looking for advice how/where/who to recruit for new i5 ops/admin position in NY City area, how phrase job desc

  Hi -- this is not a job listing, it is a request for advice especially from 
people in the NY City area for how to approach a staffing problem that has been 
laid in my lap.
   
  Sorry to be so wordy.
   
  My company is one of those that went through a buy out last year (by National 
Medical Health Card, WWW.NMHC.COM), and what used to be a Mimix'd pair of 
iSeries production servers in Sacramento, CA has become 3 i5 physical servers 
(2 570s and a 550) with 10 LPARs -- one footprint left in Sacramento as DR, and 
a production and High Availability pairing on Long Island right next to NY 
City. The purchasing company is moving off the line of business software they 
had (on HP servers) onto the software we, the purchased Sacramento company, 
ran/runs.
   
  Executive management decided it was best to use the primary software vendor 
(bread and butter Pharmacy Benefits Management package running only on iSeries) 
as the contracted System Admin team as well. (My job ends 3/31/06 per severance 
contract, so I'll be looking in the Sacramento soon. I'll be posting here, for 
myself, shortly.) All "custom code" on the i5s is rapidly being ported to a 
outer ring of HP servers running Oracle that are fed by extracts from the i5s, 
so in the not too distant future the i5s will be running "plain vanillla" 
versions of that one core software package and nothing else, so there won't be 
any i5 programmer positions left either (which closed the other option that I'd 
hoped would allow me to stay on given my 50/50 career in 400 system admin and 
P/A work).
   
  The realization has sunk in among executive ranks that the company still 
needs an operator or two in NY City who can work with the softare vendor's 
senior system admins, and work for a few weeks I guess with a system admin who 
is currently on site but who, like me, is there now on a temporary basis. The 
problem is the folks in NY have virtually no background with iSeries (a couple 
of their developers worked around AS/400s or even coded a little on them, but 
no one has systems experience to speak of). They say they don't know who to 
approach, what pay scale to expect to pay, etc. to initiate the process of 
posting and hiring for the operator / administrator position. That position 
will report to a director who comes from Sacramento who has extensive 
management experience in an AS/400 environment (and who is a terrific person 
and manager, even if his technical knowledge is now a bit dated).
   
  As the Sacramento Sr System Admin / Analyst / Programmer, with 25 years on 
S/38 - AS/400 wearing all sorts of hats including having hired and managed 
operators and programmers in California, I was asked to help come up with a 
plan, contacts, recruiters, job description, etc.
   
  There are clearly national recruiting firms; the web makes it easy to find 
recruiters in the NY area; Monster.com and such are well known, and David's 
list I'm sending this to is an obvious resource to post the position. My 
problem is being very uncertain about how to define, promote, and otherwise get 
this staffing decision moving.
   
  I'm hoping to impose on hiring managers in the NY City area, maybe even 
attract would be candidates for what will probably be defined as something like 
a solid mid level i5 operator / system admin position, to get back to me with 
advice as to how best to proceed.
   
  I don't envy anyone looking at this (these?) position(s?) when it/they are 
posted. No matter how described, the reality will almost certainly depend on 
factors I'm not aware of now and that will evolve pretty quickly once the 
players (the vendor's system admins are solidly experienced, my company's 
people in "IT" are too but not on i5 and they likely won't be eager to learn 
much about the i5s under these circumstances) are working together. I don't 
know for sure that the 2nd position will actually materialize. I expect the 
position might be officially posted as "temp to perm".
   
  Given what I've just said, incomplete and vague as it is, does anyone care to 
share any advice as to things like:
  pay range, stock (I know stock is a benefit for perm employees), motivators 
of importance (I'm thinking strong commitment to regular formal training might 
matter a lot -- with V5R3 LPAR the need to learn/use HMC is important, MImix is 
a critical product, HelpSystems suite is heavily used, BRMS, and there are lots 
of communications issues with remote offices and the DR site in Sacramento) or 
other things that could make the job attractive ?
   
  When posting to this listserv or to Monster or just writing the job 
description generally, I'd sure appreciate particular suggestions for what it 
is that might be listed as a 'mid-level' operator skill / experience set these 
days. I'm thinking that 3-5 years of solid operations experience might no 
longer need to include much if any exposure to i5 based printing (it won't be 
needed here), that many shops (again like this one) likely make i5 operators 
keep their hands off the PCs that the LAN/WAN folks must support instead, that 
an operator at that level may have never touched a 5250 class terminal or a 
line printer or a POTS using modem -- and probably won't have to in this job. 
(Well, there is a modem on each HMC now.)  Yet FTP to/from PCs, 5250 emulation 
software, and so on will likely be valuable for a candidate to present. Command 
line, experience logging and working trouble tickets or similar, reporting 
related to service level agreements -- those sorts of non-i5 specific
 experiences might be as important as having installed PTFs and baby sat an 
option 21 save.
   
  My having what may be too much experience in this field seems to color and 
distort my perception of what to list in the job description. That makes me ask 
for help.
   
  My thanks to everyone who made it through this -- and more so to anyone who 
replies, whether on the list or privately to my chahn@xxxxxxxx account, or to 
my chiseries@yahoo personal account.
   
  regards,
   
  Charlie Hahn
  NMHC
  chahn@xxxxxxxx
  916.361.4432


                
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