IT Staffing

Cardinal Data Systems, Inc. has been in business since 1974 as an Information Technology consulting firm. About ten years ago we started to perform staff augmentation and full time employee sourcing for select clients and found that we were successful at understanding and meeting clients IT staffing needs. Much of this is due to our unique blend of technical background and performance-based approach to talent sourcing. We believe that our performance-based talent acquisition methodology succeeds where the traditional skills matching techniques utilized by our competition fails. This approach has demonstrated its value with major financial institutions, healthcare, pharmaceutical and retail firms.

To give you some insight into how our process works it is important to explain where faults exist in the traditional recruiting approach. We don’t believe that hiring managers prepare complete, effective job descriptions, or that Human Resources has a complete handle on what a technical team needs to be successful. Even typical vendor calls are too short and shallow to be effective in gaining key details. Frequently incomplete and poorly written, job descriptions often do more harm than good during the hiring process. In addition, other hiring mistakes are frequently made because first impressions are used to determine on-the-job success and this just doesn’t work.

Our methodology centers around gaining a comprehensive understanding of the objectives that a candidate must achieve to be successful in the role. This is different from identifying skills people must possess for the job. From the understanding of objectives we develop a performance profile to use as our key tool from which we develop other tools such as our networking tactics, unique advertisements, mailings and search technology to source qualified candidates. We take advantage of advanced networking and marketing technologies to source candidates who might not otherwise be identified through traditional sourcing techniques. We then systematically present only the candidates who score in the top 25% of our talent scorecard, insuring an appropriate job fit.

At CDS we come from technology backgrounds and having worked in enterprise environments so we can gain a strong comprehension of an IT department’s technical needs. Where possible we like to have access to the hiring manager as this actually saves time because we help prevent mistakes in hiring due to poorly defined requirements and subjective candidate assessments. In most cases we are able to minimize our candidate presentation to just three or four qualified candidates, saving time, effort and money.