Leading a Diverse, Millennial IT Team

Heller Search: Can you describe your role at TravelClick?

Joe Eng: I’m the chief information officer responsible for product engineering, technology and operations and a member of the senior leadership team.

What is TravelClick’s business?

We provide SaaS solutions to hoteliers around the world in the form of business intelligence and a hotel’s online presence: websites, online booking and digital marketing campaigns. We are headquartered in New York City and have over 1,000 employees.

How many employees are in your IT operation?

We have 100+ onshore staff, spread around five locations in North America. We have another 300+ offshore resources through our outsourcing business partners in various locations around the world.

What is the make-up of your onshore team?

It is a diverse team in terms of personal backgrounds, cultures and nationalities, and over time it will become even more diverse. We have a large and growing number of millennials, or Gen-Y, on the technology team who bring a ton of creativity and talent to the company.

Different adjectives are often used to describe the millennial workforce.

That is true. I have certainly heard and read those comments. But within the millennial group, there is also diversity, so it is hard to paint with a broad brush. I think that there is some truth in the observation that millennials as a group are more determined to achieve a better work-life balance than previous generations.

Does that make your job harder?

It is transforming the way that we run IT here, mostly for the better.

It can be challenging to balance the preferred hours and work patterns of all of our team members against the mission-critical nature of our business. Our solutions are 24/7/365 mission-critical systems for our clients. Hotels lose a lot of money if they are unable to accept bookings online, even for a short time. The thing about tech issues is that they don’t happen at planned times, and more often than not, they occur at the most inconvenient times. That means we need people who are available at all times to quickly handle issues or problems that may arise anywhere around the world.

So, from a management perspective, a challenge that I have is allowing team members to have a real life outside of work that includes time for family and vacations and weekends off, while still providing the 24-hour global coverage that we need to serve our clients.

Have you been able to solve the life-outside-of-work challenge?

We are definitely getting better at it. We are leveraging our mix of onshore and offshore in smarter ways to cover all of the time zones more efficiently, but there are still certain skillsets that we don’t have absolutely everywhere.

We’re also changing how we manage deployment of new releases. Typically, solution providers like us avoid deploying new releases during local normal business hours, because usage volume may be at a peak. It is seen as riskier. So the updates are scheduled for off-peak hours, usually on a weekend or in the middle of the night when they may cause less disruption to operations. That is when you have to schedule members of your team to staff the update during what, for many, are considered to be odd working hours.

We are working toward getting more flexibility on how and when we deliver our updates into production. We are leveraging our alternate sites as an ability to get the next release ready. We are able to test and deploy new releases at an alternate site and get them fully ready before deploying them into production during normal daylight working hours, even during peak system usage. We also make more use of DevOps in that our engineering and operations can deploy changes without taking the system offline.

How else is DevOps transforming your operation?

Our developers have gotten closer to the operations and have come to appreciate the challenges of IT operations. They have a much stronger understanding of the real-time 24/7/365 nature of the products and the importance to our customers, and as a result, they build better software.

They see how quality has become more important so they prepare their products for production more carefully. They also know that if they want to avoid having to work late or getting called in to the office in the middle of the night to fix something that they worked on, they need to build better performing products – and that is something I know this millennial generation is passionate about.

Has the millennial workforce changed how you recruit IT talent?

We’ve become more focused on cultural fit. We still carefully assess each candidate’s hard skills in technology – how to build software, their previous experiences and projects, etc. Once we are comfortable with those, we spend more effort on their soft skills and the cultural aspects. For example, we are doing more team interviews rather than just one-on-ones.

I find that I am resisting the temptation to “sell the candidate,” even when he or she is a real rock star who we want on our team. Instead, we are talking with them more about “what you will be coming into if you work here” – a frank conversation about the real-time, mission-critical aspect of our products, for example. I would rather have the person say “this is not for me” than hire them, discover that it’s a mismatch and then have to go through a painful and costly separation process a few weeks or months down the road.

I don’t try to not sell them, but I don’t go into complete selling mode like I may have in the past for the most desirable candidates. In that mode, you get blinded. You want to make sure that the candidates sell themselves.

What else has changed with technology recruiting?

For our candidate pipeline, we are focusing more on getting people referred in by existing members of the team. This works great, because the people here already understand how things work. They are more likely to identify people who not only have all of the required hard skills but also the soft skills and are likely to be a cultural fit. None of this is new – there was a lot of this type of thing back during the battle for developer talent during the dot-com boom.

We also have a referral bonus program to incentivize people, and we give constant reminders at our meetings, and we say that “one of the biggest things that each of you can contribute is to help us find people.” It helps to build the team’s commitment to the process here, as well.

About Joe Eng

Joe Eng is Chief Information Officer at TravelClick, a New York City-based company that offers hotels world-class reservation solutions, business intelligence products, and comprehensive media and marketing solutions. Eng oversees and drives technology innovation for TravelClick's products, technologies and operations. Previously, Eng was CIO at JetBlue Airways. Eng earned a master's degree in computer science from New York University.