The IT Solution Provider industry has been collectively bitching about the lack of available talent for a long time. I have to agree, we have been having a really tough time trying to find even entry level IT employees for well over a year.
Yet GoDaddy has 20,000 people willing to work for $11 / hr.
So either Bob Parsons is a genius, or we all suck. Good news, this is not going to require a SWOT analysis – if you’re bitching about the talent, you suck. There, I’m letting you have this one for free.
So now what?
Forget Tests
Personality tests, profiles, interviews and other collections of standardized questions that are supposed to separate a serial killer from a person looking for a career in IT can be easily gamed by intelligent people.
That, and most technical people fit perfectly into the personality profile of a serial killer.
“I like Bob. He’s quiet. Keeps to himself. Doesn’t complain out loud or create conflict in the office.”
Our Problem
Our problem typically always came down to hiring people that we liked that showed a lot of potential. As we start to grow really fast we no longer have the luxury of hiring “the perfect person” we kind of have to go for “the available person” – it’s been a hit and miss.
What it comes down to is identifying the skills that you need, skills that they have, and skills that you can teach them.
Recently our interview for one role came down to two people: One was really shy, reserved, quiet and knew a bit about social networking. The other one was quite open, friendly, charming and flexible but didn’t quite know as much about the social marketing stuff.
So here is the $35,000 question: What do you think is easier to teach: people skills or book skills?
My staff naturally looked at the hard facts: Facebook – check. Twitter – check. We go with the one that has that. They were sold. Until I asked them the question above.
The Solution
Given enough bananas, I can teach a monkey the OSI model. It won’t make them Cisco engineers.
Given an unlimited supply of gold, I couldn’t teach someone with the solid understanding of an OSI model how to talk to another human being that didn’t about how to help someone troubleshoot their network connection.
You see, most intelligent people can easily pick up yet another skill or additional knowledge.
Changing who they are, how they behave, interact, communicate and so on – not so much.
Some of the smartest people I know couldn’t even pick up the phone at a helpdesk.
The Fix
Today, we started recording internal training videos:
OWN 101 (30 minutes)
Product Matrix (30 minutes)
Customer Service – Deferrals, Escalations, Alternatives and Workarounds (1 hour)
Essential Network Troubleshooting (1-2 hours) – DNS, SSL, ping, traceroute
This is just the starting point, but I hope you take note of one thing: these are not specific, deep dive, technical videos.
These are videos about our values, about our business, about the way we treat partners, about the way we build our company and how we got from just me to here to where we want to go to next.
Technical skills, in my opinion, can be taught.
But if in a span of a week anyone (beyond janitors) in my company cannot explain how we work and what we do, they have no place working for an IT company.
It goes beyond that.
The investment in technically training an employee to understand the intricacies of our solutions is immense. We used to focus on training people how to take over one task at a time – an apprentice – getting way too deep into their employment before we realized they were not the right fit.
We’re now investing more – but we’ll know faster if they are not the right person for OWN.
More importantly, they will know sooner if we’re the company where they can build their career or not. Most successful people I know aren’t in a given job just because of the cash and cash alone – yet nearly all of the people that I know that are stuck in dead end job are stuck in it solely for the money. The person that’s there for a paycheck is not the person that has your company in mind because they are not the company – they are just the paycheck. Be fair and let them come to the conclusion on their own.
So the talent availability sucks – you can still build some really great things with great people – all you need is to give them a chance and a starting point. It starts with you though, they aren’t just going to become perfect job candidates on their own or you wouldn’t be reading this blog post.
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