Good staff are hard to find

Good staff are hard to find.

I’ve got some good staff on my team - my writers are especially of a good standard, namely because I never went on price, but instead, on quality, hiring experienced writers already working in the UK press industry.

However, writing requires a particular skill - what’s more difficult is when looking for people with a particular aptitude.

Initiative is one of the most valuable skills in webmastering - the ability to understand the problem at hand, and solve it through use of initiative.

I always have a real need for people who have initiative, and constantly have problem finding them - at least, people available for hire, as most who do have some degree of initiative seem to be already using this to develop their own personal business interests. It’s hard to find those who aren’t.

Initiative isn’t about having a particular skillset - it’s about the ability to think around those skills, learn new ones as required, and overall, the applications of these to work within a brief.

Many technical skills are nothing more than button pushing in the right order. Sure, understanding which buttons to push can take a lot of learning and intelligence, but at the end of the day, it’s button pushing.

People with initiative appreciate that button pushing doesn’t have to happen in a particular order - and that just because some people push a few buttons in a particular order, doesn’t mean to say these buttons can’t be pushed in a different order to offer a new solution.

It’s so annoying when I take people on, who need to have a sense of initiative, but who instead do nothing more than button pushing. There’s no sense of artistic flair, no sense of scientific exploration, and no overall understanding of the actual problem that actually needs solving.

If I want to redevelop a site I can do it myself - but I find it so time consuming I find myself trying to bring other people on board who can do this, and with a better vision than myself.

Instead, seem to end up with people with less vision.

I find my writers are successfully because I treat them well, pay them comparatively well - but most of all these are people with a professional approach to the work, who know exactly what the problem is, and what they need to do to solve it.

Can only hope I can find that in developers soon. :)