By
Jennifer Bosavage
25 July 2007 07:34AM
Tags:
hire | great | people | today
It's a complaint heard industry-wide: "We're hiring, but we can't find anyone right for the position!"
It's a complaint heard industry-wide: "We're hiring, but we can't find anyone right for the position!" Finding qualified employees who are going to "gel" with your organization, and make it more profitable, is seemingly getting more difficult by the day.
In the high-tech world, it's tough all over. Finding, attracting and hiring talented employees " particularly engineers and sales people -- are tough hurdles facing every IT organization. There are ways to get the people you need, but they require a dedicated effort to be successful. "Staffing is such is a challenge that it is a competitive issue to some extent," says Robert Murphy, Northeast Divisional Co-President for Presidio Networked Solutions (VARBusiness 500 No. 72).
Many VARs use recruiters to get the job done, particularly for support staff, but even engineers can be found through a good search firm, says Debra Candido, vice president of administration at Manhattan Information Systems. "We hire engineers, a lot of times, based on a certain skill set. Many times we use a placement agency," Candido says. "We always have the need for the Cisco guy, and also, for certain types of software -- Unix or Linux, for example."
To Know Them Is To Love Them While recruitment firms are one option, for many hard-core techies, nothing beats the personal touch. "Referrals are better than any job post or resume search," says Chris Kurpeikis, co-founder and vice president of sales at B2B Computer Products (VARBusiness 500 No. 424). Kurpeikis says his company will be hiring in the Fall for salespeople, sales assistants and engineers. But there will be little guesswork in bringing those employees on-board. "All of our technical hires have been people we knew from working with previously," Kurpeikis says. "We really haven't had to interview and hire anyone that we did not know."
It's More Than Just the Interview After deciding how to search for the employee " ad placement, internal referrals, search firms or a combination -- determine how the candidate is going to benefit your company, and its culture. The key is to consider the employee as an asset, and to create an entire hiring process that reflects that belief. By creating a comprehensive program that is head and shoulders above what others are doing, companies not only gain a valuable tool, but they also create a desirable company culture. Good people want to be where they know other good people are.
"Overriding on all our selections is: Does this person create problems or are they problem solvers?" says Will Henderson, CEO and CFO, Sword and Shield Enterprise Security (VARBusiness 500 No. 399). "They have to all work together. There's only one thing I get mad about, and that is when people don't cooperate. If they don't cooperate with each other, it's not going to work. We have to have people that generate ideas, people who get things done. You have to be willing to make the whole thing work together." The successful hire begins with the candidate selection and continues through the new employees' orientation and training.
Orientation and training? "The typical VAR is not doing in-house training on company policies, for example," Murphy says. "There are no VARs that have three-week new-employee programs. Contrast that with Sun or Cisco, which send their employees for a week or two of training." Such training is not just for the recent college grad, but also for the more experienced. It may be on company policies, or comprise ongoing product tutorials. All of it makes a company more marketable to potential employees, and creates a value-added workforce. "We are focusing a lot of our energies now on time-to-revenue on new employees, say, a sales rep who has never sold in our industry or a four-year, degreed engineer," says Murphy.
"We're working to getting them billable, and looking at how we compress that time without harming quality and customer satisfaction. It's about soft skills training; when you've got someone straight from school or internal IT, how do you train them to execute in the field with confidence and expert we require? Business management companies have done this for years." And IT companies can do it too.