HR Stands For 'Hire Right'

It's always good when a company needs to add head count; it's a sign of economic upturn or that the company is ramping up operations in a burgeoning market. Many solution providers are in this encouraging position as 2006 gets under way. Yet, despite this positive trend, solution providers still need to take care when adding personnel, because supplementing head count in the wrong way can sometimes turn out worse than not adding anyone at all. Here are some tips:

Hire Over Train

These days, most industry observers agree that the best way to attack a new market is to hire new people rather than train existing staff. That doesn't mean you should prevent your existing employees from adding to their skillsets, but it does mean that first adding people with expertise in the desired area will help everyone else get to where you want to go a lot faster.

Careful Screening

Hiring the right people requires a rigorous screening process. It's tempting when you're tackling a booming new market to just throw bodies at the problem, but solution providers need to ensure they won't compromise their core competency in the process.

"The risk for me is being able to trust the people I bring in to help with consulting," says Raymond Hall, the sole proprietor of Raymond V. Hall Training and Consulting Services in Chicago. Hall wants to add part-time and full-time people to help handle the additional business he anticipates in 2006, but in such a small operation, the new hires must be both polished and tech-savvy. "The key is that the adoption of the new services I sell is happening mostly among C-level executives, so I have to deliver high-level overviews in technology and business processes," he says.

Recruit Only What You Need

Solution providers of any size hiring new personnel must perform rigorous due diligence to discover their magic numbers. Officials at WebGrid Business Solutions, a Web-services integrator in West Palm Beach, Fla., used their own experience plus statistical analysis to conclude that adding 20 percent to their staff of about 370 people would give them the best productivity increase with the least amount of management headaches.

Interestingly, only 60 percent of the new staff will be working in the company's newly targeted energy and transportation markets; the rest will fan out through the organization to keep the established sectors running smoothly.

Scour Competitors

Solution providers may also find good sources of talent in consolidating spaces, such as security and networking. As other VARs merge, get acquired, go out of business or sometimes relocate, resellers in the same region may find an available talent pool of people who can't or won't follow their old company's new direction.

As the economy begins to show life again, available talent figures to be one of the industry's hottest commodities.