Collaboration

TPC: Have you established some best practices in the hiring and interviewing
process?
JS: We have never used an external recruiter and don’t plan to. Our internal hiring
team has the best idea of our core values and what’s important to being an integral
part of our company.
We’ve had a lot of success with hosting a college career event each year. We have
about 200 students show up, we hire 12, and away we go.
From a fit perspective, we’re looking for people who get what the technology does
and are passionate about that. And since we hire based on our core values, it’s not
the depth of technology knowledge a person has, but rather that they think it’s really
cool. Those are the people we want.
IS: We’ve tried to stay away from the Microsoft Dynamics recruiting pool because
we operate from a consulting standpoint, very differently than most VARs in the
channel. Our hiring process has to be unique. We work with a local recruiter and
have a negotiated fee with them that has seemed to work well for us. It’s important to
find a recruiter that’s a good match with your company. Some agencies work for the
numbers, but we are a tad more “touchy feely” than that. It’s more about the employee
matching our culture and having similar values. Our recruiter understands that.
We then go through top-down interviews to see if they’re a culture fit. They
meet with sales, consultants, and marketing to get questions from every end of the
spectrum. If all that goes well, we have them shadow a day with a consultant.
JB: We work with a recruiter, too, and conduct team interviews to see their social
skills and how they answer difficult questions under pressure. We also have them
undergo an assessment, which potentially uncovers personality clashes.
TPC: Have you ever worked with temp agencies?
JB: No. It’s not a sufficient option when people don’t have the skills. You really need
to be a technical expert in implementing software and undergoing upgrades.
IS: Same here. We don’t hire contract people. They simply don’t have skin in the
game on ensuring the happiness of our client. We also can’t deliver on our culture or
promise to our clients by hiring a temp.
TPC: Have times changed since you’ve started in this business? Is it harder to
find talent now versus back then?
JB: I’ve had this consulting practice for 21 years, and this has always been a difficult
thing for us. We’ve learned that when we get a good employee, we do everything
to keep him/her. With all our new Microsoft Dynamics NAV deals, I over-hired
to get people on the ground quickly, and unfortunately, a few of those deals fell
through. I would say I’m more cautious to hire now, but yet we remain committed to
having enough people and thrilling our clients. It can be a struggle, especially when
starting a new practice.
IS: Exactly. It’s a tango all the way. There’s a certain cadence to manage billable hours
and scale team members with that. Even when you hire those employees, it’s another
tango of giving them certainty of new deals and keeping their average billable time
high enough so they’re challenged and seeing good compensation.
I started more than 26 years ago in the channel and remember Great Plains 4.0 to
5. Although that was a challenge because it was new, we weren’t expected to know
so much back then. Now, we need to understand how it all plays and works together.
There is a ton more complexity with infrastructure and the web, so if you don’t have
a baseline understanding, you can’t troubleshoot.
JS: I would say it has been pretty consistently difficult if you are looking to just hire
people with the technology skill set. We’ve only been in Microsoft Dynamics since
2007, and the whole time, we have been in a resource-constrained channel. What
has changed is how we approach it and look at finding the right people that fit our
culture and invest in their skills.
Iris Schimke
Jim Sheehan
Jack Boyer
Katie Hasbargen
THEPARTNERCHANNEL.COM | FALL 2015 33