Collaboration

VAR PROFILE
Hiring
and
Keeping
Talent
Hiring and keeping talent is a
topic that seems to come up time
and time again when we talk to
Partners, so this roundtable digs a
little deeper into that issue. There’s
definitely no silver bullet, but our
interviewees have a few tricks up
their sleeves…
IRIS SCHIMKE
president and CEO of Express
Information Systems
JIM SHEEHAN
managing partner at PowerObjects
JACK BOYER
president of Boyer and Associates
KATIE HASBARGEN
worldwide program lead for the
Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance
The Partner Channel (TPC): What does your current hiring environment look like?
Jack Boyer (JB): We’ve gone through some serious changes in the last six months
in building up our Microsoft Dynamics NAV practice, but we are struggling to
find Microsoft Dynamics NAV professionals to meet that demand. Even when we
go through the hoops of using a hiring agency, conducting personality tests, and
vetting out the new professional, we’ve had limited success in knowing new people
will work out. I would say one out of two are successful in spite of the additional HR
steps we are making to vet candidates.
Iris Schimke (IS): Keeping great people is a lot easier than finding new ones. For
us, we are always on the lookout to see when new tech resources bubble to the
surface, because when you’re actually looking for someone, you don’t find him/her.
For example, we hired a professional part-time because we didn’t have a spot open,
and now she’s one of our highest billable resources. If we would have turned her
away at the beginning, we would have missed that chance to onboard a very valuable
employee.
Katie Hasbargen (KH): Similar to what Jack and Iris touched on, we see Partners
struggle with finding the right candidate at the right time. There is a lack of
resources in the community at large, so finding those resources is problematic. It
is often a reactive situation of when the work is coming in and then trying to scale
their resources to adjust. I think Partners are starting to realize the need for a more
pragmatic approach to hiring talent.
Jim Sheehan (JS): We take a completely different tactic. Hiring has become a
soapbox item for me, and an entrepreneurial challenge that PowerObjects has to
own. Last year we added 150 people, doubling the size of our organization. We made
a lot of investments to make that happen, but it was doable.
Partners need to stay ahead of the curve. Just-in-time hiring will never enable an
organization to grow to a sustainable business. When you hire in that way, you’re
just paying for the inconvenience of needing people right away.
TPC: How would you recommend Partners start thinking more strategically in
terms of hiring?
JS: With just-in-time hiring, you’re on the road to higher turnover and lots of issues.
You’ll always be playing catch-up to projects, rather than getting the right teams in
place and ready to serve your clients.
We like that the Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance is pushing colleges to
teach business applications, but we don’t rely on it as a strategy. We want students
to know about PowerObjects, and more so, how we can add to the university
curriculum to help them learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
KH: We encourage Partners to consider a new graduate recruiting strategy.
Candidates are centrally located at colleges and universities. It is a longer-term
strategy and takes them longer to ramp up, but then you can depend on a more
steady flow of talent.
IS: We’ve seen two challenges when hiring “green technicians”: 1. They don’t have
enough business acumen, so they don’t understand the lay of the land from a
customer’s perspective. 2: Customers smell what they don’t know, and that creates
stress on both sides. Therefore, to compensate for less experience, the billing rates
are less.
I would rather plunk the new people with a client to get real on-the-ground
experience so they can see how it works from the other side, and then move them
back to us.
KH: It’s funny you say that, because some Partners do just that. They offer their new
recruits up as a free resource at the client site, and then eventually move them back
to their Partner organization.
IS: That’s a great idea. Once they understand what a client goes through and why
different things are important from a client’s perspective, the light bulb comes on,
and their value as a consultant goes up.
32 FALL 2015 | THEPARTNERCHANNEL.COM