improve your staff, challenge them, and recognize their efforts will help you build and keep a team that will be effective and much less prone to look for greener pastures.