
What the heck is DevOps and what’s it got to do with your organization’s hiring strategy? DevOps – the practice of operations and development engineers working together in the entire service lifestyle – is rapidly spreading through the tech community. From design to support, DevOps is a cultural movement that operates under the four essential elements of culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (“CAMS”).
The CAMS principles are applied to the hiring process in a way that emphasizes common goals for all involved.
DevOps: The Common Goal
DevOps benefits an organization’s product or service lifecycle, its competitive advantage, and its innate ability to better and more quickly meet client and customer needs. While still in its early phases, it represents a significant cultural shift in how organizations, including those in the tech industry, operate and, consequently, how they hire.
Here are some trends you can watch for in the coming year, as well as some hiring tips that reflect the DevOps approach. Keep in mind that every organization will have its own interpretation of what DevOps is, so it’s important to not get hung up on the buzzwords that have sprung into being with this movement.
- The DevOps method continues to increase its use of a modular approach to team building. Your hiring strategy should consider ways to employ small, nimble teams to manage individual projects. Look for candidates who understand how to break down traditional monolithic processes into bite-sized pieces.
- As the DevOps approach is more readily embraced, teams will be empowered to develop product and services and operate the workplace environment with software-based methods. Search for candidates that know how to prioritize automation considerations from the start and integrate that technology in the development phase.
- The traditional silos between development and operations will continue to shrink and integrated teams will focus on continuous delivery and improvement. Potential candidates should understand that their job isn’t over once a product or service has been delivered. Both development and operations employees will need to be part of a project’s entire lifecycle.
- The DevOps method reduces the amount of time required to take a product or service to production. Ideal candidates will show a willingness to operate under the more agile ways of working to ensure systems are more risk-tolerant, and to develop metrics that deliver clear goals and accurate times to implementation.
- Over time, the DevOps approach will eliminate the role of operations as it’s currently known. Organizations can expect to see a big change in how operations are able to change or switch out the technology stack in days rather than years. The best IT candidates will be those who can adjust their skills to meet the changes that result from DevOps increasingly becoming an organization’s normal way of operating.
Conclusion
More and more, organizations are recognizing the need to break down the walls that separate and divide IT development and operations. Recruiting candidates that possess DevOps skills has become more critical, but it is often easier said than done. Qualified candidates are today’s hot commodities, making it difficult for many organizations to find them and bring them into their company. A highly-qualified staffing and recruitment firm may be your best bet for finding those highly sought after employees.