Once you've got a sharp worker, one way to keep him is to let him start making decisions right away. That's a tip from San Diego-based wireless vendor Qualcomm Inc., which ranks 23rd on this year's list.

"We push a lot of decision-making down in the organization, so people right out of school get involved," says Norm Fjeldheim, Qualcomm's senior vice president and CIO. As an example, he recalls how a technology team made up largely of junior staffers approached him in 2004 and suggested that virtualizing the company's servers would ease setup. In response, the CIO approved a US$150,000 evaluation of VMware virtualization products.

"We saw early success, so we kept expanding the program until we ultimately put it in production," Fjeldheim says. "Now, 50 percent of our data center is virtual. We've saved over $3 million on hardware alone, and we can set up a server in 30 minutes." All because some young administrators were intrigued by virtualization's potential.

Hiring managers must also be careful not to underestimate the urge to build an empire when the larder is full. Securian's Delaney Nelson says this has been a key to her group's ability to avoid layoffs. "Some companies do huge staff-ups when the economy's strong," she says. "We don't. We'd rather move gradually." When Securian needs IT staffing but is unsure for how long, it uses consultants. By the time Delaney Nelson's team replaces a consultant with a full-timer, it's confident that the position will be needed in the long run.

Securian also encourages departments to borrow staffers from one another when one group is busy and another is slack. This is a reasonably trauma-free option, Sullivan says, because Securian uses a standard set of development tools. She says, "If I move to another group, I know they'll be using the same J2EE platform" that her group is using now to develop a business-to-business e-commerce Web site for the financial services department.