Hiring the right people is hard. Especially extending your technical operations and services staff…
While an unlimited budget can make finding the best person for any job easier, in the real world, budgets can’t be conjured out of thin air for every position on your team. And everyone knows that sourcing the best person will be nearly impossible with a low budget. Sometimes finding an intern with raw talent, dedication, loyalty and a commitment to learning is a delightful happenstance, but those of us seeking talented, long-term staff solutions know that the challenge of finding the correct person for a position is really difficult. Especially if the job requires technical abilities or expertise.
Finding senior staff comes with its own set of unique challenges. Senior staff expect a competitive salary and thought-provoking, stimulating projects to hone their competitive skills and keep their experience up to date. Will you be able to provide that type of position and continual growth path to keep a high-level individual engaged and committed to your company’s success? On the other hand, junior people don’t have the experience or skills and must be trained. They need guidance to avoid big, costly mistakes, and that supervision and control puts a different type of stress on your organization. Do you have the processes and educational leadership to consistently on-board new neophyte staff personnel and how will you address the churn that occurs in low level, lower paid staff?
You probably won’t be surprised to learn you are not alone in addressing these frustrations. The search for qualified, experienced technical operations staff in any province is trying, and some areas are downright deserts for sourcing new talent. In particular, the area around Kitchener-Waterloo is facing a shortage of qualified people for technical and operations staff, an outcome of our own success and the growth of our local economy and tech businesses. A lack of qualified candidates is hampering our abilities and growth.
It is no surprise that the overall talent shortage in every sector is the primary, number 1 hiring challenge today. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, 87% of HR professionals report “few or no qualified applicants” for the positions they seek to fill. And the problem is not going to go away anytime soon: A 2020 McKinsey Global Institute study found that companies in North America will need up to 18 million more educated employees that are going to be available. Think about that statistic: the demand is far outweighing the resources—even when facing a pandemic, it becomes clear that we are all entering a continual battle for the right, talented personnel.
Speed is also a key frustration in the hiring process—Positions are often critical to expansion or customer retention services, and because of those growth requirements, teams push to hire as fast as possible. Vacant positions delay plans, hamper operations and often cost money, or in the worst case, drag important personnel from other areas of the company into a quasi-permanent recovery role where your best technical staff is dedicated to solving problems. And don’t discount that fact that your HR process for new hires may be too long or your internal teams may struggle to reach a consensus, letting the best candidates slip through your fingers.
Consider the intangibles as well. A candidate experience drives value for your employer branding, and it is a major factor when qualified candidates evaluate job offers. Every potential new hire understands the way you treat candidates during the interview process absolutely reflects the way you’ll treat them as employees. Bad experiences will convince them to turn your offer of a position down, and with the market for talent balanced in favor of the job seeking professional, they will have other options to consider. Another particularly North American challenge we must address is the ability to build diversity in our organization at all levels. Many companies struggle to attract diverse candidates and that can be a reflection of your particular industry as well as unconscious biases. We all seek an inclusive workplace showing potential candidates that you’re a meritocracy and allowing you to benefit from diversity’s positive effects. Yes, we all have legal obligations to provide equal opportunities, but it is important to objectively source talent because by removing stereotypes, we can find the absolute best candidate for the position.
Is there a better way?
If you are facing IT Operations and technical support and services staff challenges, OPSgrok can help! IT organizations are generally support organizations focused on project completion and keeping all infrastructure running and up to date – they are not primarily focused or evaluated on production, logistics, delivery and support for your information products. Let us show you how our outsources “Operations as a Service” can augment your current staff and support strategic growth at a fraction of the cost of new hires. Production Operations is the only part of the company that generates revenue. Sales generates orders and engineering generates products. We enable our customers to focus on Strategy, Development and Sales.
Rest assured at OPSgrok, Production Operations is our core business. How? Using our unique Information Factory™, we reuse people, processes and tools whenever we add a new class of sensors and new set of outputs (i.e., set up a new production or service line). We have developed standard approaches, systems and tools to optimize production with a total focus on throughput, quality and customer satisfaction. Through this massive reuse, we share the costs across multiple customers (but never their data or processing) and thus enable faster, better and more cost-efficient growth.
Revenue and Production Operations is key to successful growth! OPSgrok has built upon decades of information services experience to create an outsource Production Operations partner to help companies grow. In the same way Apple relies on Foxconn for manufacturing physical products, our customers can rely on OPSgrok to manufacture information out of data, using our customer’s designs, with quality, reliability and great support.
Want to know more about how our Operations as a Service can help you “find the right people at the right price?” Contact us at info@opsgrok.com for more information.
